It’s only 23 lines, fitting tidily into no more than one-third of a page in a recent edition of the “The New Yorker” magazine, and it sports a one-word title: “God.” In it, the poet Campbell McGrath almost playfully takes it upon himself to explore….well, it’s hard to lasso it exactly, partly because the three letters in that word remain so elusive, so much the giant projection screen upon which so much depends, from which everything is wanted, and about which nothing is truly known.
Is it the Creator, the Source, the Foundation, the Big Ultimate Proper Noun of Person, Place, and Thing At the Bottom and Top of It All, the Height and Width and Depth and Breadth and Everything in Between That Ever Was or Will Be?
That God?
Maybe.
But if so, Mr. McGrath has set himself quite the task. Learned theologians have been hard at it for no doubt millions of pages and several millennia now, from all over the earth.
And still: so many questions…
Closer to home and in our time, the writer-professor Jack Miles deigned to pen, “God: A Biography,” in 1995. Its 426 pages won him a Pulitzer Prize, though it was much more a kind of interpretive history of the idea of his subject rather than a strict biography, given the sketchy, well, make that “non-existent” details about any actual life having been lived and breathed by that idea.
Enter McGrath, who enters boldly where probably far too many have tried going before, though he does us the favor of cutting to the chase, as poets are wont to do, with his self-imposed 23-line allotment.
All the struggle to produce a Miles-like tome can be exhausting, after all, even as we can well imagine McGrath laboring over his own lines with all the ardor and fussiness of the theologian he mercifully didn’t become. In turn, he provides us with a compact set of memorable musings, questions and images that don’t dare to define God but instead, serve to inspire reflection on the peculiarly human need and quest and objectification of the very notion.
Let’s read it now, and talk about it a little more on the backside, no promises to restrict that part to 23 lines.
***
***
GOD
By Campbell McGrath
It makes sense notionally, a painless hypothesis
for our predicament, crayoned face to bridge
the gulf between grace and the lightning storm.
But why should God be imagined as human—heavens,
dogs are nobler creatures, to say nothing of whales
or oak trees—and why as a man? Why should God
be gendered any more than potassium or gravity?
If a coconut falls on your head, you don’t question its
sexuality. You curse, flail, you might even die,
poor donkey of the body tapping out, farewell.
Death doesn’t scare the body because all the body wants
is to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV
but the mind is drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless.
It wants God to be more than a notion, it wants God
to be real so it can escape the hairy carcass
and rise—eternity seems always to be an ascension—
the mind wants to climb that ladder while the body
prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter,
the mind wants to study the stars from the roof
and imagine an afterlife it understands
deep down, in its python coils, to be nothing
but a metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope
resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.
[Copyright 2025 “The New Yorker” magazine, Conde Nast Publications]
***
The first three lines set the tone—McGrath’s acknowledgement that sure, the notion of God makes rational sense. We are the great conjurers, after all, able to imagine gods and actually make things ourselves, such as animal traps and weapons and fires and babies. All of which naturally led to the question long ago: “Then who made the world—and us?”
And: “Why?”
God indeed became “a painless hypothesis/for our predicament” of unknowing, the “Who, What and Why?” of it all being the primordial questions our children dog us with during that phase of their lives when everything they behold strikes them as utter, delightful mystery in need of an immediate answer. (The answer often winding up, at the end of an endless back-and-forth as, “Go ask your mother.”)
McGrath gives us his own answer for the “notional” idea of God with a beautiful poetic image: that we employ it “to bridge/the gulf between grace and the lightning storm.” (The beauty and the beast, the triumph and the tragedy, the heart and the hand…)
Then he asks another, almost impertinent, child-like question (if only children didn’t grow up and get stopped from thinking this way): Why should God be a person at all? (“Given how just plain impossible people often are” being the obvious subtext.) He then points to dogs, whales and even oak trees as obviously “nobler” creatures, “nobler,” I think, meaning more self-possessed, more what they are, stout in character rather than the self-tortured, shape-shifting mess humans can often be.
