This post doesn’t need much explanation. There are days of belief and there are days of doubt. God gives us reason to doubt, and also reason to believe. With the first poem – written a few years ago – I was trying to write something which might have been included in a McGuffey Reader from the 1800s. The second poem is quite recent.

[Hurry, children, come and see]

Hurry, children, come and see
the blue jay and a chickadee
playing in our maple tree.
Hurry now, it's so much fun.
Come and see what God has done!

And on those dark days of doubt . . .

ARE YOU THERE, GOD?
IT’S ME, THE 21ST CENTURY.

The old answers no longer suffice—
the plan we cannot understand,
the gift of free will,
the phoenix not the ashes—
not when children are murdered at mass
and deadly floods ravage camps
where children seek to know you,
not when dictators fire missiles
at old people in apartments
and their grandchildren in hospitals
when the sun goes down in Kiev.

God once turned rivers to blood,
sent locusts and parted seas
but is perhaps distracted now
by problems elsewhere in creation
and, glancing away, leaves us
to weep and rend our robes
generation after generation.

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My book, SLOW RIVERS, can be ordered through your local bookstore or online via bookshop.org.

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