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Pilgrim’s Problem C. S. Lewis By now I
should be entering on the supreme stage Of the whole walk, reserved
for the late afternoon. The heat was to be over now; the anxious
mountains, The airless valleys and the sun-baked rocks, behind me.
Now, or soon now, if all is well, come the majestic Rivers of
foamless charity that glide beneath Forests of contemplation. In the
grassy clearings Humility with liquid eyes and damp, cool nose
Should come, half-tame, to eat bread from my hermit hand. If storms
arose, then in my tower of fortitude-- It ought to have been in sight
by this—I would take refuge; But I expected rather a pale mackerel
sky, Feather-like, perhaps shaking from a lower cloud Light drops
of silver temperance, and clover earth Sending up mists of chastity,
a country smell, Till earnest stars blaze out in the established sky
Rigid with justice; the streams audible; my rest secure. I can
see nothing like all this. Was the map wrong? Maps can be wrong. But
the experienced walker knows That the other explanation is more often
true.
C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, is best known
for his prose works but he wrote a fair amount of poetry as well. Born
in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, Lewis was a reader and writer from an
early age. Raised in a Christian household, “Jack” (as he was always
called) began to consider himself an atheist in his teenage years.
Always a brilliant student, Lewis received a scholarship to University
College, Oxford, in 1916, on the eve of World War I. He entered the army
and experienced trench warfare on the front line at the Somme Valley. He
was injured in friendly fire and had a long physical and mental
recovery. After the war he resumed his studies at Oxford, where, after
gaining First Class honors in Latin and Greek, Philosophy and Ancient
History, and English, he remained as a tutor. Lewis’ rediscovery
of his Christian faith was nurtured by reading—especially the works of
George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton—and by conversations with
believing friends, like J. R. R. Tolkien. He famously wrote of his
conversion, “You must picture me alone in [my] room… night after night,
feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the
steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to
meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me…. I gave in,
and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that
night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
C. S. Lewis became one of the most famous and prolific of Christian
apologists. He died on November 22, 1963. Lewis loved the
natural world, and he loved to “ramble,” taking long walks – twenty
miles, sometimes—in the countryside. In this poem, he describes the
spiritual journey as a ramble, and at times playfully evokes the
language of a guidebook. This ramble doesn’t go according to plan. It is
late afternoon, and he has been walking a while already. Lewis writes:
“By now I should be entering on the supreme stage / Of the whole walk.”
The difficult part of the day—the heat, the mountains, the rocks—was
supposed to be over by now, and nothing before him but beautiful views
and easy walking. This far into his spiritual journey, Lewis
expected to have arrived at the Christian virtues: “majestic / Rivers of
foamless charity,” “Forests of contemplation,” “towers of fortitude,”
“Light drops of silver temperance,” and “mists of chastity.” But that
hasn’t happened. “I can see nothing like all this,” he writes. “Was the
map wrong? / Maps can be wrong.” The conclusion of the poem is tongue in
cheek. “The experienced walker knows / That the other explanation is
more often true.” The map wasn’t wrong – the rambler was.
“Pilgrim’s Problem” makes the point that the journey doesn’t get easier.
In the spiritual life, most of us do not make steady, continual
progress. We do advance, but we do not leave difficulties and temptation
behind. If we think we will get to a place where the virtues come
effortlessly, we are fooling ourselves—we are misreading “the map,”
which did not promise consolations—just the cross. Lewis’s poem
made me think of medieval labyrinths, like the one at Chartres Cathedral
in France. When we walk the labyrinth, we do not go straight to the
center. Rather, we follow a circuitous path, which takes us very close
to the center from time to time, but then moves away from it again. On
the spiritual journey, there are moments where we feel very close to
God, but there are also moments where the end seems far away, or where
we lose sight of the goal altogether. We can give in to discouragement,
and blame the map—or acknowledge, as the speaker in Lewis’s poem does,
that “the other explanation is more often true”—and adjust our
expectations.
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From For the Time Being: A Christmas
Oratorio W. H. Auden Well, so that is that. Now
we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their
cardboard boxes — Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the
attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to
do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week — Not that we have much
appetite, having drunk such a lot, Stayed up so late, attempted —
quite unsuccessfully — To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we
have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it
as an agreeable Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant, The promising child
who cannot keep His word for long. The Christmas Feast is already a
fading memory, And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware Of
an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought Of Lent and Good
Friday which cannot, after all, now Be very far off. But, for the
time being, here we all are, Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry And
Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen
table exists because I scrub it. It seems to have shrunk during the
holidays. The streets Are much narrower than we remembered; we had
forgotten The office was as depressing as this. To those who have
seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time
Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. W.
H. Auden – Wystan Hugh Auden – was born in 1907 in York, England, and
died in Vienna, Austria in 1973. His family were part of England’s
established minor gentry—both grandfathers were high Church clergymen,
and he was brought up in a milieu of Anglicanism, private school, and
Oxford. Auden began writing poetry as a teenager, but his career was
never straightforward. He taught and lectured, and wrote essays,
screenplays, libretti for operas, and journalism. Auden moved to the
United States in 1939. Auden lived for a year in Brooklyn with a number
of other artists and writers, including the composer Benjamin Britten
and the novelist Carson McCullers. He also rediscovered his Christian
faith through an encounter with the English writer Charles Williams, and
through his study of thinkers like Kierkegaard and Niebuhr. The death of
Auden’s mother, and the unfaithfulness of his partner, to whom Auden
considered himself married, are in the background of For the Time Being,
his most explicitly Christian work, in which he explores the basic idea
of what difference the Incarnation makes in how we view the world.
Auden intended For the Time Being as the libretto of an oratorio to be
composed by his friend Benjamin Britten. Britten only ended up setting a
couple of short lyrics—it is said that when Britten saw how long For The
Time Being was, he was quite angry! The passage Jackie just
read is from close to the end of the oratorio. Auden wonderfully
captures the disconnect, which most of us have experienced by now, of
putting Christmas away. “That is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, /
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes - / Some have
got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.” The holly and the
mistletoe are tossed out, the children go back to school, and all our
Christmas feasts have left us with cold leftovers and not much appetite.
