RonPrice
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Member # 1611
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posted 22. September 2005 11:29
NEW CONFIGURATIONS
In modern times, a latent, and even involuntary skepticism adheres to the most pious disposition. -Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter 15, quoted in Gibbon’s Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian, W.B. Carnochan, Stanford UP, Stanford, Cal., 1987, p.13.
I did not know that this would be asked of me
when faith’s murmur spoke its earliest messages
way back then when I was young and impressionable.
Slowly, by the ceaseless sound of the sea, I was seduced.
Enticing shells were thrown up in my path,
collected for a future time
that I hoped for would come my way.
Frothed treachery lapped the shore, unbeknownst,
lured as I was by a simple majesty and grandeur;
dreaming, I gave it all away in bubbled wonder
and now, returning, to the shore, deft practitioner
of all the protocols of piety,
I am stranded on a new sadness.
I enter and leave that rare Presence
with a quietness I have never known,
a fresh grace and an ever-varying splendour
deriving from His new and wonderful configurations.1
Ron Price
23 November 1996
1 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, USA, 1970, p.1.
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