I think I'll stick with Christianity

First thing this morning it was cold
so I went back inside
and now it's around ten 
and I'm out again.  It's warming up.
I'm barefoot, and there's really
nothing I have to do right now.

Winter is coming,
but so is another summer.

A bird lands on a branch,
weighing it down,
moves the branch and its leaves 
down and back up, down and back up. 
The dark bird with white eyes
looks forward, looks this way, looks that way,
leaps, spreads his wings, glides off 
into flight, into sunlight.  
Athletic.  Majestic.  
This happens every day.

He must have a reason to arrive
and he must have a reason to depart.  
It's bird business I know nothing about.
I am a witness to the bird's activity,
his beautiful, animal activity, 
but I will never be a judge.

I have sympathy for the heathens who 
worshiped the sun.  They never knew Jesus.
They never felt the salvation that springs from
joining his flock, of being found
by the Good Shepherd,
cast upon his broad, strong shoulders,
finding pasture, finding rest.

And yet I imagine the ancient illiterate ones,
the ones without Bibles, felt spiritual strength
flowing into them, flowing from the sun,
and I imagine they absorbed a feeling of transcendence,
however erroneous and however doctrinally impure,
whenever they opened themselves to the beams
that streamed day by glorious day 
from the orb floating in the sky, 
the orb, that, like the great I AM,
cannot be looked upon directly.

They worshiped the sun, 
the same sun that now upon us shines.
Can you believe that?

It wasn't a bad idea.
The sun is always there, 
though hidden at times by the earth 
and hidden at times by the clouds,
but it's always there,
whether you give it cursings 
or whether you give it praise.
It feels better to give it praise.

But the heathens got carried away.
If they had settled with the soft-spoken decency
and the cyclical, sacred nature of life 
that seems to come from the sun,
if they had quietly felt the serenity
that emanates from a sunlit afternoon,
maybe things would have worked out,
maybe they would have been happier.

Instead they whipped each other until
they finally finished the Pyramids
and they started stabbing people in the heart
and the blood flowed down grooves 
carved into an altar, collected in clay pots
and the pagans took turns drinking it, 
chanting some mumbo-jumbo
about a blood-thirsty sun
that would cause the rain to fall once again
all because they killed another guy
and drank his blood. 

I think I'll stick with Christianity.