We have one more failed effort “to love all of our relatives” to put
behind us. We are putting away Christmas decorations and
Christmas activities; but Auden goes on to suggest that, too often, that
is what we do to Christmas itself—to Christ himself. “Once again / As in
previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more
than entertain it as an agreeable / Possibility, once again we have sent
him away.” We have seen an “actual Vision,” the reality of Christ, and
enjoyed the “agreeable / Possibility” of it, but we keep it at a
distance. And thus, “here we all are, / Back in the moderate
Aristotelian city / Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen.” The commonplace
and the tangible dominate our reality again: the city, the chores, the
schedules. But even so, something has happened to us. As we
return to this world of Aristotle, Euclid, and Newton—this world that
can be measured and explained—it is not the same, or we are not the
same. The kitchen table seems to have shrunk; the streets are narrower
and the office more “depressing.” The world seems smaller because we
have glimpsed something larger. The vision of Christmas has spoiled us:
“To those who have seen / The Child, however dimly, however
incredulously, / The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of
all.” For Auden, the Incarnation changes everything. It makes us
restless. What do we do with this sense of disillusionment with the
world as it is—with “the Time Being”? As Auden writes at the
end of his oratorio, this restlessness is also our mission: “There are
bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, / Irregular verbs to
learn, the Time Being to redeem / From insignificance.” As we continue
to do what needs to be done, our real task is much larger: to redeem the
present from insignificance—to bring the mystery of the Incarnation to
bear upon every aspect and every day of our lives.
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In the Bleak Midwinter Christina Rossetti
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as
iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on
snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven
cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away
when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place
sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ. Enough for Him,
whom cherubim, worship night and day, Breastful of milk, and a
mangerful of hay; Enough for Him, whom angels fall before, The ox
and ass and camel which adore. Angels and archangels may have
gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; But His
mother only, in her maiden bliss, Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.
What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would
bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; Yet what I
can I give Him: give my heart.
Through the musical
settings of Gustav Holst and Harold Darke, Rossetti’s poem has become a
standard at Christmas, including Christmas here at St. James. In
this Poem of the Week series, we’ve read two other poems by Christina
Rossetti—“Good Friday” and “Up-Hill.” Rossetti was one of the finest
poets of the Victorian era, and when Tennyson died, her name was
suggested for Poet Laureate—but England wasn’t ready for a female poet
laureate at that time! Her poetry is richly varied, and her work
includes long narrative poems like “Goblin Market,” lyrics on both
secular and religious subjects, and even nursery rhymes. Rossetti could
write splendidly about joy and love. But she could also write about
darkness. As someone who struggled with depression all her life, she
knew dark days, and in poetry she gave voice to that darkness and
struggled to reconcile it with her faith. “In the bleak
midwinter” is full of vivid contrasts. In the first stanza, we get an
evocative description of winter (clearly, an English winter, not a
Palestinian one!). It is “the bleak midwinter,” and everything is frozen
and hard – “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” This winter
is deep and seems to have gone on forever—Rossetti masterfully creates
that sense of winter’s duration in the line “snow had fallen, snow on
snow, snow on snow,” which adds layer upon layer to this winter.
In the second stanza, God enters into this coldness and hardness.
Rossetti describes both the first and second comings of Christ in the
poem. Heaven and earth are too small to hold him, and both will “flee
away” when he comes again; but at this moment in time, “in the bleak
midwinter,” Christ enters in. Rossetti evokes the simplicity,
the poverty of the Christmas stable, again, through powerful contrasts.
“Cherubim worship [him] night and day,” but here, Christ has only a
“breastful of milk and a mangerful of hay.” Angels fall down in worship
before him, but he accepts the homage of animals. There may have been
archangels gathered around, but here in the stable, his mother’s kiss is
enough. Again and again, Rossetti contrasts the power and glory
of heaven with the simplicity and poverty of earth. For me, Rossetti’s
poem recalls the early Christian hymn in St. Paul’s letter to the
Philippians: “Christ Jesus… though he was in the form of God, did not
regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness”
(Philippians 2:6-7). This self-emptying love of Christ is seen in the
Incarnation, and reaches its fullest expression on the cross. I
think that passage from Philippians also sheds light on the last stanza
of the poem: “What can I give him, poor as I am?” The poem began with
such a barren image of the bleak midwinter – a frozen earth, “water like
a stone.” And at the end, the speaker is similarly barren. She has no
role to play here – she is neither a shepherd nor a wise man – and she
has no gift to give: nothing except her heart—her love, her self.
I am reminded of St. Therese’s words of self-offering: “At the close of
life's evening I shall appear before you with empty hands.”
Christmas is so associated with joy and hope and light and peace that it
can seem like there is no room for sadness or darkness. But in this
poem, Christina Rossetti makes room. Christ comes not just into the
sunshine and happiness, but into the “bleak midwinter” of our world. In
his self-emptying love, Christ gives meaning to our emptiness.
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The Burning Babe Robert Southwell, SJ As
I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris’d I
was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a
fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning
bright did in the air appear; Who, scorchèd with excessive heat, such
floods of tears did shed As though his floods should quench his
flames which with his tears were fed. “Alas!” quoth he, “but newly
born, in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or
feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel
wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes
shame and scorns; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the
coals, The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilèd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas day.
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of the Week.
This week, I’ve chosen a poem by Robert Southwell, “The Burning Babe.”
Scott Webster will read the poem, and then I’ll be back with some brief
commentary. Thank you, Scott. Robert Southwell is a
fascinating figure. He was born in 1561 into an English Catholic family,
and lived his entire life under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when it
was illegal to practice the Catholic faith, and priests were not allowed
to enter England on pain of death. Nevertheless, at the age of 15,
Southwell headed to Europe to study for the priesthood in Douai, France
and later in Rome. He entered the Jesuits and was ordained at 23. After
a few years in Europe, he asked for the difficult and dangerous
assignment of serving as a clandestine missionary in his native land.
