Oh God, Where Art Thou?

The Great Conundrum

James McCollum

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532664939
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Follow the author's odyssey of the mind in his endless search for God and meaning in life, as well as his plea for moral action in the uncertainty, discord, and chaos of a world that appears callous and cruel and is prone to political exploitation of vulnerable people, cultures, and countries of our shared planet. Although the manuscript views organized religion, religious hypocrisy, and social injustice through a microscope, this book is spiritual and life-affirming while recognizing the inherent impermanence of the universe and humanity's collective and individual imprint. You can read short stories with a nontraditional take on John the Baptist and Jesus; shorter poems dealing with Tourette syndrome, aging, and suicide; religious conformity and hypocrisy in the context of finding a moral compass that guides humans down a path of right actions, responsibility, and compassion in a philosophical essay; and a substantial poem that unfolds a panoramic social and political critic of the American experiment through the dialogue of a dreaming man in successive encounters with Crowfoot, Black Elk, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Christ, and the Buddha.

Poetry

No Time for Remorse

Oh, how sweet thou art

the masters’ music resurrected,

Beethoven’s sonata to the moonlight

plays to comfort hearts that have bled,

while Tchaikovsky’s cherubim

await the call to sing their hymn,

to soothe the senses of who; not me!

Anubis claims he has a warrant for my soul,

but the black headed jackal-man must wait.

So, too, the ferryman of the dead,

Aristophanes’ spirit of the underworld, he too

will be delayed, too soon to self-congratulate

for a passage he must now retread.

And even Ra with his solar boat

sailing steadily across the daylight sky

will be held in temporary quarantine.

I have the ferry passage coins,

obols spit from copper and from bronze

that come from commerce’s early dawn,

to later pay the glum old ferryman

for my soul’s safe traverse to cross

the river Styx and on to Hade’s gate,

where I will barter to avoid the devil’s curse.

It’s there I will alight to negotiate my soul’s probate,

the last foreboding rail-stop along the subway line,

the check-in place for souls with burial rites complete.

But they, and Dante’s fiendish hounds of hell,

and purgatory’s less than pure and perfect

souls conflicted and confounded dwell,

and Paradiso’s prospectus of eternal joy,

or the Buddha’s freed, none-enduring self;

whatever is to be my fate, it must wait, as

my divine and tragic comedy is not complete.

They’re premature, as I resist and stubbornly

defy death’s dreaded, now curfewed convoy.

I hear the music, low and subtle, too soft

to startle an infant safe within its swaddled sleep.

I smell the scent of flowers; carnations, lilies

and sweet roses please my nose, as I

cast a glance to light subdued,

a tempered sky of blue, not bright,

no affront to Theia’s wide shining sight.

I make no pretense, no vane self-indulged fantasy,

what awaits to be unearthed and said

will not match fabled Avon’s gifted bard,

the master’s magic, rhythmic, iambic verse,

much less rival his prolific, unsurpassed folios,

his craft and mastery of traits psychological,

human flaws theatrically exemplified; precursor

to Freud’s insights into illusions of the mind-

subconscious, rationalized, often blind,

and yes, too, where the afflicted recognize

the tangles in their minds, and like the lady

whose hands she washes endlessly, but still

sees the blood upon her hands and to no avail

assails the damned spots that will not rub out.

Yet, still, I have words left unspoken, repressed,

langu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Poetry
• Fiction
• Philosophy
• References for the Essay
• Resources for the Manuscript