Writing god

There are, as we know, many ways to express our private thoughts about the divine.

Sometimes, however, they can be too subversive for authorities to bear. Novelist and noted advocate of the freedom of artistic expression, Salman Rushdie, brought to my attention the following way in which Saudi poet and journalist Hamza Kashgari paid tribute to the Prophet Mohammed; he composed three tweets:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

Kashgari was promptly jailed by the Saudi monarchy on charges of apostasy and is awaiting "trial."

The contemporary American poet Carl Phillips' way of remembering God is altogether casual and remarkably intimate.

In a prose poem, "Neon," he writes:

Comes a day when the god, what at least you've called a god, takes you not from behind, the usual, but pins you instead, his ass on your chest, his cock in your face, his mouth twisting open, saying lick my balls, and because you want to live, in spite of everything, you do what he says, heaven and earth, some rain, a few stars appearing, harder, the way he tells you to, then not so hard, a tenderness like no tenderness you've ever shown. 

A stark difference in approach to the sacred, but if Kashgari's mere humanizing (or, as they say, "historicizing") of the Prophet begets imprisonment, one shudders to think what he would have been sentenced to had he echoed Phillips'-like sentiments

I like Phillips' evocation better, as god here is an embodied individual, i.e. invested with a body and a personality. He is gay and male, of course (so is Phillips), but he is also fierce.

Kashgari's Prophet is an abstraction and he sounds somewhat deferentially-inclined toward the entity.