Confession

I’ve spent forty-seven years, Lord,
	learning to judge these things.
I’ve learned to disdain mass-produced pop-icon architecture,
	like the Pizza Hut down the street.
I’ve learned to value those same wines of dry and complex character
	that used to make me wince and shiver.
I’ve learned to prefer the cleaner exhaust
	of new cars with pollution controls,
	not like my old green Volkswagen beetle, long ago rust.
I’ve learned to despise Twinkies.

And I thank you for those lessons, Lord, but now I must tell you that
	they’re wearing off.
For now I confess, more and more, the perfection of all things:

The Pizza Hut is doing its best,
	perfect in its pizza-hutness:
	it is fit to be your temple.
The cheap wine is also from your grapes,
	and springs forth joyously from the box:
	it is fit to be quaffed before your altar.
The exhaust from the green Volkswagen is sweet too,
	a pleasing odor rising to heaven;
	the car itself is fit to be your chariot,
	your merkabah, wheels within wheels.
And the Twinkie — dear Lord, the Twinkie! —
	so small in my hand, so sweet and pure,
	pure as a wafer,
	no dead cake, this:
What keeps it from falling away into nothingness?

Only your love, Lord,
Sustains it, persists it,
	calls it continually into being,
	world without end,
	Amen.

The idea that God’s love keeps the whole cosmos from falling away into nothing goes back at least to Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century anchoress and mystic. Chapter IV of the short text of her Showings reports this vision:

“And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought: What can this be? And I was given this general answer: It is everything which is made. I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”