I’ve prayed only one other time in my adulthood
I make these personal disclosures with fear and trembling
In March of 2003 I begged the universal consciousness
That America might be turned aside
That somehow the venal leaders might acknowledge their folly
But leaders are disinclined to truthfulness
Their machiavellian calculations wrought covertly in service
Of their fatherland their class their overseers or themselves
And I was well accustomed as we all were
After Viet Nam and Watergate
To the polity of lies
But I was unprepared for the consolidation
Of two teams one ineffectual
The other brutally committed to victory at all costs
And victory for what or rather for whom
The racists the misogynists and the oligarchs

I remain the atheist I have claimed to be since adolescence
Though sometimes I’m tempted to identify as a pantheist
But I deny on moral grounds the existence of theos
Even if supposedly immanent within all things
A personal God omnipotent creator of the universe
For aside from its patent absurdity
Omnipotence should acknowledge that suffering is bad
And therefore create its world free from that evil
But if suffering and death
Are merely local aspects of the nature of things
They do not stand as evils
And indeed pain is one element of nature’s defense system
Though nobody in pain wants to be that way
On the other hand anybody responsive to fact and reasons
Should recognize the universality of consciousness
The interpenetration of all consciousness
The one life within us and abroad
And alas the prevalence of ignorance and gratuitous harm
And we live in an age in which those evils are in the ascendency
Amid the fluctuations and fragments of depthless phenomena

On Thanksgiving Day and at other times I express my gratitude
To nobody in particular to the world I guess
I am overwhelmed with gratitude
For the beauties of nature and art
For the capacity for moral judgment
For glimpses of truth however meager
For the holy communion of family and friends
For the consciousness the life the soul
Choose your metaphor
That rolls through all thinking things all objects of thought
And soon dread wraps me in its grim shroud
For I dread the suffering and death of those I love
And when I view this wondrous world
Suffused in beauty
I love all that is
The living things the broken things
The fast-food containers that litter the roadside
And I dread the wanton destruction
Of our dear community and our dear earth
I know that the earth’s orbit decays
And that the sun will expand and devour our planet
And all that stands will fall

And thus I pray that conscious beings
Will awaken from nightmare
And see that in fact they love one another
And that though our paths are strewn with darkness
And our days haunted with pain
We have the power to recognize
In our deepest hearts the beautiful and true