In a few words I will flick through my exposure to life’s ugliness and reveal how it launched my discovery of the wonder and beauty and meaning and purpose of life. I’m not the first to discover the secret of fulfillment but what compels me to write is not wanting you to be one of the millions who miss life’s greatest adventure.

Despite being born into a respectable home, devastation after devastation pounded me, commencing with sexual torture from the age of three. I was barely out of my teens when I could look back on the blur of countless times of coming face to face with the icy chill of terror. I have been spat on and beaten for being a white person, but for literally hundreds of beatings I’ve searched in desperation for a reason and found nothing. I’ve been forced to witness crimes. I’ve stared at death at the hands of drug and arms dealers. I have seen the good guys fail and the bad guys win.

But every frosty terror and wild-eyed horror of my short life had been hurtling towards what seemed like eons of soul-crushing torment, when I found myself hounded by federal agents and falsely accused in a court of law. Once I had dignity; suddenly I was scum. For day after never-ending day I was emotionally stripped naked for all to jest; debased, exposed, humiliated as I was publicly shamed in court by what had been my trusted friends. I had given them my heart and in heartless fury they smashed it against the wall. Those who should have shielded me, delighted in tearing me down. For most of my life I had clung to God like a drowning man to a stick but even he abandoned me, just as justice had.

“Why is this happening?” The question kept thundering through my head.

It felt like being slowly hacked to death, but death refused to come. For years it haunted and disfigured me. For years I was left but a shadow of a person.

With not even death an option, I had to stumble to my feet and stagger on. The sun still shone. The rain still fell. Should it? Shouldn’t all of nature mourn with me? Must I bear this loss alone?

Shakespeare’s Shrew found it better that time does not stand still. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Does it?

One morning, all hope dying, my heart broken, I saw the sunrise. To my surprise, I saw beyond my horizon. Hope sprang eternal. If the sun remains and earth keeps spinning, hope’s glimmer remains.

The rising sun reflects the mysterious and awesome power of its creator. We were not meant for darkness. Even when earth seems hell, we have a poet; a saving artist.

In his Inferno, Dante Alighieri wandered in pain, lost from hope. He found that even in hell was a poet. And even now there is a poet to guide us.

I have wandered in hell. But I have also met the poet. He is real. He is clever. He moves with a deadly stealth and a stinging blow to hell. He is hell’s silent enemy, the time-tested warrior, the all-seeing, all-knowing power that stands rock hard against the lies of hell.

Hell has no way of fooling the poet. He is music. He is beauty. He is power. He remains when all others fail. He stands in triumph on hell’s fiery sea and mocks it. There is no escaping him. He will never betray the hurting. Hell knows no terror like the fury of the poet when provoked by hell’s cruelty to its own.

The poet is underestimated and presumed to be weak. That’s hell’s fatal mistake. The poet plans the rescue of those in pain by bringing them the beauty of art and to the artist himself. He floods soothing words of heart-felt love over the scorched pain of the hurting.

Listen to the wind. Listen to the dolphins. Listen to the earth. There is a melody that sings to the poet. The whole earth cries out to him. The poet’s majesty is in the mountain. His royalty is in the parrot’s plumage. His eye is that of the rising eagle that mocks the storm. His fury is a crashing sea. His light is a gentle sunset. His depth is a rosebud and the wonder of a blossom. He is locked in the mysteries of the earth and the hidden parts of the cosmos as he speeds past stars and is limitless in the endless realms he made. He designed gravity and earth as we know it – and even more spectacularly; earth as we don’t know it. To him this planet is but a priceless speck. His breath moved the seas and thawed a frozen earth and gave life eternal to a species we call humanity.

The poet lovingly scans the human psyche; knowing us before we ever know ourselves. The master stealth weapon, the poet is all around us and in everything we see; mysteriously hidden, but waiting for us to search for him so that he might step out and reveal himself.

Yes, hope does indeed spring eternal in the human breast. In fact, hope is all around us because the poet is here to guide us. He gives us a sense of being and belonging, because we are his. He owns the sea, but he lets the sea be. The sea chooses her course, but she knows her maker. The she-bear lives her life, but knows who gave her cubs life. The cherry tree blooms, knowing it is part of the circle of life that dances before the poet. So are we, but we remain clueless without the poet’s revelation. The poet hides himself in the simplicity and the complexity of the universe and the human heart.

