My God Is A Trickster

Image courtesy of PiccoloNamek at the English-language Wikipedia

My God is a Trickster was inspired by a thought experiment posed by 20th-century philosopher Alan Watts, who claimed that if there existed an omnipotent and omniscient God, seeing and knowing everything that would ever happen, He would eventually go mad with a craving for spontaneity and unpredictability. In the thought experiment, this God eventually fractures himself into the infinity of things that exist in the cosmos, thirsty to experience everything from a ground level rather than from above.

The poem sees God in the aftermath of this fracture, not as the transcendent divine which watches and judges from above, but rather as the divinity inherent in all things; in this image, we are all expressions of God - experiencing the tapestry of existence from within the weave itself.

My God is a Trickster 

Faraz Rezai

Within the weave He softly strums,

With smiling lips and human drums,

In winds of fire and hearts of ice,

His laughter echoes blazing bright,

Ten thousand masks He wears each day,

To hide Himself, this game he plays;

Of beasts and birds and mountain slopes,

Of golden sands and mothers’ hopes,

Of gleaming rivers, clouds of white,

Sadness, sorrow, sweet delight,

Now who is this God, I hear you ask?

This trickster with ten thousand eyes,

To find Him do not stray too far,

For He is you, and you are I.

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Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson