OUT OF LEFT FIELD

John D. Caputo: "The unconditional is not a power that compels, but an insistance that cannot be ignored, an appeal that beckons us beyond ourselves, a call to love that, once heard, changes everything."

​I found you in words explained to me clearly
I found you in the conceptions I made
The idols I built in the factory of my mind
In the heaven beyond the grave
I found you as the cause, the maker of this
I called you mine,  
With breath I gave
I made you wholly exist
 
Then Anslem taught, of one greater than thought
Beyond conceiving, beyond what things I could find
A light, a wind, a wave uncaught
An absent, yet present divine
 
Like a mystic, negation purified
You lost all tangible meaning
Left was nothing but what’s inside
Enraptured in numinous screaming
 
Mind saturated in absence, reframed understanding
Transcended in a surplus of lack, demanding.
You're nothing, but I can’t deny you’re with me
This emptiness knows, it sets me free
 
But could this be just perpetual illusion
Like the deceit of men in spiritual union
A magical trick, I ignorantly awed
A counter experience in the ridding of God
 
But to whom can I ask as I ravel like thread
The anguish of choice, existential dread
It can’t be for heaven if heaven a bribe
Or to follow the lead of what other’s inscribed
 
It must be my will, yet my will’s but effect
Of the various cancers those same others inject
How do I escape this alienation
Antagonist angst, endless frustration
 
If you are the one that we do not know
Like a crack which breaks its way into the flow
 
An unknowability, a constitutive lack
The way to the depths I need to unpack
The gap to which I unappealingly yield
The voice that calls from out of left field