Bible Stories

Sept 27 2014

We live in biblical times.

I know,
muddling through daily life
hardly feels scriptural.
That heightened age
when God spoke, angels descended,
and Jesus and you
might have broken bread,

having no idea

what he’d make of himself.

But with biblical drought
in California
and Holy warriors
beheading infidels,

you could mistake the daily news

for the mythological.
Meanwhile

in a present-day Exodus

refugees flee 

the land of the Bible,
and false prophets proclaim 

Ebola's plague

the wrath of God.

Above all, there is cataclysmic warming
and we ignore it,
because what Creator would destroy
his own handiwork?

I do not believe in God,
but what a mistake
to have put my faith in men,
despairing
at the death of progress,
that common sense
is less common than rare.
That we are still superstitious, tribal
fatalist,
that our greed
knows no limit, or end.

What a conceit
to have imagined enlightenment.
When we could have had heaven on earth
but were far too quarrelsome,
and have now turned the planet
a version of hell.

It’s too late for prayer
to absolve us of sin,
and doing good
in the small things of life
seems hardly enough.
Not when the aquifers
we thought inexhaustible
have been pumped nearly dry,

the fields

are turning to dust.

Such a miraculous gift

wasted on us.


This is the second poem I've written on the last few months about the state of the world. I usually prefer microcosm to big ideas. But the accumulation of bad news is too much to bear without at least ventilating. So please excuse this self-indulgent departure, the misanthropy and despair.

I know, I know ...we always live in interesting times, history is never at an end, and atrocities have never stopped. And according to Harvard's Steven Pinker, violence has never been lower, and more people have never had it so good. But I don't think my despair is simply a result of too much media, of a media landscape that is instantaneous, ubiquitous, and catastrophizing. Things really do seem terrible!

And although I'm always more than willing to blame religion for all our sins, I now find myself unable to take refuge in humanism. Men disappoint me as much as God! Which, I guess, explains the second- and third-last stanzas.

I could have gone on with all the bad news. But I kept it to three: climate change, the mess in Syria and Iraq, and Ebola in western Africa. I think all three have resonance in scripture: especially in the story of Exodus, with its plagues, and its wrathful God. ("False prophets" and "the wrath of God" actually refer to something I heard cited as one factor in Ebola's uncontained spread: self-proclaimed preachers who proclaimed to an ingenuous and credulous public that Ebola was punishment for sin, and could be cured by prayer. It's also an indirect reference to the funeral rite of body-washing, a cultural/religious practice that has apparently been another major cause of transmission.)

What actually set me off was a photo essay in the New Yorker about the unprecedented drought in California. Meanwhile, coinciding with a major climate conference at the opening session of the UN General Assembly and with mass protests worldwide in favour of climate action, I saw some coverage of Republican Senators grilling a prominent climate scientist. Their ignorance was so appalling and abysmal and ideological, I felt like giving up. So I conclude the poem on that theme: climate change. When I say "doing good/ in the small things of life/ hardly seems enough", my point is that changes in personal lifestyle (such as drive less, don't eat meat) will not solve the problem: we need top-down systemic change.

When I wrote "and Jesus and you/ might have broken bread", I'm trying to illuminate the tension between the historical Jesus -- the man -- and the symbolic Jesus -- anointed a deity by his acolytes after his death. In "God speaking" and "angels descending", you get that traditional sense of Bible stories: something mythological, unreal, distant from us. The jarring invocation of Jesus as an everyday person wrenches us from that rarefied time and place back to now. Plagues and prophecies actually happened; and they could just as well happen now. We do, indeed, "live in biblical times".

As an atheist, a rationalist, a skeptic, I bristle when people talk about miracles. So, of course, my use of "miraculous" in the penultimate line is ironic. It was originally "marvellous"; but I couldn't resist the private self-indulgent taunt!

Religious language runs through the poem. There are plagues, prophets, infidels, and Holy warriors. There is heaven and hell, absolution and sin, faith and enlightenment. There is Exodus, and allusions to Noah's flood -- which fits well with rising sea levels, if not with the drought. So the poem hardly serves a fun purpose (actually, I'm not sure it has any purpose at all, other than ventilation and self-indulgence ;-) ); but at least it was fun to write!