All True Energy

In more than one interview (and in the video below) I've heard Bruce Springsteen say that every song that he's written since 1975 has echoes of the song "Born to Run" in it, that the questions asked in that song are the same questions that drive every song he's written since. Which begs the question, I guess, of why you'd listen to any other Bruce Springsteen song EXCEPT "Born to Run," but that's a point for another day. My point for today is this: I know how he feels.

I used to write poetry all of the time. I wrote over 3,000 poems from 1984 until 2003.  Not good poetry, mind you, but poetry nonetheless. And in 1992 I wrote a wholly unremarkable poem, but in that poem I wrote two lines that have followed me ever since. I wrote:

     Yet all true energy stems
     From the Son, not the sun.

Immediately after writing it I stared at the line for a solid two minutes, and then I scratched out and reversed the homonyms so that it read as follows:

     Yet all true energy stems
     From the sun, not the Son.

I stared at the line again for a while, and then I scratched out the exchanged words and returned the line to its original state...

But I never really decided in what order that line should be written, and I've pretty much spent the last seventeen years of my life trying to decide whether the "Son" or the "sun" should come first in that sentence.

And I'm going to be honest here: After 17 years, I'm not any closer to knowing the order of that line than I was in 1992. I'd like to tell you otherwise.  I'd love to say that I have become completely convicted in my belief in Christianity, and that, as the contemporary Christian cliche goes, "I know that I know that I know." But that's nonsense to me. I don't even believe other people who say that. When someone says "I know that I know that I know," what I hear them say is, "I THINK I know, but I'm not sure, and I don't REALLY want to even address my doubts because they're really so shaky that they won't stand up under scrutiny, and I don't want anyone to talk to me about my doubts, so I'm going to just say that 'I know' multiple times so that people will avoid the conversation with me. Case closed."  But as Shakespeare said, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

On the other hand, if I'm not sure in my belief in God and Christianity, I have even less faith in anything like atheism. Though I think Creationists are ridiculous in calling Intelligent Design "science" (By its definition it's not), I do believe there is a point to be made in the idea that the universe's complexity lends itself to the idea that SOMETHING must be behind it. And besides, without God, life is pretty much meaningless. I simply can't function that way.

On the other other hand, maybe that last sentence says it all--that I have to make myself believe something fanciful in order to function, that my need to believe in a God doesn't make Him real.

So I don't know. I still don't have an answer to the question of how that line should go. Maybe I'll never know. I'd like to think that when I lie on my death bed I will not still be wrestling with a line of poetry I wrote when I was 24 years old.

I'd LIKE to think that...



(I can't see the video.)