Truth

I searched among the Mayan ruins.
I traveled there alone.
I hoped to find it among the ghosts
Of worshippers now gone,

But when I came up wanting,
I journeyed to a different shore.
I planned to find it in a grand old mosque
And within the Muslim lore.

It was not there, and so I hurried
To a land not far away.
Now it was the Jewish Sabbath,
So I bowed my head to pray.

I left the temple wondering
Just where the truth could be.
I traveled an arduous journey;
I sailed an endless sea.

I read the Bhagavad Gita,
The Annalects-divine.
I learned the proper chanting…
Showed my respects at the Buddhist shrine.

Still, I wandered aimlessly,
Not finding what I sought.
I studied the philosophers -
The highest of human thought.

I gave my heart to Jesus
I made him Savior and Lord.
I was born again, spoke in tongues,
For His spirit, I implored.

I smoked Peyote with Geronimo
And entered a spiritual trance.
I lived among his people
And learned their tribal dance.

I tried my hand at the Ouija Board
I summoned the spirits of old.
I stopped in to see my psychic, my shrink…
Wherever the truth was sold.

So many years I hunted
For what eluded me.
I voyaged to lands both near and far,
Studied Yoga and Tai-Chi.

I woke beside a pool of blue,
A lake amid the trees.
I pondered the lessons I had learned,
The things that I had seen.

I lied like that for quite sometime;
The evening came, then morn.
I wearied of this sole expedition now,
My traveling shoes long worn.

“I thirst,” I said, and so I leaned
To serve myself a sip.
I saw within that mirror, an image
Raise water to its lips.

And that’s where I found it…
The truth I had tracked and hounded for so long.
“What a fool I’ve been,” I screamed to the sky,
“How could I have been so wrong?”

The truth was never to be found within
Temples made of stone.
Cathedrals, with all their splendor,
Could never be its home.

Finally at peace, I journeyed back;
My friends, they greeted me.
“Did you find what you were looking for?
Pray tell, what did you see?”

“What is the truth, wise-man,” they asked.
“Here is not where it can be found.”
“Then where Master? Can we travel there?
To that place of Holy ground?”

“You must visit the shrines and the mosques,” I said.
“You must consult the wisest seer.
You must dabble in philosophy,
Face your darkest fears.”

“You must learn the Koran and the Bible.
You must pray to every god.
You must bow in every temple
Your tired feet may trod,

And when you’ve come to the very end
Of the answers man has found,
You will see an image of yourself and know
It is there that truth resounds.”

Essay:

Growing up in a non-practicing Catholic family, I rarely experienced exposure to fundamentalist religion. My mother was only religious, when it served her or when her moral compass aligned with the commandments of the Catholic god. Still, with even minimum exposure to the Christian deity, I knew who Jesus was. I knew that he was said to be the son of the Jewish god and had been crucified on a cross. The Bible was obsolete in our home, and Mass was only attended midnight on Christmas Eve and Easter morn. I remember watching the story of Jesus on television one year, at Christmas time; it’s been so long now that I can’t recall my age, but I remember feeling terrible for this kind man who had been so terribly treated. I experienced sincere horror at the inhumane torture that Christ had suffered.

At sixteen, I found myself institutionalized for incorrigible behavior, and it was during my stay at the Indiana Girls’ School, Department of Corrections that I finally grasped the Christian message of love and redemption. When one is “born-again” or enlightened as a Christian, the message is simple and beautiful, but as one grows in the knowledge of Biblical scripture, she often finds seriously contradicting and confusing text staring back at her. For years, I attempted to reconcile these contradictions. For years, I tried to ignore them. For years, I regurgitated the same apologetic arguments I had heard recited over and over to me, but deep inside me, I knew that there was something seriously wrong with the whole getup. You see, the Bible was boasted to be divinely inspired, and the inerrant Word of God. While I was ignorant of its true content, I accepted these claims, but the more I read, the more troubled I became.

A truly bothersome reality for me, was that even if Bible God were THE one, true God, He had some heavy explaining to do. Disturbing orders given by him to the Israelites, ridiculous laws and sacrificial ritual, and scientific impossibilities plagued the pages of this holy book that the church claimed had God’s mighty fingerprint upon it. If I had read in any other religious text that its god had commanded his followers to pillage another city, kill all of its inhabitants, including the elderly, children, and infants, and to keep for themselves all the young virgins, I would be turned off immediately and would seriously doubt that any divine inspiration had been involved. It seemed to me, that if I wouldn’t accept such behavior and cruelty from a leader of this world or any other of the religions’ gods, then I had the right to question the Christian God’s purpose behind such deplorable acts and commandments.

