Poets who write about God

 If the concept of God is coherent, it seems to me that God is a force that must be active today — more like a live volcano than an extinct one. I’d say that the activity must be perceptible and thus open to new perceptions.

And so I’d agree with Emerson:

If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.

I’d start the investigation with fresh perceptions. I’d look at what our contemporaries are saying.

Yesterday’s note was about one poet’s attempt to get at the qualities of God. Lucille Clifton was alive in my lifetime. Her ideas are strange to me but wonderful in a way that much of the poetry in the Bible is not.

If I were a minister, I’d implore people to read the poets.

Source: The quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson is from “Self Reliance.”