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NOT EVEN 'GOD'

The miracle that is everywhere
rising up before us
beautiful and enormous
nonetheless remains
invisible, mysterious -
I cannot call it 'Jesus',
not even 'God' - those images
remain in my head, alas,
as images and so
not true, unless
(as Gleizes said of Cézanne)
as signposts pointing -
not pointing away
'beyond the horizon',
not pointing 'within', but pointing
directly, dear reader,
at you - for that this word
(or any word)
uttered by me
(or by anyone) should exist
now before your (before
anyone's) eyes makes
mockery of time
and space, of
any measurement, anything
quantifiable and therefore not
the image of God,
the image that points
always and everywhere to what is no longer
everything (things being stuck
in their own
time, stuck in their place).
So let us imagine
for a moment, Jesus,
stuck in His own
time and place, a man who was born
in the usual way and who died
in the usual way, and who said
more or less what He is said
to have said which was then
refracted in millions
and billions of heads
and that is supposed to be
less marvellous than to declare
that God is everywhere?
However you hack it, 'believer' or
'non-believer', we
are not separate beings, we
are singular
- beautiful and enormous
and an invisible
mystery.
And yet even that
doesn't hack it if we
believe, which is to say
'trust', which is to say
believe that it is useful
to believe, that God,
which is to say,
Jesus as God,
isn't that overarching singularity
but rather that
overarching singularity is
nothing more than God's
eternal memory.

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