His return to England was watched by spies, and over the next few years
he wrote and ministered in secret, moving from safe house to safe house,
often using a pseudonym. Queen Elizabeth’s priest-hunters
caught up with Southwell at Uxendon Hall in Harrow in 1592. He was
arrested and spent the next three years in the Tower of London, where
the notorious Richard Topcliffe tortured him repeatedly. In 1595, he was
brought to trial and sentenced to death by hanging at Tyburn. As he
died, he repeated the words of Jesus on the cross: “Into your hands I
commend my spirit.” Southwell was beatified in 1929, and canonized in
1970. Southwell lived in a great age of poets – he was a
contemporary of Shakespeare (to whom he may have been related), Mary
Sidney, and John Donne—and poetry was an important part of his ministry.
His poems, which were very Catholic, were widely read and shared. “The
Burning Babe” is one of his best-known lyrics. This poem is
written in long lines of 14 syllables, and it has a simple quality,
almost a sing-song rhythm, like a folk song. But the imagery is anything
but simple. Southwell’s poem is built around a conceit, which is a
literary term for an elaborate, and often strange, comparison. The
beginning of the poem gives us a vivid contrast between dark and light,
cold and heat. “As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the
snow, / Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow.”
The warmth and light come from a “pretty Babe all burning bright.” This
infant weeps so copiously that the speaker is surprised the flames are
not extinguished. The child does not weep from the pain of the flames;
rather, he weeps because “none approach to warm their hearts.”
In a way that’s very typical of the poetry of his time, Southwell brings
great meaning to every aspect of the comparison. Every detail means
something. The child is the furnace. “Love is the fire.” Justice adds
the fuel. Mercy “blows the coals,” making the fire even hotter. The
smoke is “sighs,” the ashes “shames and scorns.” And the metal worked on
in this furnace is human souls. The comparison is not
Southwell’s invention. The prophet Malachi uses the image of the Messiah
as a blacksmith: “Who can endure the day of his coming?... He will sit
refining and purifying silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi,
refining them like gold or silver” (Malachi 3:3). In Southwell’s image,
Christ is not the blacksmith, but the crucible itself; and the bath in
which this metal will be tempered is his blood. At the end of
Southwell’s poem, the sudden vision vanishes, and the speaker realizes:
“straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas day.” It’s such a
strange image, isn’t it, and perhaps it may not seem very “Christmassy.”
We are accustomed to cozy images on Christmas, aren’t we—light and
warmth, for sure, but not fire. And yet, Christmas and Good Friday are
not very far apart. In the familiar words of the carol, “I wonder as I
wander / Out under the sky, / How Jesus the Savior / Did come for to
die.” Southwell, a martyr himself who saw many friends martyred,
understood that reality. Jesus is born so that he can redeem us on the
cross, and in some sense, the beginning of his life is the beginning of
his passion. Jesus shares our life, so that we can share in
his; he is born so that we can come to new life in him. In the liturgy
of Christmas Day, the Church prays: “Grant… that we may share in the
divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” It’s
a prayer for transformation—the transformation the “burning babe” came
to work in each of us.
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In Too Much Light Jessica Powers The Magi
had one only star to follow, a single sanctuary lamp hung low,
gold ornament in the astonished air. I am confounded in this latter
day; I find stars everywhere. Rumor locates the presence of a
night out past the loss of perishable sun where, round midnight, I
shall come to see that all the stars are one. I long for this
night of the onement of stars when days of scattered shining are my
lot and my confusion. Yet faith even here burns her throat dry,
cries: on this very spot of mornings, see, there is not any place
where the sought Word is not. Under and over, in and out, this morn
flawlessly, purely, wakes the newly born. Behold, all places which
have light in them truly are Bethlehem. (1964) This
past week, the Bethlehem star has been making headlines. Again! That’s
because we have the opportunity to witness conjunction of the planets
Jupiter and Saturn, which means that they appear, from our perspective
on planet earth, to come very together in the sky. It’s a phenomenon
that happens about every twenty years, but there hasn’t been a visible
alignment of the two planets this close since March 4, 1226! This
phenomenon is known as the “Christmas Star,” because it has been
speculated for centuries that the “star” that guided the Magi might have
been a similar conjunction of two planets. In this lovely
Christmas poem, Jessica Powers plays on the idea of the “great
conjunction”—in her words “the onement of stars.” She sets up her
problem at the beginning of the poem – the Magi who followed the star to
the infant Christ “had one only star to follow.” I love the comparison
of the Christmas star to “a single sanctuary lamp hung low”—this image
emphasizes how easy to spot the star was, and also what it marked—the
presence of Christ. It was like a “gold ornament in the astonished air.”
It was easier for the Magi, Powers suggests – they knew exactly what to
look for. But now it is more difficult. “I am confounded in this latter
day; / I find stars everywhere.” The speaker believes that she
will have equal clarity one day – it’s rumored, she says, that one day
we “shall come to see / that all the stars are one,” but this won’t
happy until “midnight” –in other words, not until eternity, “past the
loss of perishable sun.” We have to wait for this “great conjunction” of
stars. What is Powers talking about here when she talks about
stars? That image of the “sanctuary lamp” in the first stanza gives us
the clue. She is talking about the presence of Christ. The Magi,
following a single star, found Christ himself. She ‘finds stars
everywhere”—she finds Christ, but she doesn’t find him in one place. “I
long for this night of the onement of stars / when days of scattered
shining are my lot / and my confusion.” There are glimmers of Christ’s
presence everywhere—but the light is “scattered” and at times confusing.
