What If God Is an Event

What if God is an event,
a brightening glance, art
from start to finish, a walk

through the ages? What if
God isn't a being, but a way
in which things unfold,

a process, thought capable
of taking on the substance
of form and matter? What

if God is a meditation in
action, the sacred invention
of all religious prayer, what

history becomes when no
one is looking? What if Karl
Barth was right and God's

being is his becoming? What
if God is what Jesus meant
when He said the Kingdom

is like yeast which a woman
hides in three measures until
everything is equally leavened?

The Candle of Faith

If I light this candle, something more
than light will enter the darkness.
The big silence will shift, just a little,

and begin to hum. The geography
of thought will lead me back into
the ancestral mind where the inner

voice was trusted as surely as the eye.
I seek no heavenly intrigue, not a single
scroll of mystical theology, no special

favors and no bag of tricks. All I
want is a desirable God who is okay
with letting me be the architect of my

own embarrassment and who has long
since lost his or her love for the game
of hide and seek. I want a God who

isn't happy with just chance meetings
at tent revivals or being aware there
are no atheists in the trenches of battle.

I'm looking for an ordinary God--one
who doesn't mind living in, among,
around, and in between, and still has time

to attend to the affairs of the universe,
who knows the difference between
freedom and failure, the dimensions

anatomies of greed take on, and why
the search for meaning makes time,
the journey, and the destination all sacred.

Fredrick Zydek is a poet, playwright, and essayist. He has nine collections of poetry, the most recent T'Kopechuck: The Buckley Poems (Winthrop Press 2007). Zydek's work has appeared in many journals, including Antioch Review, Christianity Today, and Poetry.