It’s August. I’m listening to Christmas songs again. Something about bells and piano bring me back to myself. As in, back to a person without any thoughts and feelings except for those of my own. When I get here, it makes it easier to be sincere. I do this because I want to discover more about my world before I jump back into the pits of work and pressure. Before I look for a reason to be proud of myself, I want to know why I need to be.

It’s not despair that brings much revelation or thought. Rather it’s in the quiet moments that follow. Today, I tried to notice things that I usually don’t. I found that I’m not much of a thankful person. Despite any handicaps I may adopt or boast of, there is a fact that levels them all. I have my health, and I have time. Everyday there are a few hours I’m free in which I could dedicate myself to good food, friends, and writing. Well, I live like a free man–that’s what I’m trying to say–that I am a free being in that I speak and act on my own behalf. With all the choices I get to make in this life, I’m always invited to make more each day I wake. Better ones.

Knowing all that I’ve been given, I can’t help but feel the weight of authority and expectation, of God (that Guy). How dare You make it so easy for me? What do You expect me to become, to accomplish? Behind these questions, I know my appreciation is lost and it returns to something bitter. What if I am not what You created me to be and this life You put so much magic into was just a waste of time? It’s not enough that You believe in me until I do.

Few years back, I’d write some stuff down, dream journal things, and I called it poetry. Somehow, I’d thought poetry was a mess of feelings on a page. Mostly, that it wasn’t creating anything new like free sketching. Poets used the same look, language. So writing a few lines given this medium seemed simple and redeemable.

I like the idea of control because it had stayed with me from my Dantist studies. Control allows one to mediate their appetite for noodles, sex, fame, whatever ring of hell one prefers. I still continue to observe what this lack of control or excess does for the soul. Boethius says it better: “The joy of human happiness is shot through with bitterness; no matter how pleasant it seems when one has it, such happiness cannot be kept when it decides to leave” (1962 Macmillian Pub). He goes on to say, we find happiness not in excess, but in controlled reasoning. Reason allows us to be content with what we have, rather than seek more. Reason is the key to mediation and human joy.

As I became more acquainted with the craft, I found a similar philosophy behind poetry. Poetry is about taking that mess of feelings (the excess) and refining them.  I seize literary device and selection to control the mess on the page. By doing so, something incredible happens. Other people can read it too. The audience gains access into the poet’s writing because it’s no longer a mess. And all the poet can hope for is that the reader doesn’t feel he has wasted his time.

It seems juvenile, but some of my edits are simple, one word. It took me a week to change the line, “she stepped” to “she ran.” Quickly, we notice the differences in tone, in agency, and sometimes these different words allow ourselves to realize how we think, or how we blame. It becomes a self-study. I frequently write about my mom, it comes naturally and it has served as a vehicle to write about myself. I find Boethius’ happiness in mediating my emotions towards her and am content in doing so. I must have the most selfish (and luckiest)  job of all, being a poet.

This must have been my first poem. Frui is one of the two defined loves in Dantist study. It is to love someone, not for themselves, but for the source of their creation. (Frui previously appeared in Qarrtsiluni and received the Bret Baldwin HM)

Frui

Mom always loved the rain. She loved the sharp edges of the stones
washed with it. Because she liked things clean.

It cleans every alley, she said.
God must like things clean. She was sure of this

more than the broken zippers
and the washed take-out boxes she saved in the pantry.

She loved to bleed.
I hope she finally sensed God’s cleaning in it.

No matter how much we age, he’d lived more than me in the most similar circumstances (environmentally, biologically). To me, his word was final not because he was exceptionally loud, but because his word conveyed the world I’d face. He walked, broke his bones before I did. So there was always something to learn and be afraid of. Though he was particularly cruel with his bullying antics in my childhood, I think I was scared for other reasons. I believed he had a right to despise me. My parents reminded, “he’s had it worse” and even he must feel—he was a child faulted for being one and had thus grown to be an adult prematurely.

The whole way, I’d felt sorry for myself watching him (things I’d have to endure but never came). Like a worn broom he cleared my footpath. By the time it was my turn, I had little to bear. Evidently, I had had a childhood at all. When my parents blanked, lost me in a wonder park, it was my brother to find me huddled by the cobblestone street. I realized it’s not him that scares me. It’s what I imagine: a boy having to find his own way back to his lost parents. And most selfishly, what I would’ve done without that boy having suffered so.

Because love could be so difficult to refine, I used fear instead. It was the only way I could communicate a sincerity for God. When everything was terrifying beyond their temporal rationale, there was no family or drink I begged for more than Him. And the darker the corner, the vents, the greater my gravity towards Him. Beyond wanting to feel love, I wanted to stay alive though I couldn’t merit it from the unnatural fear I fed Him. I’d stare at my plaster walls, looking for a flicker, making bets in my head. If You’re here, show me a streak of shine. If You think I’ll get through the day, make a clang from the sill. Show me I still have life beyond this.

Robert Jastrow (agnostic): “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics): “When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer) “I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.”

The last one by Braun is my favorite. I have stared at quotes like these in my physics class when I was 15. Rather than listening I would just stare at the quote not understanding what it meant at all. I asked the teacher and he simply said “There is a purpose behind every cube.” Had I been 16 I would have said “You cannot show religious preference in the classroom.” Had I been 20 I would have asked “At what point in your research did you realize this?” But I was 15 and I said nothing and nodded with fake understanding as I did with everything else. But I had filed it away, and would not have known how obsessed I would become.

So beyond my understanding of God and of evil I believe in a presence that exists higher than man and lower than God (not despite, but due to my studies). Like there is the animal between man and rock there are angels between man and God. As Dr. Kenneth Gangel coined, there is a certain Angelmania occurring today through females with bright wings. On the contrary, they have often been manifested in human form, as a mature man that you could not separate from other humans. I’ve come across the New Testament’s doctrine for how every being is born with a guardian angel, but this can be argued as the Church does not clearly “define it as an article of faith” but rather as “the mind of the church” (St. Jerome).

What am I trying to say? Prayers are endless and meaningful. There is no heightened acute strength due to prayers focused on one entity. I do not feel my prayers to a guardian angel slackens the thanks and repentence I send toward God, nor do my prayers toward Mary disregard my focus and ultimate goal towards God. Prayers are powers beyond imagination beyond our will and intellect, it is a spiritual combination, endless and infinite.
I feel the help and I feel a little lighter when I end my prayers with a gratitude for my guardian angel. Sometimes I’ll say it in a sing-song voice that has helped me memorize it like a beautiful poem. Would not the creator feel thanks if one has appraised his creation and thankfulness of the creation’s purpose? I imagine the Poet and the poem. The love of the audience may do greatness to both. Humans are not as powerless as we may seem.

Prayer to Your Guardian Angel

Angel of God
my Guardian dear,
To whom God’s love ,
commits me here,
Ever this day ,
be at my side,
To light and guard,
Rule and guide.

Angele Dei,
qui custos est mei,
Me tibi commissum pietate superna;
Hac nocte,
Hodie illumina,
custodi, rege, et guberna.