GOD IS NOT MORAL

I.

In the beginning, there was balance.

Before good was seated on the right

and evil exiled to the left,

Before we thought of colored them white and black

existence was already in motion.

Olódùmarè did not pause creation

to reflect human ethics.

II.

Yorùbá understanding is unambiguous

ti’bi-ti’re la dá ilé ayé, no force walks alone.

Ire and its other, Ibi, share the same corridor.

What heals in one season, kills in another.

Àṣẹ does not ask for moral permission before it moves.

Àṣẹ flows where it must

through the healer’s hand,

through the storm that removes the roof,

through the child’s first cry, up to his final breath.

Power moves.

III.

Rain falls on prepared soil

and on the roof that is already leaking.

The rain falls on the diligent farmer

and on the thief who never planted.

The sea swallows both the thief and the farmer.

The earth receives the thief and the farmer alike.

If the source of all things were moral in our image,

the earth would hesitate.

But the earth has no morality.

IV.

We named things good, when they preserved us.

We called things evil, when they unsettled our comfort.

But naming is a human technology

impotent in the forest,

before its fungi, its animal world,

and its spirit dwellers.

The ocean did not ratify this technology.

Why then must the source of all becoming

submit to our inadequate vocabulary?

V.

If God were moral in the human scale,

the world would keep tidy accounts.

But existence spills, overflows, contradicts itself.

Morality is a tool of fragile beings

trying to live together without devouring one another.

It is necessary, as it is beautiful.

But it is not the operating system of the cosmos.

Olódùmarè is more mysterious than our technologies,

wider than our judgments,

more patient than our need for clean stories.

VI.

In Yorùbá knowing,

light leans into shadow.

Medicine and poison share a root.

The path forward is braided

with the possibility of loss.

Existence survives

not through purity

but through tension.

A purely moral universe

would have shattered long ago

Unable to bear the weight of its own ambiguity.

VII.

At the crossroads still stands Èṣù,

owner of the swirling path.

Èṣù does not belong to your tidy columns

of virtue and sin.

Èṣù confuses to reveal

and disrupts to clarify.

Èṣù carries both the message and the mischief

in the same calabash.

The divine that created Èṣù

is not naïve about ambiguity.

At the center of becoming

stands not a cosmic moral police

but a field of moving force

that refuses to fit inside our narrow mouths.

VIII.

So do not rush

to clean the face of the divine

with human categories.

What we call good and evil

may be twin currents

inside a river older than our judgment.

And God —

if we must speak carefully —

is not the judge standing above the river.

God is the moving river

and everything above and below it.