Becoming Your Own God

"The God Who Loves You" by Carl Dennis

In Genesis 2, God creates Adam and then tells him he’s free to eat from any tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for when you eat from it you will surely die.” I can’t remember how many different ways I’ve seen this story, this passage, parsed over the years. The one I was raised with focused on the obedience test of it all, that God had said no and we weren’t supposed to question it, and it’s better to be faithful than curious, because the faithful are rewarded. And that’s handy for a church, for any autocratic organization really, but especially one which focuses on the importance of obedience to hierarchy.

When I was a kid in church, the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” was always presented as a consequence of disobedience. Had Adam never eaten from it, then humans would never have sinned or fallen from God’s grace and paradise would never have been taken away from us, so the story went. Mind you, there’s nothing in the story to back that reading up. There’s no evidence that the tree would cease to exist or that future generations wouldn’t have to pass their own obedience tests. Now I’m imagining a scenario where this test becomes a rite of passage, where when children reach a certain age, they have to face off against the tree one-on-one, and if they resist the temptation to eat, they get to continue their lives in the garden and if they fail, they’re cast out into the world beyond the walls and none of the faithful ever see or hear of them again. Hmmm.

Aziraphale guarding the entrance (or exit?) to the Garden of Eden from the show Good Omens.

The part of the story that always fascinated me most was how the serpent presented the tree to Eve. God just told Adam the name of the tree and forbade it; the serpent told Eve what eating from it would do to her. God promised swift punishment—“for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die”—but the serpent promised growth and transformation, that “you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it always felt to me, even when I was a believer, that God was playing fast and loose with his words because “in the day that you eat from it” sure felt to me like the fruit had cobra venom in it or something. The elders in my church later explained that “day” could be used metaphorically when they needed to use it metaphorically. Other parts of the Bible could only be read literally, and they were the ones who knew the difference. Convenient, that.

In the story the serpent was indeed lying, but only in the “you will not die” part of the conversation. The rest of what the serpent said was true, that the effect of eating the fruit would make them like God in terms of knowing good and evil, no matter what definition you use for “know,” the “understand the difference” or “determine for yourself” or even the carnal knowledge version. What I think all these definitions have in common, though, is that they’re connected to the ability to imagine alternate futures or paths for ourselves and others. If we’re conscious of ourselves, we must be able to imagine what if.

I really just wanted to find a picture of the cover art, which is by Judith Berk King, but hey, it's also my book.

Maybe that’s what it is to be like God, knowing good and evil. Maybe it’s the ability to look back at what, in retrospect, seem to be cusp moments and wonder what would have happened if we’d made a different choice. Goodness knows writers and other artists have burned plenty of brain cells exploring those potential storylines, and some of them have even been pretty compelling. Others, not so much. I’m thinking of you, Mr. Destiny.

I’ve had the poem I’m about to write about open in a tab on my iPad for a couple of months at least, trying to think of a way to get into it. I’ve started this post a half-dozen times at least, written three or four paragraphs and then pushed them away. In one, I wrote about my meager attempts to write short stories set in a universe with superheroes, but it turned into thinking about how those are all war stories with the victims largely erased; another would have required me to re-watch significant parts of Mr. Destiny for the first time in at least 30 years and I tapped out of that pretty quickly; a third included a list of all the times I could have died earlier in my life and a wonder if maybe of all the Brian’s in all the universes out there, I’m the last one standing. I’m not going to list them all. Suffice to say that this is the one that’s held this long.

The poem is Carl Dennis’s “The God Who Loves You.” I don’t remember exactly how I came to see it—my gut currently says someone posted it on Bluesky because that’s about the only place I’m online these days—but I read it and then reread it and it’s been worming around in my head ever since then, enough that I think I need to locate a copy of Practical Gods, the volume it comes from.

The cover of Practical Gods by Carl Dennis from Penguin Books 2001

There’s an interesting detachment in the voice in this poem right from the opening lines:

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

In those first lines Dennis locates us in a universe not only with gods, but with a speaker who is able to comment on both the relationship between the subject, the you of the poem, and the god who at the very least has knowledge of the future, though it’s unclear…well, I don’t want to spoil anything.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

So many of those stories I mentioned earlier where the protagonist imagines the life they’d have had if only one thing had gone differently focus on the idea that the other life would have been better, and predictably, once the main character experiences the other life, they recognize how much they love the things they had. This part of the poem is playing in a similar sandbox, but mutes it some by making the choice something less obvious, where you went to college and who you connected with as opposed to, I don’t know, hitting a home run instead of striking out to end the big game. Jim Belushi, I fucking swear to god.

I do think it’s kind of cute, though, that Dennis throws in a Jesus reference there, just casually, because he's playing with the question of why an omnipotent god who knows not just everything that happens but that could happen would allow his creation to suffer, or if not suffer exactly, then not live their lives to the fullest possible extent of happiness.

You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold ffrom your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.

I like this turn here, where Dennis has moved the perspective from the you of the poem onto the god, where the you who possibly has never even thought of these possible other lives is now responsible for the feelings of the god who has all this other knowledge. And he does it while making the you of the poem a little more pathetic.

And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance?

I think I laughed audibly when I read this the first time, perhaps uttered an expletive or two at the audacity of the lines. The continued move here, to place the negative emotion on knowing how this knowledge pains this god rather than on the you who is apparently both missing out on a better life and condemning his family to a less enjoyable one, even if it’s only by 30 points on an unnamed scale, is pretty impressive. It’s hard for me to decide what’s more insulting, honestly, that this god cares enough about my life to be bothered that I didn’t get what it thinks was the best one for me or that I would give a shit about this god’s feelings in the first place. But Dennis isn’t done upping the stakes.

The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the God who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine, scene by scene

And this is where Dennis begins to return power to the you of the poem, because I think the reader has been imagining an omnipotent god this whole time, the Christian god specifically given the “thorn in the side” line earlier, but that God can’t be compelled to imagine anything. I suppose a truly omnipotent God would be able to both keep track of every person’s current and missed lives and be troubled by them while simultaneously keeping the rest of the universe moving and occasionally putting down rebellions and planning for whatever version of the end times eventually comes but at this point we’re talking about something beyond imagination. We can’t grasp it.

Did you notice I broke that last quote in the middle of a sentence?

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. 

Yes. The knowledge of good and evil is our ability to imagine all these possibilities, including a god who loves us or even one who isn’t paying attention to us at all. It’s imagining that we’re living our best possible life or our worst one or even not worrying about what other us’s are doing in other universes.

Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

I especially like that Dennis closes the poem with a command, not just because I happen to agree with the sentiment, but because the poem has spent the whole time on the page at this kind of remove. Go back and look at the way each of the sentences begin. There’s very little directness in them. A couple start with “it must be” and a couple start with “and” and the result is that the reader can be lulled into forgetting that the whole poem is directly addressing them.

But not those closing lines. Dennis is, oddly enough, kind of speaking with the voice of God here. Sit down and write your friend and talk about your life with them, and listen to them talk about theirs. This is the one you know you have. Don’t fuck it up.

Thanks as always for reading. These posts appear first at my personal website, also (confusingly?) called Another Poem to Love. Hope to see you there, or here, or on Bluesky, the only social media platform I’m on, and I’m on there sparingly. I think I’m going to write some old friends now.