Meditation on a Theme Suggested by Dr. Trellou Joseph Pond

How would it feel to really love your neighbor,

your neighbor who worships a stranger god?

What if your god allowed that man to prosper - -

no plagues, no holy wars, no sanctioned slaughter

of first born sons? Could such a god be God?

How would it feel to really love your neighbor?

 

Will the salt of holiness have lost its savor

when no longer underwritten by the blood

of lambs, infidels, martyrs? If we prosper,

 

if we be long upon this earth brother

\to brother, is God then obsolete? Or would

God dwell among us - - familiar, stranger: neighbor?

 

Between our fallings short and strivings for

yawned an abyss so fell we needed God,

a cobbled ladder in order to cohere, let alone to prosper.

 

But if they were always us the terrible strangers - -

attending angels, wrathful, jealous gods?

How would it feel to really love your neighbor?

To love your self? To reverence life? To prosper?