The end of the poem provides some resolution to this dilemma of
hers, this being “In too much light.” Faith is saying – yelling,
even—“burning her throat dry” to proclaim what this “scattered shining”
means. It means that in even this place of “mornings,” where the night
sky with its Christmas star is no longer visible, “there is not any
place / where the sought Word is not.” The Christ she is looking for is
everywhere—in every place she looks. “All places which have light in
them / truly are Bethlehem.” No longer is Christ is born in just one
place. Everywhere there is light—everywhere there is love, hope, truth,
service, faith, reconciliation—Christ is born. So if you missed
the “onement of stars,” and didn’t see the “great conjunction” of
Jupiter and Saturn on the horizon this week, never fear. As Pope Francis
has written, “The Lord… comes not from above, but from within, he comes
that we might find him in this world of ours” (Laudato Si).
Have a blessed and merry Christmas.
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At the round earth’s imagined corners John Donne At the
round earth's imagin'd corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and
arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and
to your scatter'd bodies go; All whom the flood did, and fire shall
o'erthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair,
law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes Shall behold God and never
taste death's woe. But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound, 'Tis late to ask abundance of
thy grace When we are there; here on this lowly ground Teach me
how to repent; for that's as good As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon
with thy blood.
This week, we’re reading a poem about the end of the world –
John Donne’s “At the round earth’s imagined corners.” We’ve met
John Donne before in this series. Donne was a remarkable figure. He
started out as a Catholic and ended up an Anglican; he went from
ambitious man of the world to priest. This poem, one of Donne’s “Holy
Sonnets,” is a really spectacular example of Donne’s metaphysical
poetry. “Metaphysical” refers something beyond the natural world. In
terms of poetry, we use the word to describe poets like Donne, where the
physical and the spiritual are never far apart, and where there is a
penchant for intricate and sometimes downright strange imagery. In one
of his most famous poems, Donne uses the image of a flea to talk about
love! Whenever we encounter a poem by Donne, we know we’re going to get
some pretty amazing imagery. This sonnet begins with a bang. “At
the round earth’s imagined corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels.” Donne
draws on the Scriptures here: in the First Letter to the Thessalonians,
St. Paul writes about what the end of the world will be like: “the Lord
himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with
the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ
will rise first” (I Thess 4:16). The angels blow their
trumpets, and the dead are raised. Donne describes this raising of the
dead in a truly epic way. The souls of the dead fly back to their
earthly dwelling places: “arise, arise / From death, you numberless
infinities / Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go.” These are dead
of all times, all places, and all causes. They died in “the flood,” in
the time of Noah. They died from natural causes – “age” and “agues” and
“dearth,” or famine. And many died unnatural deaths: killed in wars, by
tyrants, lost to suicide, the death penalty, and accidents. And Donne
does not forget those who will still be alive at the time of the Last
Judgment—“you whose eyes / Shall behold God and never taste death’s
woe.” The vision is vast, wide-ranging, all-inclusive. In the
sestet, the last six lines of the poem, all this drama and action and
movement ceases suddenly and dramatically. “But let them wait, Lord.”
The speaker asks God to hold off on the end of time, for a moment. Why?
Because he has sins to repent of. “'Tis late to ask abundance of thy
grace / When we are there,” he says. This is the time of repentance, and
this is the place of repentance. In the passage from I
Thessalonians that inspired Donne’s poem, St. Paul describes how “we who
are alive, who are left, will be caught up together … in the clouds to
meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). Earth will be left behind. Donne’s
speaker began the poem calling on the angels to blow their trumpets and
the dead to rise. But he knows he is not ready for the air yet, because
once that trumpet sounds, it will be too late for repentance.
The poem that began with epic imagery of the cosmos ends with a quiet
spotlight on one repentant sinner on earth. “Here on this lowly ground /
Teach me how to repent.” All he needs to do is repent his sins, and
Christ will do the rest. To repent is “as good,” Donne writes, “As if
thou hadst seal'd my pardon with thy blood.” “Teach me how to
repent.” We often bristle when we hear that word, repent. Our culture
prefers to talk about “choices” rather than “sins.” But we Christians
know that sin is real, and that it can do damage to ourselves and those
around us. The sinful choices we make can tear the fabric of family and
of society. All of us are sinners, called to repentance. And when, like
the speaker of Donne’s poem, we dare to look honestly at our own lives
and to recognize our sinfulness—to repent—Jesus pours out mercy and
forgiveness. And then we can look to his coming not with dread and fear,
but with hope.
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Advent Jessica Powers I live my Advent in the womb of
Mary. And on one night when a great star swings free from its high
mooring and walks down the sky to be the dot above the Christus i,
I shall be born of her by blessed grace. I wait in Mary-darkness,
faith’s walled place, with hope’s expectance of nativity. I
knew for long she carried me and fed me, guarded and loved me, though
I could not see. But only now, with inward jubilee, I come upon
earth’s most amazing knowledge: someone is hidden in this dark with
me. (1948) We started this Poem of the Week series
with Jessica Powers. Jessica Powers—Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit—was
a poet both before and after she became a Carmelite nun. Many of her
poems use imagery from the Church’s rich mystical tradition, and this
poem, “Advent,” is no exception. “I live my Advent in the womb
of Mary.” It’s such a surprising line. Advent is, when you think about
it, a pregnant season. In Advent, we wait for the second coming, which
is sometimes likened to a birth: “all creation is groaning in labor
pains, even until now,” said St. Paul (Romans 8:22). And we wait for
Christmas, our celebration of Christ’s first coming. If Christmas is
about Christ’s birth into the world, then Advent is about Mary’s
pregnancy. “I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.” The poet imagines
herself in Mary’s womb. Here, in darkness, yet with “hope’s expectance
of nativity,” she waits to be brought to birth. I love this poem’s
description of the Christmas star, swinging “free / from its high
mooring,” walking “down the sky / to be the dot above the Christus i.”
In the second part of this poem, the sense of mystery deepens.
