Peter Dale Scott

from:
MOSAIC OF ORPHEUS: Five Canadian Poems

Confession

   for Paul Almond

I saw myself as a humanist 
searching the right way to love
our religious species

who became a theist 
accepting God’s will 
that texts be critically examined

and slowly released
from their burdensome and divisive
contexts of external practice

but at last seeing myself 
as a child of Jewish observance
and of Buddhist compassion

a small voice inside me
has persuaded me to confess

I am a Christian			
seeking to be enlightened		
		      
enlightened: not in the sense
of Naipaul’s Beyond Belief

or the gnosticisms
of Yeats and Pound

but openness to the simple
living waters of the Lord’s Prayer                       Song of Songs 4:16

in the spirit of Merton’s
I am a Jew and a Moslem	                  Merton, Striving Towards Being 137

open to other precepts
love the Lord in Hebrew	                                              Deut 6:5

love thy neighbor in koine Greek	               Septuagint Leviticus 19:18
the straight path in Arabic                                     Qur'an 1:6

all things are impermanent		                  Mahaparinibbana Sutta 14
the nameable name is not eternal	               	         Tao Te Ching 1

precepts unburdened 
by the travails of past Councils

like the priests in Utopia
of exceeding holiness 

and therefore very few                                          More Utopia 2