Humanity: born dying, born seeking, not knowing what he seeks, but craving it with passion. If he is blessed he feels earth’s rhythms and hears its music, but turning aside, he looks for meaning. He strives to create beauty; not fully understanding that the desire for beauty stems from the very heart of the poet. Humanity feels, sees, hears and tastes, but there is more, and he knows it. The poet is that more, that answer, that friend, that depth, that awesome fury that makes life worth living.

Who is this majestic poet? He is the Spirit of God; the part of God that we can truly have. He longs to give himself to us.

In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the poet knew the way out of hell. Beauty was that way. Art was salvation. It is a metaphor. Beauty and art are still the way. There is still the poet. What or who is the pinnacle of beauty? Love is the ultimate beauty.

The poet – the Spirit of God – leads me to love, the personification of art and beauty. Love can never be impersonal. To be real, love must be encapsulated in a person. More than a feeling or a concept, perfect love is truly a person – a person of divine proportions. In the most breathtakingly enormous sense of the word, this astounding person is my hero.

Like me, friends turned on my hero. He was falsely accused. Like me, my hero was betrayed, exposed and humiliated. I’m moved by the similarities between the two of us – I feel such a kinship – but I’m moved even more profoundly by the stark differences. In the blaze of his suffering, mine fades to a shadow. I thought myself innocent but alongside the dazzling purity of his innocence, mine is mud. The torment and injustice he suffered screams past mine like a freight train overtaking a trackside grub. I agonized only because I was too weak to escape. He is all-powerful. He volunteered; sacrificing all so that I might have everything. He let them strip him naked so that I could be robed with his eternal dignity. He was wounded so that I could be healed; smeared with my sin so that his matchless purity could be mine; abused so that I could be honored; humiliated so that I could be exalted to heaven’s throne; bashed so that I could be crowned.

Despite what I had supposed, he had never abandoned me. When I was engulfed by hell’s flames, he wasn’t merely heart broken, he, as it were, plunged into the furnace and used his own body to smother the flames, letting himself be burnt alive to rescue me. He didn’t merely sacrifice everything for me, he became the sacrifice. As the richest person in the universe, he didn’t merely buy my freedom by paying a monetary ransom. When I was locked and forgotten in the torture chamber on hell’s death row, he arranged the most daring prisoner exchange, securing my freedom by swapping places with me.

And yet, I, who of all people, know what it is to be rejected and treated like dirt, twisted the knife in my hero’s heart by rejecting him and treating him like dirt. As ridiculous as it seems, I pushed him away and for years and years needlessly reeled in the pain of loneliness and rejection and despair.

To put it mildly, people had always let me down. He promised to be so different. He has not a shred of human imperfection and selfishness but, like being handed a check for a billion dollars, I thought my hero, my lover, the joy of the universe, too good to be true. As insane as it sounds, it felt safer to live in abject poverty than in the riches he offered. That might be a pitiful way to live but it seemed believable to me. It seemed consistent with everything else I’ve experienced in life. And if I have nothing, no one can con me out of anything and leave me even more disappointed.

Like the world’s greatest love story, I finally mustered the courage to tentatively put my fragile trust in him and suddenly I was enveloped in loving acceptance that excelled my fondest dreams.

For me, trust has been an agonizingly slow journey of small, scary steps. I keep having to push myself further and I expect to have to do so for the rest of my life, but each step that I have been so ridiculously reluctant to take has exploded in joyous fulfillment and liberation.

My hero, the personification of love, is the eternal Son of God, who on the cross swapped places with me, taking upon himself my blame so that I might become one with him. I will spend eternity exploring all the wonders that opens up to me. And so can you.

Related Pages

You Can Find Love: What Your Fantasies Reveal

Where Was God When You Suffered Unspeakable Horrors?

Revenge!

Why I Hate the Myth of a Cruel Christian God

Issues that Make Christians Squirm

Not to be sold. © Copyright 2008, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged and it is not used in a webpage. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.com  Freely you have received, freely give. For use outside these limits, consult the author.