religion

I wanted to play Gabriel in a tinsel crown,
but was cast as the Little Drummer. I hoped
to carry the crucifix, to ferry the chalice
down the long corridor of St. Aloysius

Before North took a seasonal job / fishing for kings in Alaska / I’d never admitted to myself / that he was my only friend.

Sometimes I enter the small chambers of the God of Forgetting 
and take my place at his feet 
and kneel 
and bow my head.

Pascal’s wager—that saw of Christian apologetics—is conventionally understood to demonstrate that human beings deny the Christian God’s existence at the risk of perdition. The seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal weighed the infinite torment awaiting unbelievers under God’s Providence against the finite pleasures of living as an atheist in a godless universe. He concluded, regardless of the deity’s actual existence, that the only rational choice is to adopt cautious belief.

To continue reading, please login or subscribe.