If God Were One Of Us Poem by gershon hepner

What if God were one of us?
Joan Osborne asked, and so do I;
I think He would make fun of us
and make us laugh until we cry.

As long as we believe that we
are gods like Him he isn’t lonely;
He doesn’t mind, and lets us be
His golden calves, for laughter only.

But once we start to disbelieve
ourselves, we make Him very nervous:
we diss the image aggrieve,
self-disbelief to Him disservice.

This poem, inspired in part by Exod.32: 6, was inspired by an article written by John Rockwell about Hans Hotter(“A Wotan for Whom Crowds Parted Like the Red Sea, ” The New York Times, December 26,2003) :

The Wagner festival in the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth takes place in late July and August. Most performances begin at 4 in the afternoon, meaning, usually, in brilliant sunshine. For a good hour before that, the grounds around the theater are crowded with formally dressed people, most milling about in anticipation of their daily dose of Wagner, others desperately trying to snag tickets. One afternoon some 35 years ago, I was one of those milling. Suddenly, behind me, I sensed a disturbance in the Force. I turned and saw a tall man with impossibly broad shoulders and a face like an eagle, dressed impeccably in a summer white tuxedo jacket. He was walking — no, striding. The crowd parted before him like the Red Sea. In our secular age God is supposed to manifest him/herself as anyone: so Joan Osborne told us in the pop song 'What if God Was One of Us, ' and so the television show 'Joan of Arcadia' tells us now. But in more conventional iconography of the divine, Jewish or Christian, God looks more, well, godly. And on that afternoon at Bayreuth, Hans Hotter looked like God. That was fitting, since Hotter's most famous role was Wotan, the chief god of Germanic mythology, in Wagner's 'Ring des Nibelungen, ' a part he had sung many times at Bayreuth, not to speak of Munich, Vienna, London, Paris and most other enlightened operatic capitals.



12/28/03.1/8/10