City of God Read Online Free PDF Page A

means,
    This may not be the world that’s on your string
    But this is God’s world, there is goodness there is sin
    We have to learn the difference again and again
    Your shadow is the Good Lord’s light not passing through you,
    You are dense, you’re opaque
    that ought to tell you something, for God’s sake!
    At twelve o’clock when my time comes to an end?
    I know that I will climb the stairway to heaven!
    I will hear them say, Don’t bother knocking the gate is open!
    I will feel His warm celestial light shine down upon me
    And when I turn around my shadow will be gone!
    Sent back down to bring another soul along!
    O happy day, when the bell begins to toll for all the world’s poor souls—
    I can tell you they won’t be feeling blue
    When they find out it’s His glory they’ve been strolling to!
    (
enthusiastic applause
)
    The singer is saying, “Of all the troubles I’ve seen
    The last and worst is the trouble of never again having someone to tell my troubles to.”
    In fact he’s saying, “I’d be trouble-free
    If I had someone to listen other than me.”
    This is a mourning song of love lost
    Remembering a time of past happiness
    When he was one half of a fine-looking high-stepping couple enjoying a walk on the day of rest
    Where now he has only his own pale shadow for company.
    And it’s not as if this isn’t some festive scene everything in color, alive and humming with other fine-looking high-stepping couples on their Sabbath walk under the flags in the warmth of the morning sun
    So that it might be an Easter parade of the city’s population—
    Not at all. The rest of this city is turned out in its best
    Whereas for him, singing a dirge of his soul’s lost romance
    Alone, independent, he’s atonal, he is dissonance.
    And when he reaches the destination of all shadowed beings,
    the most silent and mysterious of buildings,
    Before he can knock the door swings open
    And he steps into the darkness of the shadow cast by God.
    And the singer has to acknowledge as he steps through the door,
    â€œIn His shadow I am nothing, don’t even have my shadow anymore.”
    (
a few hands clapping
)
    Shadow me,
shadow you,
what’s a shadow
gonna do. . .
    Up at dawn,
hides at noon,
evening comes
does the moon
    Go to ground,
make no sound,
mourners done,
shadow’s gone.
    â€”What if there’s no heaven, just a door?
    â€”I don’t even have my shadow anymore. . .
    â€”We don’t know the glory we are strolling toward. . .
    â€”Gone, shadow’s gone.
    Me and My shadow,
    Strolling down the avenue.
    Me and my shadow
    Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .
    (
wild acclaim
)

    â€”That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated. . . is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.
    Einstein was one physicist who lived quite easily with the concept of a Creator. He had a habit of calling God the Old One. That was his name for God, the Old One. He was not a stylish writer, Albert, but he chose words for their precision. One way or another God is very old. . . because archaeologists in the fifties discovered a sacred ossuary cave of the Neanderthals on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Pomptine Fields in western Italy. They found the skull of a male buried within a circle of stones. The cranium had been severed from the jaw and brow and used for a drinking bowl. That’s how old God is. So Einstein is right about that. And
One
. . . because God is by definition not only unduplicable and all-encompassing but also without gender. So the phrase is really very exact: the Old One. Not much in the way of a revelation, of course. Albert thought of his work in physics as tracking God, as if God lived in gravity, or shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force,