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Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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* * * * Love and Spirituality
By
Marvin X
God is love. The love of God is the
path through which we come to love humanity. If we
cannot love humanity we cannot love God. You say you
love God, but you hate niggers. What if God turned out
to be a nigger? What if your daughter married a nigger?
I cannot hate Christians because my
children are in the church, my people are in the church.
I just say, "Get right church." Come into the new
millennium. Discard that slavery time theology, servants
be obedient to your master. You are too close to Pharaoh
to be close to Jesus. Jesus was not with Pharaoh or
Caesar. Liberation theology is what Jesus was about. If
you love Jesus, you love liberation, you love
revolution. If you hate revolution you hate Jesus. Jesus
liberated the human spirit and it was a radical
liberation of love.
A radical understanding of Jesus will
allow one to reach spiritual maturity for we shall
understand all things possess love and reflect love.
This is true for humans, animals and nature. Look into
the creek and see love flowing in the water. Look at the
rose and see love. Look at the woman, the man, the
child, for they are manifestations of love. If they are
evil it is not God's fault but society. What is more
loving than a baby until that baby is abused, deprived
and abandoned. That loving child becomes a murderer, a
rapist, a sociopath. That child becomes a mental
patient. That child has no knowledge of love.
Prisoners will tell you they never
received a hug in their life. Now we sometimes hear that
a child was just born evil. Maybe we should check the
DNA—it could be from a family of murderers, rapists,
bank robbers, pimps. Even then the child can be redeemed
with love power. I know a sister who adopted five crack
babies. Some were unable to speak, had been abandoned,
came from criminal families, but she showered them with
love and attention, and under the circumstances, they
are doing fine.
All children have problems, even the
Kennedy children and the Bush children. Of course it
could be something in the DNA, especially with the Bush
children. Or it could be socialization. They're just
doing what they saw their parents doing, like smoking
crack.
The soul longs for love just as the
thirsty longs for water. Love can be seen on the face of
one who possesses it, in the eyes, in the skin. We can
see love as we see the sun. Love can be heard in the
voice of the lover and the beloved. It is the voice of
total submission. There is absolutely nothing the lover
won't do for the beloved. It is a selfless condition.
The lover is no longer capable of selfishness, but is at
the whim of the beloved. It is often a condition of
helplessness. The lover will say, "I just can't help
myself." That's why they say fools fall in love.
The lovers are helpless. They are
blind. They refuse to see flaws, sometimes tragic flaws,
in the beloved. In the eyes of the lover, the beloved is
perfect. Mother and father can tell the lover nothing
against the beloved. It is a condition approaching
insanity, if not insanity itself.
I remember traveling from New York
City to Montreal, Canada in the dead of winter to see my
beloved. I have never experienced such cold weather
since then, but the lips of my beloved took away any
feeling of cold. Yes, she warmed my soul, even though
when I went out into the street my face was frozen in
seconds.
The heart is a precious thing,
brittle as glass. All kinds of acts, from the heroic to
savage, are committed in the name of love. The jails and
prisons are full of men and women who committed crimes
in the name of love. The mental wards are full of people
who were in love but suffered a broken heart and never
recovered.
The hospitals are full of people who
were beaten bloody in the name of love, and the morgue
is full of those who died in the name of love. Look at
the dead soldiers coming back to America because of
their love of country.
It is very difficult not to lose
oneself in the name of love. By the nature of love, we
lose oneself in the self of another. In my play One Day
in the Life, the woman says to her man, "I put you
before my son, but no more, you blew it buddy, I hate
you."
Oh, when love turns to hate. That is
when the sparks fly. That is when we discover love was
quite superficial, whimsical, purely emotional, sexual,
but not spiritual, emanating from the deep structure of
the Divine mind, where love is tempered with reason and
discipline, not based on pure emotion that can be
shattered at the ring of a cell phone, "Who's that
calling you, let me see, better not be that bitch, your
baby's mama." Oh, love, a many splendid thing.
Spiritual consciousness allows us to
withstand the pain of love, to appreciate the joy of
love, to understand that love can be ephemeral, quite
short-lived, if not based on Divine love that lasts
forever. While lovers come and go, the river will always
flow, the birds will fly, the bees will buzz, so flow
with the flow. Let lovers love God and they shall find
loving each other a pleasure.
A love supreme. A love supreme. A love supreme. A
love Supreme.
Source:
Toward Radical Spirituality, Black Bird Press,
2007 (c) 2006 by Marvin X (El Muhajir)
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* * * *
Marvin X has given permission to
Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji
Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X
(1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of
Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited
by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West
Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology
Muslim American Literature, University of
Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in
the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple
University.
posted 22 June 2006
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update 29 July 2008 |