“I knew for long she carried me and fed me, / guarded and loved me,
though I could not see. / But only now, with inward jubilee, / I come
upon earth’s most amazing knowledge: / someone is hidden in this dark
with me.” In this place—the speaker is “carried” and “fed,” “guarded and
loved,” but in the darkness. And yet, not alone in the dark. Who is
hidden in this dark with her? Christ, of course—her brother, even her
twin! “I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.” This poem is not
really about the liturgical season of Advent. Rather, Advent here is a
metaphor for the life of faith: a life of waiting, in darkness, yet
conscious, in moments of “inward jubilee,” that we are not alone: that
Christ is with us. The poem reflects the Church’s teaching about Mary.
The Church calls her Mother of God, because God became incarnate in her
womb. She is also Mother of the Church and Mother of believers.
The Church has always raised Mary high, not simply because she gave
birth to Jesus, but rather, because she is the model of Christian
discipleship. Mary was not a passive vessel. She did not merely consent,
but actively cooperated with God’s plan, and continues to play an active
role in the life of believers, just as she did at the wedding feast at
Cana—“do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). As Pope Francis has written,
“She is the handmaid of the Father who sings his praises. She is the
friend who is ever concerned that wine not be lacking in our lives. She
is the woman whose heart was pierced by a sword and who understands all
our pain. As mother of all, she is a sign of hope for peoples suffering
the birth pangs of justice…. As a true mother, she walks at our side,
she shares our struggles and she constantly surrounds us with God’s
love” (Joy of the Gospel, 286). Mary always points us towards
Christ. Incarnate once in her womb, he continues to make himself
present, in the sacramental life of the Church, and in the suffering
flesh of our brothers and sisters in need. In this way, Mary constantly
reminds us of “earth’s most amazing knowledge: someone is hidden in this
dark with” us.
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Kneeling R. S. Thomas Moments of great calm, Kneeling
before an altar Of wood in a stone church In summer, waiting for
the God To speak; the air a staircase For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng Of spirits waiting, as I, For the
message.
Prompt me, God; But not yet. When I speak, Though it be you who
speak Through me, something is lost. The meaning is in the
waiting.
We met Welsh poet Ronald Stuart Thomas earlier in this
series. A priest of the Church of England, Thomas wrote many poems on
spiritual themes, especially on the challenges of prayer. In
this short poem, Thomas evokes a peaceful moment, “kneeling before an
altar / Of wood in a stone church / in summer.” The speaker seems to be
alone in the empty church, and yet the moment has great import, great
drama. He is “waiting for the God / To speak.” As Thomas describes the
scene, we get the sense that everything is waiting for God to speak: the
air is “a staircase / For silence”: the image gives us a sense of
anticipation, as well as the potential for connection, like Jacob’s
ladder, reaching from earth to heaven. The sun surrounds the speaker
with light, spotlighting him like an performer on a stage, “as though I
acted / A great role.” And then there’s the audience: a “close throng /
of spirits waiting” with him, for whatever God will say: for the
“message.” After all this, the poem takes a surprising turn.
“Prompt me, God; / But not yet.” Words of prayer are on the tip of his
tongue, but he holds back. “When I speak, / Though it be you who speak /
Through me, something is lost.” Even if God inspires what he is going to
say, “something is lost.” That “something” is this pregnant silence, in
the company with the “spirits,” the sun, the air, the church itself, all
waiting together in a silence that is filled with God, even though God
is silent. In the last line of the poem, Thomas says: “The meaning is in
the waiting.” The revelation he awaits has already come, in the silent
waiting itself. Though the poem is set in the summer, I think
this is the right poem for this time of year. This past Sunday, we began
the season of Advent. The word “Advent” means “coming” and this season
is all about waiting for Christ’s coming. Our Advent waiting is
multi-layered. We wait and watch for the second coming, the day of
Christ’s return, and the Church dares to await that day with joy and
hope: we pray that Christ “may he find us watchful in prayer / and
exultant in his praise” (Roman Missal). And there is another kind of
waiting in Advent: we wait in anticipation of the celebration of
Christ’s first coming at Christmas. Advent traditions like the Advent
wreath, with its gradually increasing number of lit candles, and the
Advent calendar, with its doors and windows for each day leading up to
Christmas, are visual emblems of this joyful waiting. In our Advent
waiting, past and future merge: in the same moment, we look to our
beginning and to our end. In a lovely book on R. S. Thomas
entitled Frequencies of God, Carys Walsh writes of this poem: “There is
no anxiety in this waiting; nor is it something to be endured or
suffered. There is simply the understanding that waiting upon God is
fundamental to knowing God… Thomas opens up the paradoxical possibility
that God might be revealed while we are waiting for God to be revealed.”
Have a blessed Advent!
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Vespers BY LOUISE GLÜCK From Wild Iris (1992) In
your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment,
principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be
encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the
heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other
regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on
the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the
blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not
discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in
consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much
terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of the Week.
This week, I’ve chosen a poem by Louise Glück. You may have heard her
name recently—she is the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in
Literature. Jackie O’Ryan will read Glück’s poem “Vespers,” and then
I’ll be back with some brief commentary. Louise Glück is an
American poet, born in 1943 in New York City to a Jewish parents of
Russian and Hungarian descent. She wanted to be a writer from a very
young age, and even in her early teens was sending poems and even books
of poems off to publishers. As a teenager, she struggled with anorexia,
and her illness and eventual cure was a significant turning point in her
life. She credits her years in psychoanalysis not only with treating her
disease, but with teaching her how to think. Glück published her
first book of poems in 1968, and many other books have followed. Glück
has also spoken of years of crippling writer’s block. One critic has
written: Glück’s “basic concerns” are “betrayal, mortality, love and the
sense of loss that accompanies it… She is at heart the poet of a fallen
world” (Don Bogen). Her language is “staunchly straightforward,
remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech….. [but with] a
weight that is far from colloquial” (Dana Goodyear). I think
that assessment of Glück’s language is helpful in approaching this poem,
“Vespers.” The poet describes something so ordinary—her struggle to grow
tomato plants—and yet the stakes are high. The poem begins: In
your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment,
principally regarding the tomato plants. Clearly, the poem
is addressed to God, and the speaker is giving an accounting. I am
reminded of the parable in Matthew: “a man who was going on a journey
called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he
gave five talents; to another, two; to a third, one—to each according to
his ability. Then he went away” (Mt. 25:14-15). Like the servants in the
parable, the speaker knows she has to do something with what God has
given her. Note the formal, distant language—“return on
investment,” “report,” “assignment,” “principally,” all words which we
would expect to see in business correspondence—not in an address to God.