After years of study, I had come across other accounts of the life of Jesus that the Nicene Council had systematically left out of the Bible, which did not refer to Jesus’ supposed deity at all. I researched the origins of the Christian Sabbath and holidays and was appalled at what I had found! The Christian holidays were not so “Christian” after all. Using the name of Jesus, Constantine “Christianized” the pagan rituals, beliefs and festivals of the surrounding pagan religions, so as to appeal to their followers and attract them to the new religion of Rome. I also soon learned of accounts of other “crucified” saviors, born of virgins, visited by wise men whom had also performed miracles. These accounts were older than Biblical ones, and these “saviors” had lived long before Jesus. I also found that Jesus’ words were eerily similar to those of Buddha, who had also come before this supposed Christ. Needless to say, I was becoming disillusioned!

I spoke to pastors and friends who were more enlightened than I, but their answers and excuses were truly insulting to my rational mind. Of course, others pointed to a lack of faith on my part, but after awhile, I began to see that the problem was not with me, but with the text I was reading. The more I tried to hang on to my religious notions and the more doggedly I pursued answers, the faster I sped to the inevitable conclusion that I had been duped.

After leaving the fold, I began to see the world with different eyes. I began to see my fellow man as a sister or a brother, a fellow sojourner on this ball of blue and green, and as a tender soul deserving of honor, dignity, and freedom, regardless of their religious affiliation. Where before I had secretly placed people into one of two categories-the saved or the damned-I was now able to consider my journeymen for the lives they led, instead of the creed they professed. It had become obvious to me that the religious could not boast of having the monopoly on truth, since the members of any given religion could not even agree among themselves as to the tenets of their faith, nor could they boast to have the monopoly on morality. More and more, the sins of the “Father” are being exposed in the news, and much of the world’s most barbaric acts have been committed in the name of God.

I was finally free to explore the wonders of the Universe, the origins of man, philosophical thought, and the arts, with no more thought of divine retribution. Knowledge is religion’s enemy for a reason. What I found, at least up until this point, is that none of us know what awaits us beyond this life. None of can claim to know with certainty which god is the right one, or which path is the right to follow, because the fact - the cold hard fact - is that god, should there be one, has failed to reveal his will or his secrets to the world in such a way that we have no room left for conjecture. Until this happens, we are left only to muse.

I began to look within myself, and it was there, not within the pages of any religious manuscript, that I found the truth. I am still trying to take it all in, but much to my own frustration, it comes in small doses. My mind just can not perceive it all at once, but that’s okay now. I am not afraid of not knowing. I can not vote against my own conscience, regardless of some superstitious warning of Hell. If God exists, then He will reward me for my faithfulness in honoring my intellectual and spiritual integrity, rather than following the crowd. I am not afraid of any god’s wrath, either. If I have to fear any god, simply for embracing the wrong belief, regardless of my sincere and justified reasons for doing so, then I hardly find this god, worthy of worship in the first place.

I suppose that the timely question now would be: what do I believe in. That is not an easy question to answer. I do not consider myself an “Athiest”. I think it would be quite audacious of me to make a claim that there is no god. I tend to like the idea that my personality will go on in one form or another, and that the gods will think enough of me to prolong my existence in one way or another, but until he/she/it or they deem me worthy of the knowledge of their purpose and commands, I find it difficult to take sides in the religious wars. As far as I can tell, none of us have God pinned. For one to claim to know the mind of God, indicates some amount of brain damage to me now.

Searching for truth will be a life-long endeavor for me. It is something that religion actually teaches us to avoid. I find that ironic, since the followers of any god or religious leader all claim that their leader or god, had to go through the process of searching, fasting, questioning, etc., to find the truth that we are all supposed to follow. Am I not allowed to follow my own path? Have my own sincere steps to enlightenment been somehow less dignified or less worthy of a response from God? I mean, if they could find the truth for themselves, why can’t I?

As I stated in the poem preceding this essay, the truth was never to be found within temples or cathedrals, never mind their splendor. No, the truth (it does exist) is to be found within each and every one of us. It can only be found in that quiet place each of us posses but few of us ever find the courage to tread.