My Poetry: God is a Mirror of Man’s Soul

God is a mirror of man’s soul

The title is about why there are so many different translations/ observation/ interpretations of a single piece of text. Less cynical than Lennon's 'God is a concept' lyric, but from the same hymn sheet

God gave us creativity

So we repay him with mimicry

Of text translated by people

With different interpretations of the truth.

Choose the sect 

Which mirrors your personality,

Then the bespoke holy house preaching it

My son, and prey you chose wisely.

Symbolic text taken literally

Becomes more powerful than words

In the hands of businessmen

Disguised as religious men

Tricking believers into paying

For heavenly absolution

at Friday prayer or Sunday worship

Or the collections plates of spurious

TV Evangelists.

GOD’s doctrines re-writ by human hands

Echo like a slow clap

Through the corridors of time,

A hundred different churches

All kneeling before the same cross 

Created by men who cherry pick

Passages to justify bad life choices:

Men who wage war under a red-cross

Stone wives in the name of the prophet

Or prefer Sunday’s repentance,

Rather than give up sin.

Theological interpretations

Intended as moral guidance

Based on revised revisions

Handed down, like two thousand years

Of Chinese whispers, by learned few,

With secret tongues 

Translating foreign alphabets

Into gilded sacred tomes

While ignoring lessons from

A thousand generations:

From pagan’s celebrating the moon

To harvests where the sun

Was man’s time-piece,

Where coin or temporal shackles,

Were just tools of hegmonic rule,

Yet to be invented.

But there is no profit in freedom;

HE kicked out the money-lenders

Now the Church hoards

And the Vatican sits on billions

While millions starve and suffer disease

Because… because… because,

Well only their God knows why.

Men in frocks ban gay marriage

Because love is sinful

When pointed in the wrong direction,

Ban woman from bearing the cloth

As if what’s beneath a cassock

Hastens the unlocking of heaven’s gate,

But it is man who slay their brother

Kill a city’s first born

Invent ancesteral sin – from the rib

Of an Old Testament psalm?

God gave us creativity

So we repay him with mimicry

Of books written by people

With different takes on reality.

So choose the sect

Which mirrors your soul.

And prey you chose right, my son