This gives a lightness, even a humor, to the subject: “I must report /
failure in my assignment, principally / regarding the tomato plants.”
But after this light beginning, the poem goes deeper. The speaker
confesses her failure, but also points out to God all the circumstances
beyond her control which played their part. If God wants her to grow
tomato plants, why did he make it so hard? Why not provide her with dry
days and warm nights, the weeks of summer others enjoy?
The emotional distance of the beginning of the poem breaks down, and now
we hear how deeply the speaker feels this failure. She was so aware of
the beauty and promise of these plants, their “first shoots / like
wings, tearing the soil,” and the disease that struck them was painful,
even heart-breaking. And this heartbreak is a uniquely human experience:
“I doubt / you have a heart, in our understanding of / that term.”
For God lives in eternity, and thus, Glück says in an interesting
phrase, God is “immune to foreshadowing.” So what are these
tomato plants foreshadowing? By the end of the poem, we know that
this is not just about tomato plants: it’s about things dying before
their time, the fear of failing in our responsibility towards the gifts
and the living things entrusted to our care. “you may not know / how
much terror we bear,” the speaker observes, to see that first diseased
leaf, to see leaves falling from the trees before their time, “in
August, in early darkness.” The poem ends “I am responsible / for these
vines.” To be unable to protect, to bring to fruition, what we are
responsible for—this is what is heart-breaking, terrifying. The title of
the poem, “Vespers,” reinforces the prayer-dimension of this address to
God, and also reminds us of evening, the coming of darkness.
This poem is a great example of Glück’s work—deceptively simple
language, powerful impact. As one critic has observed, “No one writes
about emotionally charged subjects with such sparse, cold, and nuanced
language” (Jeffrey McDaniel). The poem is a prayer, and a difficult one.
Glück prays here like Job, and asks questions the way Job does: “I would
speak with the Almighty; I want to argue with God” (Job 13:3).
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Spring and Fall BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves
like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can
you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights
colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood
leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter,
child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no
nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the
blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of the Week.
This week, we’re back in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Scott
Webster will read Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall,” and then I’ll be back
with some brief commentary. Thank you, Scott. I thought
this poem was the perfect choice for this time of year, when the leaves
are falling from the trees, and we are feeling winter in the air.
Hopkins addresses “Spring and Fall” “to a young child,” a girl named
Margaret. We don’t know if Margaret was a real person – it doesn’t
really matter. We do know that she is a child, and that as the poem
begins she is weeping because the leaves are falling. In this
poem, Hopkins’ wonderfully distinctive voice and language are on
display. “Margaret, are you grieving / over Goldengrove unleaving?”
The natural world is never generic in Hopkins’ poetry. A few weeks ago,
we read Hopkins’ poem “Binsey Poplars,” and we talked about “inscape,”
Hopkins’ word for the unique and unrepeatable individuality of
everything—not just people, but animals, trees and even landscapes. In
this poem, the woods are given a name, “Goldengrove.” It’s a coinage of
Hopkins, one of several in this poem, and it could describe any
beautiful forest in the fall. But “Goldengrove” is capitalized, giving
it the individuality of a name. Clearly, these woods have an “inscape,”
to which the child is responding. Hopkins marvels that a child
like Margaret can be sad because of the “unleaving” of the trees. He
asks, “leaves like the things of man, you / with your fresh thoughts
care for, can you?” How is it she can care so much for the natural
world, he wonders, at her young age? And yet, he knows that “as
the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder.” Most adults
never “spare a sigh” to grieve, “though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”
Isn’t this a fantastic description of the world at this time of year –
“worlds of wanwood,” countless leaves, lying “leafmeal”—still another
coinage, but we know exactly what Hopkins is talking about. In
the second half of the poem, Hopkins does not answer Margaret’s
question, “why.” Instead, he answers his own question of why the child
cares, why she weeps at the falling of the leaves. “Now no matter,
child, the name: / Sorrow’s springs are the same. / Nor mouth had, no
nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed.” Margaret’s
sorrow, Hopkins muses, comes from the source of all sorrow. It is not
something Margaret could express aloud or articulate to herself. But the
heart and the “ghost,” the spirit within her, know the answer: “It is
the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” Margaret
weeps for Margaret: the falling of the leaves is the annual reminder
that she will also die one day. Margaret is the spring; but autumn
will come. Most of the poem is quite intricate in its diction,
especially with the playful coinages so typical of Hopkins. But that
last line is simple and direct: “It is Margaret you mourn for.” The
straightforward language intensifies the impact of the realization that
she, too, will die. Gerard Manley Hopkins was far from the first
to compare the falling of the leaves to the passing away of generations.
In fact, one critic has written: “The simile is quite likely the oldest
readily identifiable poetic artifice in European literature.” Homer,
Virgil, Dante, Milton—all of these poets used the image of leaves in the
fall to suggest the numberless dead. In the Iliad, we read: As
is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind
scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with
leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of
men will grow while another dies. (II. 6.146-49) In
this short poem, Hopkins takes a classic, even a hackneyed image, and
breathes new life into it. Viewing the change in seasons through the
eyes of a child, Hopkins does not see a generic forest shedding its
leaves, but a unique and wonderful place—“Goldengrove unleaving.” And it
is not merely faceless generations that come and go; it is an
individual, Margaret, who, without fully understanding it, feels and
knows that what happens to the leaves will one day happen to her—to each
of us. This is the destiny we have in common with all who have ever
lived, and yet it still has power to shake us: “you are dust, and
to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).
