SO HELP ME...

God help us
help those in whom
God has ceased
to help Himself.

[Note: Here's a question: Can God be helped? If not, poor God, no exchange, just one-way help. This is a difficult concept, the notion of something that can only cause effects and not be recipient of them. After all, that's what's implied. If help can go in only one direction, ditto causation.

We must find this hard to think with. (For example, can God perceive or receive communication from us without, to that extent, being affected by us? Can what we can't understand have any understanding of us?)

Oddly, those who sweep these difficulties aside as mere cobwebs in the face of faith are likely to be obsessed with helping God: Those who most ardently insist that God is out there and separate and all-powerful and beyond man's concerns are usually the ones who feel most strongly impelled to help God by, for example, visiting God's vengeance on people they feel might be annoying to God. God is all-powerful and all-impervious, so be very careful not to upset God! He has these fits of jealous anger, you know.

At least one notion of God makes him infinitely able to be affected, what one does to the least of his children being done to Him as well. This is easier for me to see. If I could create any effect I wanted, I'd be able to receive any effect, including help. As one becomes more powerful, one becomes MORE willing (not less willing) to experience and to receive effects. At least that's been my own experience in these finite arenas. But it's not hard to extrapolate. If you can create a sun, surely you can enjoy the full blast of a sun and survive to say it is good. (Perhaps it tickles.)

But my poem is merely a variation on "God helps those who help themselves"--showing what the adage becomes if we postulate that it is God in us that is what is helping (or not helping)Him/Herself. (OK, I stuck a "Her" in there, but let's go back to unslashed pronouns, with "Her" and "It" understood.)

God not helping Himself? Why not? Perhaps God can forget He is God and imagine himself to be what we often imagine ourselves to be: A piece of briefly mobile meat. Can God forget? If God is unlimited in ability, and if forgetting is an ABILITY, then yes.

And forgetting IS an ability. It's required that one be able to forget in order to have a game. At least this is the case for one who knows all and is all-powerful. He would have to locate himself in a time-line and forget knowing how things come out in order to be able to experience play and winning and losing.

Seeing that forgetting is an ability is easier if we recognize that it is tantamount to saying that playing a game is an ability. You'd better forget you can fly over the line of scrimmage or vaporize the opposition if you want to find any thrill or even mild interest in scoring a touchdown.]

Dean Blehert
Blogs:http://deanotations.blogspot.com (short poems)
http://dearreader08.blogspot.com (essays and longer poems)
WWW.BLEHERT.COM