Then God said “Let us make human beings in our own image, to be like us…”
Genesis ch 1v26.
Genesis ch 1v26.
We are people and people are completely different from
everything only because God is a person.
This is so deep you could fall in and drown.
At the heart of everything
Beneath everything
Behind everything
Fundamental to everything
Before anything
There was and is a PERSON.
This PERSON gave rise to PEOPLE (oh, and THINGS).
It’s not as The World thinks, the other way round. It’s
not “In the beginning was A THING and eventually things stumbled into being
really, really complicated things which got labelled “people”.
(And I’m not arguing with genetics or a long development
process). I’m saying a PERSON is more fundamental than a thing. Before any
elements – A PERSON.
If you don’t get this, you can still think and hope and
believe that life has meaning and that you matter. But you can’t justify it.
Fine – until, if your THING, thing is true and somebody in
power decides you don’t matter squat and ruins your life – well tough. Get over
it. Get over ‘justice’. Get over human
rights. It’s just a weak THING trying to win against a strong THING.
That’s it.
You matter because the PERSON responsible for the Universe
invented somebody(ies) like Him to matter. It affects every thought. I even
thought about it when I cleared out my office after 35 years:–
Recite this out loud.
“We’ll supply you with bin liners—black
Except for confidential stuff, a sack
That’s white so it stands out to go for shredding.”
Light is doomed and dark is saved? We’re heading
Where our norms could all be torn apart.
But, sack that I thought, to sack I’d better start.
Paper phantoms, long and best forgotten,
Briefly gasped in memory’s air—at bottom
Of a sack reburied deep and quickly;
Some achievements, solid, firm and thickly
Bound in satisfaction, warm and wistful,
Together with red herrings by the fistful,
Herculean labours, plots and schemes
Recorded side by side with idle dreams,
Business cases on which hung careers,
But that day, the sum of all my fears
Was, would I be tried by paper cuts
In addition to my allergy to dusts?
A table top appeared naked, raw
From under layers, forgotten more than stored,
Of documentary strata, decades deep,
The deposit from the thought,”Er—better keep”.
What sedimentary rock could then be born
If armies clerical, bored and forlorn,
Laid down committee minutes endlessly?
Work of administrative centuries,
Sustained by coffee lakes and tea in seas
Until at last scraped off by glacial me.
“Here we have a specimen of Beaurocracite,
Pure grey except for flashes there which might.
You think be gems, but no—Pompossistone.
Gems are there,
but rare
From the Protocolaceous zone.”
A discarded plastic bag, decades decayed,
Disintegrated at first touch and made
A plastic snowflake mini-storm—
Decades’ dandruff.
A life’s career worked for good or ill,
The final purpose, apparently, to fill
(Although to breaking) those few liners, black.
It seemed a poor product looking back.
Even they would be redundant all too soon.
The next career’s clearance from that room
Would happen in a twinkling, in a trice
From a microscopic memory device,
Its pattern of electrons clicked away.
“But you’ve had a lasting influence”, they say,
“On people’s actions, attitudes and aims”.
What if that’s just electrons , all the same?
Busy being them inside their skulls
Or stored inside some server near to Hull.
I’m thinking (it’s the ground of every thought)
We’re people, in His Image, or we’re nought.
