These came to me a long time ago. Long enough ago so that my memory of their discovery is quite hazy.
I was at a church. The story of Charles Doss was in a pamphlet at the church. This is as much as I remember of it.
Charles Doss was a man on death row. He would wake from a dream and start writing. And these poems are what he wrote. He described it as if God was writing through his hand. He takes no credit for these. If I remember right, he has volumes of these writings. I suppose he was on death row for a long time. Eventually his sentence was commuted. I don’t know if he was set free or lived out his life in a jail cell. When his sentence was commuted, the dreams stopped.
To this day I read these with my heart. I find it impossible to glance over these and just read the text. It is the greatest starting point for meditation I’ve ever known.
In this far corner of the universe I exist serenely
With quietness in my heart
Humility in my soul
I know the grandeur that awaits
I know the time is pending
When I shall slough off this mortal illusion
When I shall leap from plane to plane
When I shall live within the breast of all things
When I shall fill up creation
And wend my way home at last
To the ultimate God.
We shall be saved at the end by qualities of hope and love.
And laughter and courage and exotic dreams.
These we shall store in our bosom
A jot at a time.
A quality hence and hither
And this illusion of grief
And all these pangs of anguish
Will be triumphless.
And we shall be saved at the end
By qualities of hope and love.
The existence of joy does not depend on laughter.
It never concerns itself with happiness as most of us understand it.
Never believe that joy is a condition of mirth that depends upon human interpretation.
Joy is the flood of sunlight that rushes upon our night,
and expels with great power the darkness of a soul.
The greatest voyages of my life are not by map or chart.
But are the splendid expeditions of mind and soul and heart.
I hardly ever stir at all contained within an acre,
And yet I make fantastic treks vouchsafed by my maker.
One never is immobilized or ever quite confined,
Who scales the Matterhorns of soul and sails the sea of mind.
All in this earth worth having is to be found in oneself.
As for the rest: it is chaff and baubles.
Quantities of air that we grab at frenziedly and fetch up with nothing.
Nothing under the sun is quite so hard to grasp,
as that we ourselves are the treasures
that we so desperately seek.
Perhaps there is no reason for us to live.
Or, if any reason exists it is buried so deeply
in the colossal bosom of God,that we shall never uncover it.
Yet I ask you to live as if the reason were known.
And the reason is this:
We must live in order to love
and in order to perpetuate life.
This is our curse and our blessing
and our splendid opportunity.
That veering through the darkness
without map or compass or guide,we move proudly, gracefully.
As if we knew our destination as if the way were flooded with light.