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A Message for Earthlings and a Psalm of Distress
And a Cry for Help and Prayer to a Mute God
By Jane Tawel
January 15, 2026
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Dear Earthlings:
Why do you need me to be a brand?
(Isn’t branding used for cattle.)
If I don’t know who I really am,
Do you imagine you can tell me?
I suppose, like all dumb animals,
you want to brand me to make me feel
special in my dire commonality;
wanting me to believe
that I belong to a group, separate from others.
Apartness in a herd –
the New World’s ultimate paradoxical joke.
And so, we rage and rave against our lonely planet,
Forgetting we were not created to be special
but to be One.
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I have spent a lifetime (or two or three)
tripping over your purity laws,
sometimes landing in a soft bed of nails
and sometimes landing in the muck and mire
of a miasma of my own super-ego.
My finger aches from pointing;
My mouth grows canker sores
from all the preaching of my personal piety,
while my heart grows faint with praise in prayers
that seem to reach no further
than the next un-needed package arriving on my stupe —
(how Stupe-id are my longings!)
My thoughts and appeals to the Silence
have no more strength to save the World
than the trembling tips of my eyelashes would have
to lift and hold a crying infant.
And my despair can not be quelled
By the swells that rise.
The Ocean has not been calm for many moons.
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I take my pencil and scrap of paper,
And write this sincere letter to You, O, God:
Dear God (or Whatever-Whoever-Whyever- I AM):
“Why must You allow the humans
that You Created with such Love,
to endure the Karma of our own choices?
Will You not save us from ourselves?
Will You not come out from Your hiding place
And rescue us — if not because we deserve it —
but because You do?
This beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Planet
This tiny cosmic miracle of atoms run amok
This abiogenesis of animated Life
This — Your very Origin —
from our simplest aboriginality to our highest ascendance —
This and All This —
Why must something lesser be destroyed for something Greater?
Why must something die, for something else to Live?
Why must a leaf turn black and fall to the ground
To give life to the seedling?
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Are You really mute, or have we muted You?
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You, Grandfather, created us in Wonder, to wander
and to see the stars but not to plant our flags on them.
You, Grandmother, have created us with longing in our hearts
to seek Love, but not to contain it;
for Your Love is boundless
and it is the only Eternity we can know.
You, Oh Father, have created us
with the urge to conquer space,
But to also know that
our deepest fear is that we will one day
Be but dust to dust returned,
buried in the space we never conquered.
You, Oh Mother, have created us
to fly or fall from the Nest,
But to forever yearn to return to
the safety of Your Womb.
Why have You created me
with deep longing, if not to satisfy
the hungering of my heart
to return to Your Breast and be forever fed?
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I am left alone, yet maybe not alone, with only this —
That I can not see
but only walk blindly forward;
And that I can not know, but only trust
that in You, O Creator and Upholder of the Universe —
there is:
Hope — in Something beyond us
that craves our Love.
Grace — that there exists
a Reason beyond the greatest achievements
of the human mind.
Purpose — that all our suffering
is the crucifixion we need
to find our resurrection.
And above all that every act
of unconditional Love
is Your active presence in the World.
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I wish Oh, God, You hadn’t chosen
to live and act through us.
We — I — seem to fail at every turning
of the world upon its axis.
But, “okey-dokey, Smokey” —
I’ll choose to try again today
To change the world,
And save the planet,
And love the truly unlovable
And well….
I have to assume You will give me
a little bit of help.
I hope I can look forward
to meeting You, Someday.
Until then, You, O God,
will just have to accept
my shallow, fearful, selfish, foolish
Prayer — which is all I can summon up
to say how much I love this world
and how much I think I love, You.
Maybe?
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A Paraphrase of The Lord’s Prayer for Today:
Our ProGenitor,
Who lives in Entirety,
no one owns You or Your Name.
Please re-create us on this Earth,
as You continue to do in the Cosmos.
Help our unbelief that You know best,
and help us believe
that there is enough stuff
and enough food
and enough Love for all of us.
Create in everyone
the ability to let go
and may the spirit of Mercy have
more strength than any of our desires
for revenge or ownership.
Help us stop our mutual temptation to
destroy ourselves.
Deliver us from our own Egos
and the monkey-minds of our greedy, anxious thoughts.
For someday, we will wake up
to realize this has been Your World all along
And that You have always been in charge of it;
But only through Your Love
Are You able to act —
and Your Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
May it be so in my life today.
Amen.
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© Jane Tawel, 2026
Jane Tawel 