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Jainism, a near eastern religion that you can read more about in my Family Ministries Sunday program description, has a fascinating belief among their practitioners and especially their monastic community, and that is their religious understanding of the soul. Jains belief that when they are born their souls are clean and while like a dress shirt newly starched and hung on the line. Then every act of violence throughout one’s life, those intentional and unintentional, (his being the main difference between Jainism and other religions – the connection between sin and intention) act as dirt blown by the wind onto our white souls, muddying them up. Slowly destroying their cleanliness, and thus their chances of attaining Nirvana (escape from the cycle of death and rebirth, the closest thing that eastern religions have comparable to the Christian concept of heaven).

The following poem examines that idea projected through the eyes of a child. 

If children understood the world.

Why?
Why must I color?
The paper White
My favorite Color
Of untrod mountaintops
And souls wiped clean. 

Dipped in bleach
And hung out 
To dry. 

Did you know that 
paper comes from trees?
Did you know that 
trees breathe? 

That they bleed,
that they suffer,
that they die?

So that we
can live inside
their corpses
piled high.
Burn them
to stay warm
and dry. 
To color
by the fireside. 


[    What’s for dinner?
Chicken. 
Why?   ]