Followed by: “Why should God/be gendered any more than potassium or gravity?” (Insert a collective YESSSSSSSS!!! from every woman ever born as an annotation to that line—and no small number from their agreeable men, as well.) McGrath here lays bare the profound silliness of any kind of gendered thinking about the Absolute, underscoring the hopeless tangle we find ourselves in every time we objectify and anthropomorphize the boundless and unobjectifiable.
McGrath was a complete unknown to me before I came across this poem, but one thing I appreciate about him is how easily he seems to glide into little fun patches in his poetry, putting me in mind (in this summer season) of toddlers gleefully slip-sliding across those long plastic patches attached to hoses in their yard while their parents sip cool drinks nearby.
This ease allows him to move between the exalted imagery of “grace and the lightning storm” and the profoundly vernacular image of the body’s baseline desire “to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV.” I don’t think he’s so much indicting humans there as he is musing on our ability to pretend we’re not in the trouble we are. And I’m betting he has spent some of his own time on that couch watching golf on one occasion or other, clicker lazily in hand.
But even on that couch: the “drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless,” our minds all too aware of “the hairy carcass” we inhabit, doomed to ash and dust. Unless, of course, we give a go to enlisting the aid of a Supreme Being beefy and merciful enough to hoist us off that couch and up to the heavens despite our torpid ways.
***
***
And just so we remember that this is a poem, McGrath offers us one rhyme (little joke there, my apologies) as he cites our penchant for making the heavens and eternity always a matter of “ascension.”
“The mind,” he reminds us, “wants to climb that ladder while the body/prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter.” (Those last three words, by the way, are among the little bits of language that make a poet a poet.)
Again: the mind as mortality-aware and searching—for answers, for nobility—the body lugubrious and dim. The mind “wants to study the stars from the roof,” the body’s mouth agape, the mind pondering mystery, conjuring other possible worlds. And more to the point: an afterlife of its own.
But for the mind, the gig is up in the next line. Active, restless and reflective, it comes to understand that our desired afterlife stands on “nothing but a/metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope/resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.”
Being an old hand at resolving any number of nights into a “zodiac of consolation” (another three-word gem!), I can’t help but think we’re doing O.K. if we can accept and appreciate the metaphor of the whole God thing, keep our humor and wits about us, and pluck from that metaphor enough hard-found wisdom and sustenance to better our chances that in this life, at least, we can maintain that all-important, salvific grace that comes in so handy through every lightning storm.
***
***
Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by the kind of creative photography you see on this post. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Southwest rock formations by John Fowler, Placitas, New Mexico https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowpeak/
Clouds by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Connor McGrath portrait by Stephen Malagodi, Halifax, Canada https://www.flickr.com/photos/malagodi/
New York City skyline by Thomas Hawk, San Francisco, California https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/
Why have so many civilizations throughout time found it necessary to engender God? I suppose Images create a realness, simplifying intangible concepts like the existence of some greater power. Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam shows God as a gray-bearded chap giving life to man; Eve didn’t make the cut. Hinduism’s goddess Kali has more limbs than an oak tree because she possesses multiple personae: violent, loving, motherly, fearless, sexy and several other Freudian adjectives. Greeks gave Aphrodite, their goddess of beauty, an alluring body and flawless face. The Romans liked that Aphrodite-look hence Venus (pretty darn good-looking, too). The Navajo goddess Changing Woman also represents some of the same qualities as Aphrodite and Venus. In Norse mythology, Thor, the God of everything bad, is a character you’d not want to meet in a dark alley. Religions universally portray love, fertility, war, peace, beauty and so on in a human form or an abstraction thereof.
