Both the believer and the poet are seeking ultimate reality, to use a very badly corrupted cliché. I like to speak of seeking the matter within the matter, the reality within the reality, the God beyond God. This is not mumble jumble but the recognition that human perceptions and human constructs are always imperfect. The realities of Truth, Love, Peace are bigger and more complex than we can understand. Further, our understanding of them changes as we mature and grow in wisdom and experience. What is true of the eternal verities is all the more true of the eternal. The old, inadequate images of God must be destroyed the new understanding must be sought and nurtured. The God-seeker, the one who prays, must always be pressing on seeking the God beyond God; otherwise, God becomes an idol. Poetry, honest poetry, comes from this emerging understanding of the eternal verities. This is dangerous ground – very dangerous ground because the poet is going to be out in front of the popular notion of things. It is also difficult; The difficulty is this: We write of what we know; we pray to what we can understand. How can either activity lead us beyond the known to a new vision? Three words: COURAGE. IMAGINATION, SILENCE. SILENCE Unless we shut up we will hear neither the voice of the muse, nor the still small vice of God. Unless we hold our tongue we will here only the conflicting and echoes of the common place, and conventional, the rootless wisdom of our age. Unless we are silent we will hear only the dead words of a god who has truly died. IMAGINATION Imagination allows the seeker to examine the insights of silence; to play “what if” with the insights that silence has whispered to you. This play, this imaginative play, allows us prove or disprove the truth of what silence gives us. COURAGE Silence and Imagination require Courage. It takes Courage to open yourself to silence. Most of us use noise as a shield, a shield against our demons, and our shortcomings. It takes courage to face these. It takes courage to imagine, to go beyond the world we know. People might laugh at you, might call you a dreamer or crazy. Finally, it takes courage to start the process over again. Each new reality, each new model of God is only a step on the way to the ultimate reality. The search never ends…