19
Who can gauge the mind of God, or sound the depths of love?
Yet the existence of God and love some seek to disprove.
They say that God and love do not exist. They have reduced
Us to mechanisms. We have been temporarily seduced.
Well, for deflowering the tender and fine they have lost their eyes,
For denying man-the-divine their hearts have been put into deep freeze;
And their words are mere wind against the mountains of spirit,
Flotsam and jetsam washing on the fountains of spirit.
It has happened millions of times—the reign of the egghead,
The iron heel on the rose for whom the nightingale bled.
And millions of times God-Man has brought down the holy fire,
And in the dawn of it we the sons of God have shouted in choir.
Arise! And sing, all you that dwell in the mire of materialism,
For the meek shall inherit the Word of the new ancient realism.
Francis sees the reductive lies of the materialists and behaviorists as a ravishing of our minds. And for destroying natural faith they have lost their eyes – lost touch with the immediacy of experience and also the capacity to feel. Their efforts are passing and trivial against the mountains and fountains of spirit, spirit’s massive solidity and ever freshness. The brutal mind control recurs, although perhaps seldom as it has in our time. Yet always from a higher source comes the inspiration of ‘holy fire’. This is more than just the gift of Prometheus, it is the transforming energy and grace of Avataric incarnations.
Jesus claimed that the meek would inherit the earth (Mt:5,5) and Francis returns again and again to His radical pronouncements. . Here they inherit a new revelation of an ‘ancient realism’ – the realism of our nature and purpose in this embodied state. Six stresses per line can be given to add emphasis to the words in the last two verses.
This is a strong polemic against certain features of the modern world but perhaps it should not be forgotten that these people who are called eggheads by Francis have also produced science which is also a real knowledge and with which Meher Baba said religion must go hand in hand. Science which goes it alone and locks into a materialist ideology is dehumanizing.