Meditating on the limits of human language

A Woman's Meditation
by Ruth F. Brin

When men were children, they thought of God as a father;
When men were slaves, they thought of God as a master;
When men were subjects, they thought of God as a king.
But I am a woman, not a slave, not a subject,
not a child who longs for God as father or mother.

I might imagine God as teacher or friend, but those images,
like king, master, father or mother, are too small for me now.

God is the force of motion and light in the universe;
God is the strength of life on our planet;
God is the power moving us to do good;
God is the source of love springing up in us.
God is far beyond what we can comprehend.

That's from the 1986 book Harvest: Collected Poems and Prayers by Ruth F. Brin (1921-2009).  It's the second poem in the book (p. 4), following "God of Rain and Wind" (p. 3), in which are these lines:

I pray to You for myself, for well I know
That when a person dies a world is destroyed.

In the third (p. 5) of the five poems Amazon allowed me read of this book, I found these lines to ponder:

Help us through study and thought and meditation
To find the direction we are to travel,
With the same sure sense You have given the flying birds.

I first read the original poem (at the top) today, a week after Wilda Gafney shared it in her blog post Majesty, Mercy, and Mystery.  I found it again here, shared with the permission of the estate of Ruth F. Brin, z"l.  What does that z"l mean?  Why is it there?  A search gave me an answer:

It's the abbreviation of the common honorific "of blessed memory."  The Hebrew transliteration is "zikhrono livrakha" (m.) / "zikhronah livrakha" (f.).  In Hebrew that would be (f.) זיכרונה לברכה‬ \ (m.) זיכרונו לברכה.  It is often abbreviated in English as either OBM or z"l.  The Hebrew abbreviation is ז״ל‬.

Ah, yes, I've heard my Jewish friends say "of blessed memory" when mentioning someone who had died.  Back to Ruth Brin's poetry.  I am intrigued and have been meditating on these words, these concepts, these thoughts of a poet.  From the back of the book:

"Today it is difficult to find a Reform, Conservative, or Reconstructionist prayer book or anthology that does not include her writings."

Looking through the copy of the Jewish prayer book I got at the JCC book fair in 2015, I don't know how I'd ever determine which prayers had been written by any specific person.  The focus is on God, not which person composed each prayer.

To continue meditating, go read Wil Gafney's Majesty, Mercy, and Mystery.  By the way, I found someone online selling a used copy of Harvest (which seems to be out of print) and ordered it.