Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 2 No 1: CLRI February 2015
Dr. Dalip Kumar Khetarpal
Christ’s Second Coming — A Spiritual Rationalist’s Perception
Lord Jesus was sent to this earth*
To reveal the real character of God,
To show His great love for humans,
By dying on the Cross,
And to eradicate sin.
As ordained in The Holy Bible,
I’ve been restlessly waiting
For the return of Christ,
“For the Lord Himself will descend
From heaven with a shout,
With the voice of an archangel,
And with the trumpet of God,
And the dead in Christ will rise first.” Thessalonians: 4: 16.
I could but neither see
Nor even visualize His arrival
In any tangible form
At any point of time,
Despite strenuous efforts.
Though 2000 years have elapsed,
The sinners are still galore, sinning,
Rather with greater intensity.
But Jesus, an ocean of forgiveness,
Would leave us not
In our wretchedness sinful
For, His erring children
And even His evil angels who "don't die”
Will be renewed, He says,
"Behold, I make things ALL NEW!" Revelation: 21:5
"I came not to destroy men's lives
But to SAVE them" Luke: 9:56
"And, if I be lifted up from the earth,
I will draw all peoples to Myself" John: 12:32.
Does ‘All’ include sinners also?
No, the incorrigible sinners,
Will live in hell eternally
With Satan, an eternal evil incarnate,
Thrown “…into the everlasting fire
Prepared for the devil and his angels.” Matthew: 25:41,
But being immortal they would also,
In some form, perpetuate sin eternally
On this planet, susceptible to all evils,
Eternalizing sin and evil simultaneously
………as it were.
Sin, in fact, started with the evil angels,
But humans, God’s latter new order of creation
Are also shockingly, born with sin —
——being an off-spring of Adam,
‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity
And in my sin my mother conceived me’ Psalm: 51:5.
So, even without sinning virtually
"ALL have sinned. . ." Romans: 3:23.
Now, to deem a love- begotten- infant a sinner
Or to deem the proliferating of sin
Through bringing forth
More and more children on earth
Already contaminated with sin,
Seems rather absurd and unimaginable
Unless one’s faith in God as elucidated
In The Holy Bible
Is unswerving and unquestioning.
But does not the whole baseless idea
Of atonement for sins
Explicated in the scriptures become invalid
For a questioning mind?
Further, it is man’s faith, his theism
That generates religion
Wherefrom also springs the concept of sin,
For, there is no religion, sin or even scriptural God
For an atheist, agnostic, nihilist or skeptic.
Now, even if presumed that
Religion really or delusively exists for believers
One naturally would still like to query
Why didn't God do away
With the pre-natal contentious,
Rather eternal irritant like sin
That first afflicted those one third of the angels
Who were the first sinners,
Whose sinful activities had been bothering Him
In the celestial realms for quite some time
Much before the creation of this earth?
God, with great love and care,
Created Adam and Eve perfectly,
But then placed Satan right near them,
To probably, get them tempted to eat
The forbidden fruit grown on the tree
Of Knowledge, of Good and Evil.
Things so, began with the stimulation
Of their God-gifted innate ruinous curiosity
Susceptible to Satan’s temptation
And God’s anger---- a negative emotion of humans
Which finally led to catastrophic condemnation
By His seemingly furious Self……
…….all wrought for eating the forbidden fruit……
…. severest test ever conceived
For obedience till date.
But viewed if objectively,
The spontaneous unconscious act of disobedience
Was akin, just to trivial kindergarten fault
Inadvertently committed by poor innocent novices
Ignorant of sin hitherto.
Really, how the magnitude of punishment
Should far exceed the quantum of love and solace
Initially displayed by God, is really, terribly painful!
Still, God seems to cherish and relish
His praise and glorification by His believers
“Whosoever offers praise glorifies Me,” Psalm: 50:23,
Followed by the imploring look
Of His desperately eager believer
Beseeching Him to be helped in testifying his praise:
“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall
Show forth Your praise” Psalm: 51:15.
Was all this required when the Omniscient knows
What lies hid in human psyche?
Ironically, manifesting love, then creating sin,
Allowing it to grow and flourish,
And subsequently, condemning
And redeeming mankind from the sins
Through the sacrifice of Christ
Reveals God as one who alternate
Love with harsh and capricious punishment,
But finally, clearing the whole mess
With love and sacrifice in such a way
That the whole stuff becomes
A pattern strange with an air of mystery
Surrounding it.
Though this appears startling and confounding
To all thinking, probing, delving believers,
It surely appeals and convinces
His pious, but blind credulous believers
Who believe “The secret things belong
To the Lord our God, but those things
Which are revealed belong to us
And to our children forever, that we may
Do all the words of this law.” Deuteronomy: 29:29.
