I wonder to myself at night
On a night I should be fast asleep:
Could it be that man made God
Or was it Him who has made me?
The Bible says
We were made in God’s image.
The Ultimate Creator:
All seeing, all knowing, all powerful
open eye atop the capstone
Gazing down
With Words to shape the world
palms to hold the oceans
And breath to breathe
the gift of life.
Who are we to think ourselves like Him?
A mere fragment of such Great potential,
Man with only two hands and eyes and faculties
Limited by flesh and bone and bile
Unable to awaken
To all that is all at once
Falling short of His Almighty Glory
Failing to pierce the Veil
To see beyond
the Shadows flickering on the cavern walls.
Sisyphus digs his toes into the Earth and pushes
the stone’s weight pressing back at him.
Such is the plight of man
with hands and legs
That in some small way
make us like Him
guiding us uphill
aiming toward that on the most high
So that if only for a moment
we can taste
what it is like to be with Him.
And are we Him?
I believe in the possibility—
although, perhaps not one in the same.
But we are like Him.
Known for the briefest moment
By those who have searched have found
For when they knocked
the doors of perception opened
And all aligned to one
Everything and nothing
Transitory, fleeting, suspended and held
In that ever so fragile spacelessness
Before falling from the clouds back to Earth
And plunging into the sea
to fight the waves once again.
And fight we must.
Anything to be like Him.
With hands and voice and hearts
that shape the world.
Seen in Michelangelo’s David.
Heard in Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Read in Hesse’s Siddhartha.
Thought in Einstein’s relativity.
Felt in the heart and soul of every Artist
Who gives himself fully to the words
And notes strung together like pearls
Glimmering still in the dark of the ocean floor.
Never perfect yet divine
attention meets itself
And something stirs and swells in our chest
and coaxes the tears from our eyes
Breaking the dam of utter disbelief
that something so beautiful could come from
the heart of man.
Or no man or heart at all,
For who can make claim to that which came before
An endless row of ancestors walking through barren lands
stacked like turtle shells beneath the world
Seeds from which all things sprung
the story of God created by man,
the story of man created by God.
So I ask again,
on a night where the unknown presses down upon me
And the world draws in close
So close the question comes through as a whisper:
Could it be, God, that You created man
and we created You
So that You could be like us
And that we could be like You?