Unintended Ode to the Unknown God

Unintended Ode to the Unknown God

The force of humanity
was a press from his fingertip,
a breath through his lips,
and here we are, alive,
without understanding why.
Isn't that just like us,
to have it,
and have it wrong?
- passing the very face of God each day,
mistaking it for our own reflection,
walking in his elegance,
speaking his words after him,
as if our own thoughts.
What do you see in the formula,
if not the genius of the mathematician?
What do you hear in the masterpiece,
but the heart of its own musician?
Oh how we miss you,
your long lost children,
and can't even remember your likeness.
But with our own little hands,
we've been trying to piece together
an assemblage of your loving face,
like trying to recall a lullaby long forgotten.
But, God save us,
nothing we make looks back at us,
or hears the longing of our hearts,
or speaks the soft words we yearn to hear.
They do things very similar,
but nothing outside our handwritten plans.
They are every kind of wonderful version of you,
all except the one.
What a magnificent menagerie we've made,
an unintended ode to the unknown god,
spinning like a mobile around our heads,
soothing us to sleep each night,
in place of the one we so dearly miss.

::

The apostle Paul makes this plea to the high council in Athens -

...for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about.
“He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
“His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

- Acts 17:23-28