To My Fundamentalist Son

The signposts come along much faster, now. And I fear most of all not my own death or even your own sense of loss or grief, but my betrayal, for I cannot go upon the road to everlasting life that you will travel, reaching for my hand and at the close releasing it as I release your paper lord--and then I die without your blest assurance that I made him mine. You cannot understand the god I breathe, the one who breathes in me also-- the one who holds his peace and thus enables me in dying, to inflict more pain, for if I make an honest life and then in death deceive, I do not pull away your prayers but neither do I then impart the love I hold within my chest. For I do not beneath this tent address your god or your devotion; and thus become for you the merest husk to blow away. How may I speak to you of mystery? How may I share with you a cosmos that embraces all--a love unstoppable? If I could creep with you upon my knees into a throne room in the stratosphere that our old fathers fabricated in their heads, then I would plead that you perceive a later portrait of transcendence. Then will you let me grieve with you that you must grieve eternal loss? (while in my heart I know with your same certainty the opposite is true) --That I remove the father of the lord we love, as I suffuse a deity beneath that canopy of truth. I might explain forever what I know of that supreme and drowning ocean, overwhelming fear--but knowing inwardly, it is what you may never see. You own a most capricious source of immortality. Of after life,. I do not doubt, but see it through another spirit lens that you have spurned, as I in turn have laid your own aside. There is double dying as the price for glad reunion, and for one of us in--creed-able surprise. ~