I’m not familiar with Campbell McGrath at all. However, after reading “God” I’m gonna google more of his poetry. His humor works. “Damn that Coconut. I wonder if…” “Why not potassium or gravity?” “People chatter away like confetti.” “Are you stupid? The zodiac has constellations not consolations!” In a sense, on some level I feel he addresses the idea of God and the search for ‘it” as an absurdity. Is God real? Well, Kierkegaard seemed to dodge the question of God’s existence by calling it a “leap of faith.” Camus said to hell with God, an approach to the divine which didn’t sit well with most. Nietzsche went a bit further and said God was dead. Kant believed in God, but good luck finding “it” in a pew. McGrath’s “God” is a breath of fresh air in stale seriousness of the great philosophers.
Nice universalizing overview, Robert, each of your citations worthy of much exploration & contemplation on their own. I do think, though, that Kierkegaard’s sheer wit and creative thinking and Camus’s moral seriousness and goodness of heart hold them in good stead, quite apart from any “stale seriousness” of the great philosophers. I suppose that’s because they’re both more “literary philosophers,” which allows them to come at the Big Questions from a more creative and human bent (and fits more with my own bias of how I like to take my philosophy—with a scoop or two of cream & sugar…).
Many thanks, Andrew. I am involved in a theatrical production here in Providence, Rhode Island. ‘Dr. Korczak and the Children’ by Erwin Sylvanus in 1957. The play originally was intended to awaken the German populace to its putting all that happened into the past, while enjoying the benefits of the Marshall plan. Mr. Sylvanus was a Nazi sympathiser, had hoped to be the Nazi poet Laureate. Until a war injury changed him. He broke the taboo of the horrors. The play is done in a Brechtian/ Pirandello style, confronting the audience with two sides of the Korczak story. I am portraying Korczak. Mr. Sylvanus depicts Korczak as a man of God. I have 4 monologues wherein God is the unknown power, the source of strength and dignity required to survive mass annihilation. In his final act of living , Korczak led 167 Jewish orphans to the gas chambers of Treblinka, marching in silence and dignity as protest of the final solution. As an actor, speaking to a god with words not my own, is one of the most humbling experiences. Reading this Poets take on God has been helpful in seeing lightness through this nations dark miasma of unfeeling constancy. I try to not become mired in the current mass media dirge, and know that we as a people have been through worse times. That solidarity in doing what is right for all is the goal. I pray I can depict a great man of history, and tie it all into uplifting strength we need to survive, with our Gods, and ourselves intact. Thanks again for the lightness. Fred
One of the most interesting aspects of your blog are the comments made by your followers. Fred Dodge’s post about his role in “Dr. Korczak and the Children” is one of them. I was not familiar with it prior to your blog & now it’s on my radar. If it happens to be come way my way here in Houston, I’ll be seeing it.
Almost paradoxically, Fred, your reflections leave me most profoundly feeling the sheer weight—heavy, intractable—of history. I think I’ve become almost obsessed with what proved to be the false promise of the 20th century in its totality. Landing finally on the back end, seemingly home-free side of the Enlightenment and scientific rationalism, then taking a dark turn into the insanity of World War I, the Roaring ’20s as Hitler nursed and exploited the deep and festering German wounds which begat the later cancer of WWII. Getting through the Cold War to Gorbachev, glasnost, Mandela’s freedom and a peaceful transition there, only for history to later give us terrorism, religious nationalism, Putin, then Trump, CECOT and all the rest of the mad dash back to the beastly, the vengeful, the vile. It is head-spinning and heart-heavy, and then to contemplate an offshoot of the pied piper, leading children for righteous reasons to a dark end…yikes…. A haunting image I will now, along with Robert, explore further.
All of that in response to your gratitude for the sparks of lightness in the McGrath poem—how about that! The Wicked Witch’s phrase applies here, albeit in a different context: “Oh, what a world!”
What a world indeed—makes me really happy to hear of your theatrical venture, for you to be doing truly godly work, which is to say, redolent of strong moral purpose, creativity, empathy, generosity, all the best human virtues, the expression of which serves as a fine stand-in for God until he/she decides to actually show up and finally crash our party! (In a good way, of course…) Meanwhile, carry on, Brother, and I’ll be back to you when I’ve gotten ahold of & digested your play.