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Dawn Revisited By Rita Dove Read the poem here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51663/dawn-revisited
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the poem of the week.
This week, I’ve chosen a poem by Rita Dove, entitled “Dawn Revisited.”
Jackie O’Ryan will read the poem, and then I’ll be back with some brief
commentary. Thank you, Jackie. Rita Dove is an American
poet born in 1952. As a child growing up in Akron, Ohio, Dove’s parents
encouraged her to read early and widely. She was a brilliant student—a
Presidential Scholar, a National Merit Scholar, and later a Fulbright
Scholar. She earned her MFA at the renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In
1993, she became the United States Poet Laureate, not only the first
African American but the youngest person ever named to that post. She
transformed the office of Poet Laureate, traveling the country and using
her position to promote the arts. Dove is best known as a poet, but she
has written in other forms as well, including a novel, short stories,
plays, essays, and lyrics. Dove has said: “There’s no reason to
subscribe authors to particular genres. I’m a writer, and I write in the
form that most suits what I want to say.” She has received many
accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize, and teaches at the University
of Virginia, Charlottesville. “Dawn Revisited” was written in
1999 and appeared in Dove’s collection On the Bus with Rosa Parks. It’s
a wonderful meditation on past and present—on history and renewal.
“Imagine you wake up / with a second chance,” the poem begins. In this
second chance, some things stay the same—looking out the window, “the
blue jay / hawks his pretty wares / and the oak still stands.” But, the
poet says, “if you don’t look back / the future never happens.” This new
dawn is not an erasure of the past, of history, because without the
past, there is no future. Dove captures the freshness of a new
day. Familiar things take on wonderful depth and newness. “How good to
rise in sunlight, / in the prodigal smell of biscuits - / eggs and
sausage on the grill.” The smell of biscuits in the morning is not just
good—it’s “prodigal,” suggesting a reckless generosity. These homey
details are juxtaposed with more conventionally poetic images: “The
whole sky is yours / to write on, blown open / to a blank page.”
For a writer, what better image of fresh possibility than that? In this
“second chance,” the familiar and the unknown are both present.
I find the end of the poem surprising. “Come on, / shake a leg! You'll
never know / who's down there, frying those eggs, / if you don't get up
and see.” When we wake to the smell of breakfast cooking, we usually
have a pretty good idea of who’s cooking it! But the poet says
“you’ll never know / who’s down there… if you don’t get up and see.”
The poem invites us to be open to the surprise of the world around us,
including—perhaps especially—the most familiar things and people. The
renewal this dawn brings extends to our relationships, too.
Dove’s poem is called “Dawn Revisited.” In the Scriptures, dawn is a
very significant image. In Isaiah, dawn is associated with works of
justice: God says that when we care for the naked, the homeless, and the
hungry, our light shall “break forth like the dawn.” In the New
Testament, dawn is specifically associated with the coming of Christ:
Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophecies that “in the
tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon
us.” Christ, who was “in the beginning with God,” is also as new as the
dawn. In the familiar words of St. Augustine, Christ is “ever ancient,
ever new.” To live in Christ, ever ancient, ever new, is to be
invited to renewal—not just once, but again and again. As Pope Francis
has written, “with a tenderness which never disappoints, but is always
capable of restoring our joy, he makes it possible for us to lift up our
heads and to start anew” (Joy of the Gospel, 3). This renewal is not
about forgetting our history. The believer, Pope Francis has said, is
“one who remembers” (Joy of the Gospel, 13). We need memory, because, as
Dove says, “if you don’t look back, / the future never happens.”
St. Paul invites us, “be transformed by the renewal of your mind”
(Romans 12:2). It’s not unlike the invitation we get in this poem by
Rita Dove: “The whole sky is yours / to write on, blown open / to a
blank page. Come on, / shake a leg!”
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From In Memoriam A. H. H.
(1850) Alfred, Lord Tennyson XXXII Her eyes
are homes of silent prayer, Nor other
thought her mind admits But, he was
dead, and there he sits, And he that brought him back is there.
Then one deep love doth supersede All
other, when her ardent gaze Roves from
the living brother's face, And rests upon the Life indeed.
All subtle thought, all curious fears,
Borne down by gladness so complete,
She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet With costly spikenard and
with tears. Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure;
What souls possess themselves so pure, Or is there blessedness like
theirs? Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of
the Week. On November 2, the Church keeps the Commemoration of the
Faithful Departed—All Souls. To mark this day of remembrance of the
dead, I’ve chosen a poem from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, one of the most
celebrated elegies in English. In this poem from In Memoriam, Tennyson
imagines the thoughts of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, after Jesus raises
her brother from the dead. Scott Webster will read the poem, and then
I’ll be back with some brief commentary. Thank you, Scott.
Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, in Lincolnshire, England, in 1809.
A poet from a young age, he first won acclaim while a student at
Cambridge, where he was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for an early
poem. It was also at Cambridge that Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam,
another aspiring poet, who became his closest friend. Everything was
going well for Tennyson: in 1830, he published a well-reviewed
collection of poems; and in 1831, his friend Hallam became engaged to
Tennyson’s sister Emilia. But then it all fell apart: his 1833
collection, which included “The Lady of Shalott,” was panned by the
press; and on September 13, while on holiday in Austria with his family,
Hallam died very suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was just 22 years
old. As one of Hallam’s friends wrote, his death came as “a loud and
terrible stroke from the reality of things upon the faery building of
our youth.” Tennyson sank into grief and depression. He published
nothing for ten years, though he continued to write—especially the
lyrics which eventually became In Memoriam A. H. H. (the initials of
Arthur Henry Hallam). In Memoriam consists of 133 cantos or
shorter poems in which the poet reflects on his loss and seeks some sort
of resolution. There are moments of deep faith and also expressions of
doubt. All the poems are written in the same meter and rhyme scheme,
which has come to be known as the In Memoriam stanza. Tennyson did not
invent it, but it is an appropriate choice—the ABBA rhyme scheme forces
us to wait for resolution, reflecting the circuitous process of grief.
