Theology Today - Vol 49, No.2 - July 1992 - POETRY

If I want to find God I can look high and low,
To the quasars in space or the way onions grow.

If I want to find God I can took in and out,
To my own mind's gyrations or rains ending drought.

If I want to find God I can look back, ahead,
To the rainbow of Noah or what Julian said-

"But all shall be well,
And all shall be well,
And all manner of thing shall be well."

If I want to find God I can look over there:
A crucifix on a wall otherwise bare.

But not long ago, quite surprising to tell,
I found God while riding an old carousel.

It was sneaky of God-but God's an old sneak-
To catch me off-guard at the end of a week
When I'd rummaged through family letters and found
The dead coming to life as the decades turned round.

Faint ink on the pages set corpses to dance;
Their steps and their music put me in a trance.
When I turned to the present - their tombstones - a glance
Caused the rocks to dissolve - and here was God's chance.

I hop on the carousel, thinking no more
Than "It's no Tilt-a-Whirl, so the worst that's in store
Is a touch of the dizzies, but that will soon go,
Since the carousel's motion is measured, is slow."

And that's what it is-not too fast and no jerks,
Just up and down, round and round; no drama lurks.
No drama, that is, until God joins the ride
And is suddenly there on the horse at my side.

Patrick G. Henry is Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, MN.

247 - The Carousel

(I wish I could say that as my head turns
I see God as movies do: Oh God! George Burns!
I know God is here, sure as John Denver knew,
But what God may look like, I haven't a clue.)

The dizzies that follow this carousel's spin
Are not due to chemicals stirred up within.
The vertigo comes not from whirling around,
But from seeing the universe whole and unbound.

Saint Benedict saw all the world all at once.
That may sound like one of those medieval stunts,
But I figure he'd just ridden out from his cell
On a fine Roman horse on an old carousel.

For I know, not by words, from God sitting nearby,
I should look all way round at the earth and the sky
And drink it all in without limit or care
And get drunk on the sheer plenitude of what's there.

Eliot knew fear in a handful of dust;
So do 1, but there's grace in this carousel's rust:
In decades now known through old photos, it must
Have taken on journeys like this those now dust.

My memory stirs: Oxford: Saint Giles's Fair:
The clowns and the din and the side-shows - the dare
To us erudite scholars to wonder if God
Might prefer the Fair, thinking our seminars odd.

The carousel takes me through time and through space,
To the edges of heaven, to the start of our race.
In a minute of turning all time twists up tight;
In a few yards of radius the stars all alight.

But the carousel stops. I get off and return
To the world I got on from. And now I must learn
What it means to this mortal to have sat for a spell Next to God on an old, rusty, grand carousel.

248 - The Carousel

Not much-at least not much that sounds great and fine;
It's mostly to keep eating bread, drinking wine,
Like my monk friend who, asked "Where for God do you search?"
Disappoints with his answer: just "I go to church."

But there is something more, and it's all that I need:
A new way to listen, a new way to read
The flotsam and jetsam of both quick and dead:
No idiot's tale, as Macbeth once said.

The steps that I trace in my ancestors' ink
Are not random motions, but rather a link
In the story of people who went for a ride
On God's carousel, with God sitting beside.

Dame Julian, no fool, doubted all could be well,
But she, too, rode round on God's old carousel,
And heard that God's promise is sound as a bell,
For Christ rose up farther than Adam once fell.

God found me while riding a merry-go-round,
And I learned some old words with an up-to-date sound:

We wish we may, we know we might
By turning, turning, come round right;
And all shall be well on God's carousel,
And all manner of thing shall be we'll.

Echoes:
6th cent.: Pope Gregory the Great, Second Dialogue (Life of Saint Benedict).
14th cent.: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.
18th cent.: Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" ("turning").
20th cent.: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land