A melancholic melody wafted through the shopping precinct. Mingling with the shuffling feet of shoppers whose eyes are ever on the prize, deadened to each other and the earth beneath the cement. But I heard it. A tin whistle being blown by a down and not quite out. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

But of course a few scattered coins does not salvation bring. Only a bitter hope waiting to be daily drowned.

Until a little lady with a tartan wheelie bag stopped by. Head covered, not for religious reasons but for matters more mundane, protection against a morning mist. She had the anonymous look of the elderly. Indistinguished, now, by a life's living, now slowly slipping into the uniformity of the old.

She was slightly hunched over, She shuffled over to the bearded man. He seemed to know though not consciously, or, perhaps, even intuitively. It was as though something deeper drew one to the other, aligning for a few minutes their very beings. She took a hand, fingers protruding from tatty gloves, and removed the tin whistle. She placed it gently down. She took the man's hand and placed it in her's so they were palm to palm. She placed her other hand behind him, ushering him up to his full height. He responded and wrapped his arm around her back. They stood still, together. And then moved together, imperceptibly at first and then into long forgotten steps. A waltz.

Is this wrath? An inkling, irredeemable itch,

Distracting, dislocating behind the scenes

Of a settled consciousness? A wonderment unfulfilled.

Sentimentality making sonourous sounds

But inducing a jerking nightly apnea?

Love’s wrath destined in advance,

Splitting fractal souls, exposing currents

Beneath cognition, fast flowing to

Dark whirlpools of desire, carved into

Limey clay, courses determined.

Dizzying until mirrors reflect only images,

Endlessly spun, spiraling downwards, wrath

Descending to cavernous silence. No fires

Or lakes consuming, simple dark awaits,

The objects of love’s wrath.

Don’t get too close or stay too long,

Stay away with angelic pyrotechnics,

The wandering stars and braying donkeys,

It’s cold but better outside than in.

Because then I don’t have to see the terror,

Of a bloody baby still attached, a pulsing grey tether,

Placenta a-coming, one more descent to agony,

Screams subside, infant terror remains.

In that small tent, no maps can orientate a

Stable footing. All ground is rent, chasms

Sunder wide, a fathomless maw sucks all creation,

All is made new, mirrors reflect ugly truths.

You cannot be who you say you are,

A baby, one slip from death, always needing

Care: blankets, nipples, attention. Always

Attention, with others, dependent deep down.

I can’t get too close and don’t want to stay.

A new world blossoms they say; Peace and Hope,

Rivers in deserts, but only new bloody rivers.

Light is too heavy to bear.

He is coming, he is always coming,

Weak and naked, crying and wailing,

Coming, a terrible coming.

He is not nice. The baby is an earthquake.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/11/27/3641465.htm

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

God grounds reality and in the theological sense the goodness of the worlds life but does not answer specific why questions. If we need god simply in order to understand and accept our very reality, then our relation to god in particular circumstances will not be of need in the ordinary sense a desperate effort to make god supply this or that desired gratfication. We should be instead be capable of receiving god as pure gift, unexpected good news as energy absolutely uncontainable, me irreducible different, as God.

A mechanistic metaphysic is combined with a sentimental account of God, in this way the pagan assumption that god or the gods are to be judged by how well it or they insure the successful outcome of human purposes is underwritten in the name of Christianity. It is assumed that the attributes of such a god or gods can be known and characterized abstractly. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god that creates something called the problem of evil; rather, that problem is created by a god about which the most important facts seem to be that it exists and is morally perfect aswell as all=powerful – that is, the kind of god that emperors need to legitimate the ‘necessity’ of their rule.