Rendezvous with God by Amado Hernandez I have looked everywhere for God, from the time I was a child, I’ve pursued a thousand paths through the clearings of the years, I’ve consumed a ton of delicious herbs. At the end of the trail I would see a flash, then it was gone—just a distant light, a firefly in the April night. Frustrated, yet victorious, victorious, yet dismayed, embraced by virtue and clasped by honor, I soon discovered that honor and virtue are coquettes. I tasted the world’s rejection, was stripped of                         everything, learned how to smile at bitter loss, to guard the sweetest moment lest it be poisoned, to learn that life’s wounds must be worn as medals or                             blossoms. (Diamonds are most costly when they have been                 abraded on every facet.) In my despair— living-dying in spirit and heart, the flame of conviction still persisted, searching, tracking, inquiring in whatever time or place, the God of peoples the God of nations the God of all creation. ·    ·    ·    · I walked the fields, the soil of affliction of the unnamed oppressed; the muddy paths are hard to follow, the feet fear splinter and mire on the way to the grave-mounds of poverty flung among the dry weeds. I asked and was shocked at the harsh answer, savage and fiery. For in my heart, flickers the fear that they have long since changed their horizons, that the anguish of endurance has killed all hope; hunger, sickness, debt inherited forever; whenever land, dearly loved, is tilled, like the monster’s jaw, it bites the benefactor. Have they been renounced by God? Then they will put their fates in the hands of another                             god— justice is its name justice   rice   clothing   house   land reason   rights   liberty   liberation— the claim of a life staked out. ·    ·    ·    · Where? What place does God inhabit? What heaven and what continent? What wilderness, rocky shore or mountain? What field, sky or summit? In what temple and altar, tabernacle or monument? What lands have I not roamed? What others have I not flown over in the flight of dreams? What fancies, what fantasies, what illusions? Where’s God? Why doesn’t he answer? Has he forgotten man? Has he fallen asleep in Aphrodite’s lap? Has he no defense against Circe’s enchantment? Dante, Virgil, guide me to Utopia to Nirvana to Shangri-la to Olympus or the empyrean! ·    ·    ·    · . . . because I am of Adam, child of sin; belief and doubt are twins at birth; the days dropped off like withered leaves, men                         withered too; winter with its bluster blights the spring, the procession of seasons cannot be stopped. In my mind the memory of what has gone, returns and lives. Now is my twilight filled with sorrow, hands wrinkled, hair ash-gray, blurred eyesight, heart that refuses to throb . . . now, suffused with longing, kneeling at the feet of a cross, I cry God, God, God! Silence alone answers louder than a volcano’s thunder. One sorrowful night, all things, the very stars, weep, tears shine like meteors, the spirit is drained of faith and hope, life is a pale flash struggling through by agony, choking in the scornful dark. . . . I heard a voice speaking to my own spirit and mind: . . . “You searched for Me hunted in every corner of the world except in your heart and soul. . . . I am your conscience.” A smile stirred on my lips, I felt like a silly butterfly who had flitted about looking for loveliness and delicious scents, and only when its wings were clipped recalled that its wings are the twin petals of a flower. O God I am you and you are me that which I pursued all the days of my life in the far corners of the earth lived all the while in the substance of my own heart!