Lasting Love Of God's Poem by RoseAnn V. Shawiak

This is the spiritual truth David Attenborough was illustrating in the New Guinea story I told in my prervious message. I told it for the obvious humor aspect. Christians (and also Jews and Muslims) don't depend on Nature in their spiritual lives: no animal sacrifices in the Temple, no sacred white buffaloes, no Pan, the God of Forests and Streams. And your poem shows why: it a quiet, intimate, completely persuasive conversation with God as a Spirit, above and outside Nature. Your words are instantaneously in his mind, in fact he already sees every prayer or petition in your mind. The New Guinea farmer would think you have no gods and no heaven - No Pigs, no way to heaven. Your life is empty, he would think. He would not be aware or be able to comprehend, that what is spiritual is invisible but it is a plenitude everywhere. And the eyes of Faith do not have to see to believe. But look at the poems! They are real things in the world; they're objects perceived by the senses but serving spiritual goals. They don't grunt and snort - they sing and rejoice, and offer themselves up to the Invisible Omniprersent God. And so ends my catechism. My thanks to my collegues in preparing this show: Of course, David Attenborough, the New Guinea Pig Farmer, the 87 pigs in his corrals,4 Birds of Paradise,168 men, women and children in the village. When Pope John Paul II visited New Guinea, the pig farmers dressed in their most elaborate clothes and lined both sides of the street and when his car went by, they chanted in broken English, No.1 Jesus Man! No.1 Jesus Man! Was that not a prayer acceptable in the Christian heaven?