STEVEN W. BAKER

STEVEN W. BAKER

OF STORYTELLERS, GODS, AND KINGS

(written in Santa Cruz, Bolivia)

"God save the king." --Samuel 10:24

"It is in the process of being worshiped that God communicates His presence to men."  --C.S. Lewis

"Power is founded upon opinion." --Napoleon Bonaparte

"All kings is mostly rapscallions." --Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage." --Thucydides

Chavez is dead. The old Pope abdicates to the new.

We sense collectively the vacuum of power atomized

Humanity so readily succumbs to the spell of tyranny

Often functioning more like ants than free men.

Through unevenly ingrained millennia-old habits

We have come to see in our leaders salvation or doom

We, the object of their necessity, stand effectively humbled

Ever ready to obediently serve and do what we are told.

We imagine someone grander than our mere selves

Remember, not long ago the powerful demanded worship

Forever deserving of our obedience, loyalty, and faith

Simply because of some convenient voodoo mythology.

Good men bowed under the Inca in huge, high cities

As freer men relentlessly patrolled the Incan perimeter

Citizen-slaves obeyed their “god” without questioning

Though the path of progress lay in another direction.

I guess we don't operate the same way any longer

But, still, the chains of command and obey run deep

Chavez didn't expect the press to question

The old Pope demanded adherence to his dictates.

We've advanced a little over the long centuries

Leaders are no longer, normally, objects of worship

Yet, in reality, we've thrown in our lot with the Incas

The Law must be obeyed, we must not be free.

Of course, some freedoms we don't need and can't have

If you had total freedom, I would have none

So both of us agree to meet the other half way

But that’s not the extent of it, something lies submerged.

We are told, even now, what we must do to live together

And, if that works, a leader might gain our respect

But, unless you happen to live in North Korea

You probably don't have to declare love and fealty.

And let us not forget the Master of command and obey--God!

Kings, Popes, Presidents all wrapped themselves in His cloth

Shedding light from above on all those deemed loyal

To this day, they bask in the power citizens conjure.

Few remember this all started with simple campfire stories

The tribe or clan gathered around the warm, glittering light

Surrounded by the darkness and all that was unknown

Howling in the distance could easily be the supernatural.

Fear, mortality, the terrible aloneness had to be defeated

Or surely men would perish in a cruel land ruled by death

The job of the storyteller was not exclusively telling truths

To entertain, to teach, one hero is worth a thousand cowards.

So stories became larger than life, reflecting the struggle

To overcome the frailty that could lead to the darkest ending

The pair were shamed in the Garden of Eden, but carried on

Odysseus never watched the sun rise with fear in his heart.

Somewhere long before names are known, some storyteller

Perhaps attempting to explain “Why?”, created something new

Whether springing from some inner truth he alone perceived

Or the result of wild imagining and the basic desire for more.

Campfire stories started to be about more than mere humans

Gods ignited people’s imaginations as if with fire itself

And nothing has ever been the same. We are not alone.

That simple idea brought power to some over others.

In the beginning, it seems that God was a playful entity

He might create the world on the back of a very large turtle

The founders of a mighty city might spring from rock or river

Mother Earth, the Pachamama, was honored, not feared.

God provided a successful hunt, life, the world we know

But that was merely His job as compatriot in arms

I think the Afterlife came later, and how to get there

Became the tool that could be used to change this life.

Storytellers eventually became chiefs, and chiefs kings

The kings loved the stories of God with a simple twist

How convenient to keep the people under control

Praying for salvation in some unseen world to come.

God became the bane of those who did not obey

Angry and vindictive, demanding love and worship

A mean King who could grant eternal life or endless pain

Our leaders became Gods, or their good right hands.

God went from being part of the Earth and its people

To standing apart as the grand Inquisitor and Punisher

Now, I don't really mean to equate man and God,

But, surely, we are not given life merely to be slaves.

Even our modern ideas of God derive from old kings

We must blindly love and obey, not some leader now

But He who plays games with our lives and destroys at a whim

What else can be the source of God's wrath and vengeance?

The Biblical portrait of God is from these long-dead kings

He stands with kings. He stands with the Pope.

He even stands with that ugly little North Korean twerp

He stands beside the shepherd tending his sheep.

But only if we worship and praise and love and obey

Can we attain that most elusive of goals--immortality.

We can't just be friends or co-workers and be happy

God demands what infantile kings always sought.

In the end, without God at their side, leaders lost power

Without the voyeurism, judgments, and punishments

Especially without the fear induced by loss or fire

Without guilt, even God loses power over His dominion.

We are still, many of us, caught in this terrible trap

The quest for more always begins with loss

The desire for life starts before the first breath

Eternal life is the whip and the chains that bind us.

Lost somewhere between the wanting and the having

Lies forgotten the source of the entire enigma

The discovery that more is always less for another

Our fatal flaw is that enough is never sufficient.

When we pretend that someone else is taking care of things

We can believe that all is just part of Someone's plan

Surrendering our will, our love, our freedom, our lives

To some awful despot who might live in a castle or heaven.

The old storyteller sitting in the circle around that campfire

Just tried to express his sense of awe and longing

His truth was stolen from him and corrupted by those

Who sought nothing but to grind the rest of us to dust.

STEVEN W. BAKER