Immortality
July 1976 (ll)
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Immortality
What is uniquely human?
Our thoughts .... ?
Our thoughts of death, e.g.?

Humans have souls, rocks do not
Souls only may transcend death.

Our thoughts can project souls
To other individuals or classes
Even to all life.

But the thoughts of organisms
Possessing an element of individuality
Beyond transmutation of the matter
Is a powerful magnet that draws
Hope toward itself.

Science explores manipulation
Of the process of transmutation
In hope of discovering controlling patterns
That arrest the transmutation.

Its ideal is the youthful athlete
In a carefully nurtured primed
Expression of fertility.

This encompasses the broader ideal of
The seed as the transmitter of immortality
And professes Hope for extension,
Perhaps to immortality,
Of the state of “health” or matter of the ideal.

Theology directs its attracted attention toward
An ethereal “other” that in an unknowable way
Escapes the process.
Its ideal is the wise old man
Serene in the knowledge of the unknowable.

The ideal encompasses hope of youth
And recognizes a limit to the extension of health,
Proffering faith as a means of penetration through
And beyond the sensible, knowable sphere.

As science encompasses even more within the sensible sphere,
Theology must expand its construct of the “Ethereal Other”
Or be entrapped within an ignorant self-deceiving phantasm.

Another alternative for theology is to examine
And perhaps redefine
The hope of immortality.

It is a dangerous quest for it erodes the very foundation
Of that which all humans experience as uniquely human.
It requires redefinition of what it is to be human.

“All men are created equal”
The definition of “equal” defines
That which is uniquely human
For one organization, US.