Brian’s Reflection: Monday, June 11, 2007


December 25

Christmas defeated Chanukah
once again last night
by a margin of three billion dollars
or so, but every time I heara Yiddish word like bupkes
in a movie (L.A. Confidential)
or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie
calls a garment a shmatta, it's "good
for the Jews," as our parents used to say.
Meanwhile some things have
stayed the same; the drunken lout
in the street is still somebody's father.
Hey, kid, how does it feel to have a pop
that's a flop? And we had such good ideas
for changing the mental universe, if only
as a project in philosophy class, the one
I still dream about failing when I have
that dream everybody has, of being back
in college and needing this one course
to graduate, which I forgot to attend

- David Lehman, poet, born in NYC on this day, 1948


The cross is an ancient symbol of Life. It is a symbol of “Who We Are” as a human being - the “horizontal plane” (matter) intersected by the “vertical plane” *The Divine Spirit).

We are, each of us, indeed “A child of God”, “created in God’s image”, “a spark of God”.

Do we know that? Then:

Is it not time for each of us who does know this to “change the mental Universe”? If every encounter is the Divine in me meeting the Divine in you, can/ought we to behave badly, unkindly, unlovingly to one another??

Brian+