Despite all weird scriptural mysteries,
Unnatural twists and turns,
The harsh fact that perennially pinches most believers is,
Most unnecessarily, tragically and pitifully,
"The Lamb was slain from the foundation
Of the world," Revelation: 13:8.
But that was the Plan of Salvation
Which obviously was designed
Before the earth was created,
For, the sacrifice of innocent lamb-like Christ
Had to be made
To fulfill God’s desire,
To remedy what had gone wrong
In the higher sphere
And also to provide salvation for sinners on earth
Who otherwise would have been lost or damned,
Though, as obvious, no sphere
Has obviously been cleansed
Of any sin or evil till date.
But, such was an elaborately intricate pattern
And uncanny Plan of Salvation
That, except ingenuous believers,
None can ever stomach,
Especially, devotees with lateral thinking,
Common sense and reason-----
…….God’s own special gift to mankind.
We all know that darkness is nothing
But the absence of light.
In the beginning when “the earth was without form”,
When “darkness was on the face of the deep” Genesis: 1: 2.
God ordained, "Let there be light,
And there was light”, Genesis: 1:3.
It would have been more feasible
And infinitely beneficial
To all evil angels and mankind, both
If God had also ordained, “Let cosmos be sin-free,
And the entire cosmos was sin-free.”
The indescribably painful
Psycho-somatic odyssey
Gone through by Christ
And His ultimate crucifixion
Seemed completely redundant.
So, God’s plan, as The Holy Bible affirms,
Was not flawless….. if reason is not
A very poor substitute for blind faith.
Sinners die, Christ also died, but only physically,
For He was eternal
And so was later resurrected,
Though recognized as the “Son of God,"
He appeared in human guise
So that it could be possible for Him
To come and live with us
And finally give away His life most voluntarily,
Solely for purging the sins of the universe.
Humans, especially Christian believers
Are in pressing and dire need of God
As, as presumed, they are drenched with sin
And so have to make frantic attempts
To wash it off with the help of God and prayers.
But how far He helps them in granting absolution
Is still a moot point.
In conformity with God’s plan,
Christ displayed exemplary endurance,
Shed infinite blood,
Before and during His crucifixion
But salvaged nothing, but Himself,
Through resurrection.
Lazarus, John: 11 : 43,
A widow’s son: Luke : 7: 14,
Jairus daughter: Matthew : 9: 25
Also resurrected,
And salvaged themselves,
For their faith in Christ was firm,
But faith-less modern sinners,
Must so be beyond redemption
And can hence, see no resurrection.
Christ then, must also stop bleeding eternally
For at least those beyond redemption…..
……being the offspring of eternal Satan.
Parallel to this,
The virtuous also today
Salvage nothing, not even their own selves
Even after displaying
Remarkable sacrifice and endurance
To endure the pain, the suffering
That is even beyond endurance,
To further only endure the long-awaited, expected
And excruciatingly silent
Perceptible/imperceptible impending cataclysm
With bleeding hearts and dismal squeaks and groans.
Owing to various flaws
And inherent contradictions and dichotomies
In religion
That often suspends man
Between belief and disbelief….
…..an extremely painful state,
One is still unsure
Whether he is religious or irreligious
Or even should even be religious or not,
Whether he is rooted or even rootless…..
…….all creating a state of uncertainty,
Of terrible predicament, of doubt, of suspense….
……often shattering his psyche.
The current bleak scenario also,
Perhaps, the bleakest in the history of mankind,
Left me smoldering within so much for years
That, though being a deist, I wanted to ask
The universally worshipped God
Through the mind of a theist
Why demons have been given so much time
To go on
With their orgy of bloodshed, rape,
Murder, plunder and evil deeds multifarious.
When everything has gone topsy-turvy,
Every ill, irremediable
Every good, irreversible,
Every damage, irreparable,
Every love, fleeting and transient,
Should I then
With some credulity presume, especially
After witnessing large scale
Physical cataclysm and ecological disasters
That cataclysm has struck
‘With a whimper’
And not ‘with a bang’
And God has emerged triumphant
In this God-Satan long silent war of attrition?
But that is also still a moot point.
Despite all contradictions, setbacks and pitfalls
In creation or God’s plan
As imagined, felt and thought by rationalist believers,
And despite the dilution of living faith
By a perceptive, thinking analytical mind,
Created by God Himself,
The scope, significance and impact
Of God have not waned,
For, the believers with strong right brain
Are always busy improvising special prayers
And sometimes chanting
Their stereotyped hymns,
With seemingly greater enthusiasm
And involvement,
With the hope
To be transported to heaven
Or sneak into it
To pilfer some nectar from there.
But conversely, when atheists also along with theists
Pursue religion——a common human theatrics,
And when the Omniscient
And Omnipresent really perceives
He should wryly grin
At this farce.
The farce deepens
On witnessing those devotees
Who pray most devotedly, passionately
With mad enthusiasm---being the worst sinners.
