Salvation

What do we need saving from?

Some guilt we feel,

From a grim outlook,

Or inner critic, declaring us

Dirty and sinful.

Does a sense of judgement betray

An unbalanced view of life,

A selfish sense that I matter

And need protecting, gone wrong

So I need saving

To avoid the bad I do in a day.

A cruel self inflicted delusion

When all I need to do is

Move on.

I s the cosmic balance

Constructed for me

To satisfy a need:

A need to improve?

Humanity, compassion, charity;

What are they?

Self serving; things can be made better,

Made well by acting and thinking

Benevolence, forgoing malevolence,

Feeling the pleasing as pleasure.

However

What if I gain the same by inflicting

Pain?

At liberty to be cruel and hurt

A psychopath?

Hitler thought he was a good man.

Is what we agree to be good

A way of protecting us all

From this power; dominance.

Is conscience real, truly innate

Unlearned? Working in the worst of hearts?

Or learned, an ineffective construct absent

In the dark core, to be taken

Or left?

Conscience: an expedient to punish,

Subject to flux,

Achieving  peace in our times.

Conscience defines the way we should be

An inner conversation taught and learned to

Preserve societies safety,

Defining our good.

There is no morality.

Morality demands a cosmic reality

Beyond self serving pragmatism:

Laws like mathematics written by a hand

In the fabric of existence;

From a domain of what is true,

Prime factors of space and time.

Knowing, feeling; experiencing and hoping,

Are we deceived into seeing

Meaning in the illusion of good:

Wedded to believing that in a ritual of

Thought,  good emerges?

Repent: turn; sin no more!

Why?

To protect myself: to define a boundary

A circle of safety where I may survive

Safe in my frailty and weakness,

An example that keeps me alive,

Safe from the few who would outlive the many.

To be strong there have to be the weak:

To be rich there have to be the poor.

Is Almighty God a controlling metaphor:

An evolved mechanism;

Just a picture to ensure we all survive:

The drive that keeps the vulnerable alive.

Death is certain, suffering likely,

Life fragile and birth random.

Does faith wrap this around in a

Unprovable, providential otherness

Detached from suffering

Speaking in and within a changing self?

What of the report of the man Jesus?

He heals, brings back to life and

Delivers, if the story’s believed.

And those who follow him, it appears

Do the same. No threat there:

Take it or leave it, and the powerful,

Beware of shame. Hypocrites!

Without method, stance or warning

An immediate sense of freedom,

Release, hope, cleansing and

Purpose breaks in.

No plan, no effort, no mind games:

Like the breath of the wind.

No teaching, not theory but presence.

In Jesus, God’s presence

Brings hope,

Adds meaning,

Saving us from our futile thinking, into a

Person:

Living God, Christ who makes all things

New. His life

Inspires, breathes in and out through

Joys and suffering; disappointments,

Gains and losses: despair and victory.

He keeps us clean not by fear and guilt, but

A life within, creating new life and conscience:

Light in the darkness of us all.