Losing Religion and Finding God in The Day Zimmer Lost Religion :: Day Zimmer Lost Religion Essays

Losing worship and Finding matinee idol in The Day Zimmer Lost piety           Paul Zimmers poem The Day Zimmer Lost Religion tells of the narrators comply and fear of rescuer as a boy. He is today a man and dares to challenge Christ. The expected punishment does not occur, and Zimmer loses his religious belief in religion as he without delay perceives it.     The first stanza is to the highest degree childhood fear of God. The narrator says, The first Sunday I mixed-up Mass on purpose / I waited all day for Christ to climb great deal (1-2). Zimmer felt he deserved to be punished, to have Christ Club me on my irreverent teeth, to wade into / My puritanical gut and drop me like a / Red hot censer (4-6). Zimmer clearly expects something terrible to happen, emphasized by the presence of a watching, anticipating Devil.     Stanza two is about rebellion. It was a long c archaic stylus from the old days (8). Zi mmer would never have dared to miss Mass in his younger years. Zimmer fingers he has come a long way from his boyhood days, A long way from the dirty wind that blew / The soot like venial sins across the schoolyard (11-12). Is the dirty wind the forces in life that we cannot support? Is the soot the flaws we begin to see in our elders as we grow aged(a)? Has Zimmer observed how weak man can be and questioned why God allows our transgressions? In the schoolyard, God reigned as a threatening, / One-eyed triplicity high in the fleecy sky (13-14). Does Zimmer feel God had reigned high in the sky and observed each sin we do? He equates the schoolyard with the world. Zimmer knows the minor sins of the schoolyard. God knows the sins of all.     The last stanza is about matured faith. Zimmer repeats that he waited all day for Christ to climb down . . . and pound me / Till me irreligious tongue hung out (16-19). Zimmer seems to feel that Christ is obligated to punish and that in fact He thus far enjoys it. Zimmer never mentions a God of love is this why he feels there must be more to religion than what he knows now? In the last two lines, Zimmer tells us, But of course He never came, knowing that / I was grown up and ready for Him now (20-21).