Their schizophrenic prayers
Also emanate from their lowest
Sinful activities.
Further, when their prayers
Are blended unconsciously/subconsciously
With the worst immoral ideas,
When they try
To create an illusion
About their devotion
Before the Omniscient,
He should feel disheartened, disillusioned
And demoralized
And should not go getting
Delusions of grandeur
On listening to
Their theatrical prayers.
The Almighty
Must have also realized that
The human mind——His own creation
That tends towards Him
Also tends towards
Temptations and worldly pleasures,
Towards logic, reason and science.
As such, He must surely feel penitent
To see Himself evaluated and analyzed,
Questioned and dissected by his own created beings.
But will He be humble
To repent and realize His fault?
He must if he is alive and awake
To all scurvy human affairs
And to the glare
Of topsy-turvy creation
With its inherent clash
Between flesh and spirit, vice and virtue,
Religion and science, and faith and reason.
Now, even if all syllogism, ratiocination and rationality
Are to be set aside
And even if one immerses oneself wholly
In the Holy Bible
With all requisite prayers and meditation
That often gives peace and satisfaction,
Nothing positive obviously will emerge
For both the fate of man
And the whole cosmic scenario is,
As it was, as it has been, and had been.
Though religion may not stand
The onslaught of logic or psycho- analysis
And though untenable theories and concepts
Or unanswered questions on religion
Breed fear, suspense, uncertainty
And even disbelief in no small measure,
One has still to bank on it
To be rooted in life,
To be properly protected
And sheltered from all problems and crises…..
……..though, perhaps, psychologically.
Further, one’s own inner divine spark or intuition,
His own innate spiritual and moral consciousness,
Draw him quite naturally towards religion mystique
With rather astonishing velocity,
For, it is only religion that is replete with
Spiritual, moral, sublime and divine values, contents,
And essence already inherent in him
With varying degree;
It is also only the language of religion
That is couched in the vernacular
Of the human spirit
That drenches it
To the core, rejuvenates it
And finally kindles faith in it.
It is precisely because of this that
This planet is flooded with believers.
Religion, with its divine and benign influence
Has carved successfully
The image of Gods
On human psyche
That anchors him to life,
Works as hinges,
Moves him unhindered,
Facilitates his survival
And smoothens his existence
For, he is so weak, so dependable
So insufficient, so pitiable
So helpless and so hapless,
Pitted against fate
Every now and then
In this inscrutable world.
When help and succor
From nature and humans
Is not forthcoming
His logic, reason and rationalization
Capacities and skills
Are bound to give in,
For he finds nothing else to cling on
But only to God (be it delusive or imagined)
Only whom he can implore
To extricate him
Out of the mess.
God then becomes a Savior
A Reliever, Pacifier
Who acts as a strong
Psycho- spiritual base
For his existence
Confirming vicariously also His own existence…..
……..in some way.
Though abstract and mysterious,
God is truly man’s most ideal concept,
Most compelling, fascinating illusion
And weirdest and sublime mystery
Man has ever created, visualized or imagined.
Man can never ever
Think, imagine and feel
Anything better, greater
And more sublime than God
For endless ages to come.
If this be really so,
Even illusion of God seemingly becomes
A delusion sweet, concrete and real
That Borders on faith
That emanates naturally from the spirit of man
From perhaps, the divine spark
That often sparks
When scriptural verses seep into his spirit,
When he sees God in imagination
Or as a living reality,
But pathetically sees his transient self
As still an illusion, living amidst
Countless transient persons and things
Illusive………incredibly followed by
A weird demonic realization that
Even God would dwindle into illusion
When he dies,
For God can live only as long as he is conscious
Of His existence.
After many years of breakneck scrutiny and analysis
From groping, pondering, meditating
And brain storming exercises,
To final doubting, confusion, predicament
And fatal exhaustion,
My flummoxed and ambivalent self
Arrived nowhere
As my faith had been flickering,
Waxing and waning
Throughout my psychic odyssey
Amidst weirdly diversified
Human drama.
Besieged by
Dark-narrow-blind alleys thus,
I could go nowhere
See no light.
An unknown spark in me then
Suddenly sparked one fine morn,
Flooding my whole being
With intense light.
Inspired and freely carried away
By this light
That seemed divine
That ended my endless, uncertain
Labyrinthine spiritual journey
That annihilated the darkness
Of my ignorance, of the limitations
Of my logic, my reasoning powers,
I humbly kneel before
Thy greatest Self
In supplication today
And pray to Thee.
Being an illusion myself
I yearn for fusion with Thy immortal self
But the impact of this fusion
Should be such
That puts my transient self
On the path of eternity,
That strips
My illusive hallucinatory existence
Of its delusions,
That rekindles and rejuvenates
My the dying- living faith,
That reduces
Even the impact of nuclear fusion
To a mere illusion,
And saves my psyche
From eternal maim.
