To Be or To Have
Beginning with the “breath of life” breathed into dust (Gen 2:7), this poem traces the human drama as a continual choice between being and having. Its deepest horizon is Eden and its two trees: the “Tree of Life” evokes existence received as gift—life in communion with God, oneself, others, and creation—while the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” becomes the temptation to grasp, possess, control, and make reality one’s own. That primordial choice continues through history and within every human heart: the living soul finds itself “halfway king and halfway slave,” intoxicated by power and counting its coins even as the hour vanishes (approaching death). The sea and the recurring oarsman turn this existential struggle into a journey: humanity rows between two calls, “Become” and “Own,” between temple and throne, communion and possession. Yet the poem does not simply condemn the material world; it asks whether things are received as gifts or seized as possessions. Its final movement is therefore a homecoming, from having toward being, from mastery toward communion, from the anxious self that possesses to the creature who recognizes itself as “dust made song by the I AM” (Exodus 3). The voyage remains unfinished: on the darkening sea, the human person is still rowing.