“Hey, God! What went wrong and when are you going to fix it?” is the title of a book I wrote while in the process of working my way out of what I came to call the “tyranny of religion.” When I write about the love of God and our loved ones that inspires hope in believers there is also the need to work our way through those things in which it appears the love of God is conspicuous by its absence. But a closer examination of the problem in seeking answers led me into areas not open to religion, but to our very humanity and the issues we deal with as mere mortals. For this reason, I am going to share with readers an excerpt from the book focusing on this very human part of the problem:

Because I'm a poet, musician and romantic, I lose myself in the great Broadway and film musicals. I have sung to women and had some sing to me. It hasn't been a fantasy, it has actually happened. I've loved several women and they have said they loved me. But the music ended quickly in most cases. Maybe because I needed Audrey or Maria but never found her. The idealization of the poet's love is holding that woman, looking into her eyes, singing to her and having that look and that song returned in kind. Failing this, the best I could do was to offer my faithful love, the kind of love that keeps its nose to the grindstone, caring for wife and family and, in short, working out your love in the traditional ways.

    Tragically, the poet may slumber, but he never dies. He lies there, growing restless and, at last aroused, becomes something the great majority of women do not know how to accept. But the majority of women don't know how to have a man look into their eyes while he sings to them.

    The majority of men and women know nothing of writing love letters. The poet is compelled to write them. The majority of men and women know nothing of opening their very heart and soul. Again, this is a compulsion of the poet. A poet knows little of secret compartments of the heart and mind, he tells all, even when that all is hard and ugly. He does not know how to practice the hypocrisy of presenting a carefully barbered and perfumed, well-tailored facade in the place of the truth.

    But it doesn't take a poet to dream or want those dreams to come true. All those possessed of a conscience, a soul want to love and be loved. We want an ending where the lovers live happily ever after. And we want that happy ending for ourselves.

    What does it take to play a part convincingly? How did Shirley Jones and Julie Andrews learn to sing to a man and look so convincingly in love with Gordon MacRea and Christopher Plummer? Shirley and Julie knew how to love. They were in love as they played their parts. For the men and women who give us our enduring fantasies of such love and romance, the best know how to love and, while the play goes on they live that love.

    But you must be practical! Yes, there is no getting around that one. Love and romance don't go well with an empty stomach and no roof over your head. However, even provided the necessities, few women ever find their Knight and few men their Audrey Hepburn, Shirley Jones or Julie Andrews.

    Now, in the September of my life, I have come to some conclusions as to why this seldom is the case, why the right man and woman have such difficulty meeting each other; if I have to settle for Audrey in my reverie if we are only able to have each other in our dreams that will have to do; at that, it is more than most ever have.

    Why? Because I know my Audrey, wherever she is, is faithful to our love in spite of the fact that we never found each other in this life. Granted that sounds a poor substitute for the reality. But I maintain it is more than most ever have. Why? Because Audrey and I know real love and romance; we know there is no substitute for this regardless the realities.

    Somewhere out there is Audrey; a woman who knows the love I have just as I know the love she has, a love that regardless of never finding its fulfillment in each other keeps the dream alive, keeps us alive. It is the kind of love that inspires to the best art, music, literature of humanity, the kind of love that moves hearts and minds in these things, that has true immortality, deathless because it is the very heart of God himself!

    There is a faith in love to be considered. Those who have such a faith are saved by it. They are the true believers that know, in their hearts, that no matter what, love conquers all! I live, and move and have my being in love. I live in the music, the poetry, literature and art of love. I always have, though the poet gave place at times in order to meet the necessities of practicalities and the too oft times ugly realities of life.

    I nourished the poet at times with a wilderness trout stream where the joyous, chuckling, sparkling water cascading over rocks, spraying and flashing into countless diamonds shooting off refracted, iridescent rays of dappled sunshine, plunging through short rapids became gleaming waterfalls descending into crystal clear pools. I would take him to the oceans where the scent and sound of the sea and the crashing of the waves against gleaming sands or rocky shore left marvels in their retreat. And watch a bloodburst sunset in wonder at that magnificent vista of water across which lay the islands of imagination, of the Bali Hai’s of the mind and soul. Then we would go to the desert, so clean without the corruption of fences, asphalt, concrete and man-made structures and marvel at the sere vastness with nights so clear we could count every grain of sand in the moonlight.

    When I made music with clarinet, saxophone, guitar or my voice, the inspiration in the music was Audrey. Her name at the time might have been Susan or Ann, but it was Audrey that remained; Susan and Ann never did.

    In the yard of my little house in the country, I sit outside of a summer evening and watch the sunset gradually give place to a platinum-colored twilight. The trees and the hills in the distance become dark silhouettes and stars begin to appear in the canopy of heaven and I listen to my private, heavenly choir of the rustling of the leaves and branches by a warm, scented breeze and the last music of the birds now beginning to be replaced by the peeping of tiny frogs and the chirrup of crickets.

    Evening deepens into the quiet, smooth velvet of darkness and I gaze at the stars, Ursa Major and the immense Milky Way and Audrey is with me though I sit alone. And at that, I'm not nearly as alone as countless who don't even see the stars or even consider sharing them with another.

    I don't blame Susan or Ann for not being able to abide the poet; they felt ignored by him. His thoughts were on Audrey and they simply couldn't be her; it wasn't their nature. At first, they thought they were Audrey. There were the times when they thought they shared the enchantment of God's marvelous creation, that they even thanked the poet for pointing such things out to them.

    The poet would place a rose on their nightstand. He would try to tell them the thoughts of his heart. He believed the closeness of their warmth and softness as women a sacred thing. But invariably, Susan and Ann would prove they didn't really value the things of the poet. They couldn't be Audrey. The poet, because he couldn't betray, would simply retreat and go to sleep. Eventually, Susan and Ann would find someone else, someone more practical with common sense and not given to dreams.