PROFESSOR TO READ FROM BOOK ON SEARCHING FOR GOD

The problem with modern theology is the lack of respect for its subject, says poet Ted Hirschfield.

"No one is afraid of God anymore."

He laments that God currently is portrayed as a kind friend who bails people out of trouble instead of the awesome force the ancients called the mysterium tremendum.

Hirshfield himself, a minister's son who rejects organized religion, is terrified by the idea of God, "of being overwhelmed by a terrible power that cannot be defined."

Hirschfield will read from his new book-in-progress, "Orbiting God," at 4 p.m. today in Crisp Hall. He has taught in the English department at Southeast Missouri State University since 1965.

Hirschfield's father, Herbert, who also lives in Cape Girardeau, was a well-known Baptist minister in Germany when the Nazis came to power. "German Requiem," a volume of poetry in which Hirschfield explores his own youthful experiences in the situation, will be published next month.

"Requeim," to be published by Time-Being Books of St. Louis, was written in six weeks "It came one a day," Hirschfield says in amazement.

"...It was an intensely religious experience. The works had already composed themselves."

The poems spring from his remembrances of some horrific events crowds stoning his father's church, for instance and were a bridge to "Orbiting God," he says.

When Hirschfield was a 13-year-old boy, newly arrived in America, he and his father used to spend all day Saturday cleaning a church in a Chicago suburb. His father, he recalls, could make people cry simply by holding a flower in his hand and preaching about its significance. But he could not find a church of his own in America because he couldn't speak English.

The accompanying poem, "Judson Baptist Church," describes Hirschfield's feelings about the experience now.

Like many people born into ministers' families, Hirshfield says, he was always "very much a rebel, a scoffer and a doubter."

"I had to wait until middle age to re-examine it."

Though "Orbiting God" is very much an affirmation of God's existence, he still cannot find God in churches and potluck suppers.

"When you're born into a minister's family you see what goes on behind the altar," Hirschfield says.

Some of the poems in "Orbiting God" are satirical, some accusatory and some condemnatory, he says, while describing the book as "deeply religious, but not in the conventional sense.

"...In every poem I've written in `Orbiting God,'" he says, "I'm looking for God."

Yet to try to describe or define God is impossible, Hirschfield says. "That is the essence of the holy."

He calls the book a meditation: "If we all practiced more of it, we wouldn't have to argue about the existence of God.

"...The more willing I am to open myself to the presence, the stronger I become and the less I'm able to say about it," Hirschfield says.

"You find God in silence and darkness."

Hirschfield's "Human Weather" appeared in 1991. Another volume titled "Life Currents" is in the editing stage, and "Orbiting God" will be published in 1995.