Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?