In this section of the poem, Tennyson meditates on the miracle of
Jesus in raising Lazarus from the dead. In the Gospel of John, the story
of the raising of Lazarus is followed by the anointing at Bethany, when
Jesus, with his disciples, is having supper with Lazarus and his sisters
in their home. During this gathering, Mary anoints the feet of Jesus
with costly perfume. Tennyson beautifully imagines the scene
from Mary’s perspective. “Her eyes are homes of silent prayer” as she
looks from her brother, who was dead and now lives, to Jesus, the one
who brought him back. Without saying anything, Mary anoints the feet of
Jesus with “spikenard and with tears.” “One deep love doth supersede /
All other,” Tennyson says: she loves her brother, but she loves Christ
more—or rather, her love for her brother leads her to Christ. The poem
ends by marveling at this faith. “Thrice blest whose lives are faithful
prayers,” he says—people like Mary, who pray without words, who go
straight to the heart of things, “whose loves in higher love
endure”—whose human loves find their origin and their fulfillment in
love of Christ. “What souls possess themselves so pure,” Tennyson asks
at the end of this short poem, “Or is there blessedness like theirs?”
It’s a wonderful meditation on the Scripture story. I think the way
Tennyson concludes this lyric is also significant: it ends with a
question mark. Tennyson wishes for faith like Mary’s, but he always has
more questions than answers. Through the poems of In Memoriam, we see
the process of Tennyson’s grief, as he moves from the first raw stages
of grief to peace and hope. We also see the way this grief shatters his
faith, and puts it back together again. Grief forces him to reckon with
death, to acknowledge his doubts, and ultimately to return to God, with
a faith that is less sure of itself, perhaps, but deeper and more
authentic than before. As he writes in another poem: I
falter where I firmly trod, And
falling with my weight of cares Upon
the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call To
what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621) Psalm 70
Lord, hie thee me to save; Lord, now
to help me haste: Shame let them surely have
And of confusion taste,
That hold my soul in chase.
Let them be forcèd back,
And no disgraces lack,
That joy in my disgrace. Back forcèd let them be
And for a fair reward Their own foul ruin see
Who laugh and laugh out hard
When I most inly moan.
But mirth and joy renew
In them thy paths ensue
And love thy help alone. Make them with gladness sing:
To God be ever praise. And fail not me to bring,
My downcast state to raise.
Thy speedy aid and stay
In thee my succour grows:
From thee my freedom flows:
Lord, make no long delay.
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here
with the Poem of the Week. This week, I’ve chosen a Psalm –
which is, of course, the poetry anthology that is part of the Bible!
Jackie O’Ryan will read Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Psalm 70,
which dates to the end of the 16th century, and then I’ll be back with
some brief commentary. Thank you, Jackie. This poem is
fascinating on a number of levels. First, there’s its author. Mary
Sidney was born in 1561. Upon her marriage at the age of 16, she became
the Countess of Pembroke and one of the wealthiest and most influential
women of her time. With her wealth and status, Mary Sidney had access to
education which was extremely rare for women of her time. She was
exceptionally well read, and fluent in French, Italian, and Latin. Her
poetry was circulated widely among her friends.
Mary’s older brother was the poet Sir Philip Sidney. When Philip died
at the young age of 31, Mary (just 25 years old at the time) became his
literary executor and completed his unfinished translation of the book
of Psalms. She not only edited her brother’s work on the first 43
psalms, but translated the remaining 107 psalms herself. It is an
extraordinary achievement. Every one of the psalms is in a unique meter
and rhyme scheme, some of which had never been attempted in English
before. The translation had a significant impact on English poetry. John
Donne called it “the highest matter in the noblest form,” and said of
the Sidneys: “they tell us why, and teach us how to sing.”
And then there’s the Psalm itself. The Book of Psalms is an
anthology, a hymnal, if you will—a collection of prayers and hymns which
were used in worship at various times during the year. The Psalms
include a huge range of moods, from festive joy to lament. There are
prayers of repentance, prayers of trust and confidence in God, and
prayers of praise.
Psalm 70 is a lament. It begins with an urgent prayer for help:
“Lord, hie thee me to save” – “now to help me haste.” (In parentheses,
these lines have a significant place in the liturgy—they are used at the
beginning of the Liturgy of the Hours – “O God, come to my assistance.
Lord, make haste to help me.”) What might surprise us is where the Psalm
goes from there. The Psalmist asks God to punish enemies – “Let them be
forced back / And no disgraces lack, / That joy in my disgrace”; “For a
fair reward / Their own foul ruin see / Who laugh and laugh out hard /
When I most inly moan.” The Psalmist asks that those who mock and pursue
him be punished with shame, disgrace, and ruin.
Typical of the laments in the Book of Psalms, the text doesn’t stay
in this place of imprecation, but moves in a new direction, as the
psalmist asks God’s blessing on those who trust in God: “mirth and joy
renew / In them thy paths ensue”; “make them with gladness sing.” The
Psalm ends with an expression of hope and a renewal of the speaker’s
plea for help. “Fail not… / My downcast state to raise… Lord, make no
long delay.” It’s easy for us to get distracted by the
imprecations in Psalm 70 and other psalms of lament—wait, we’re not
supposed to be asking God to punish our enemies, are we?! I think the
more important thing to recognize here is the honesty of this prayer.
The Psalmist doesn’t hold back, but brings everything to God—including
feelings of resentment, abandonment, and betrayal. When we pray, whether
on our own or as a community, I think we sometimes feel like we need to
be on our best behavior, burying our resentments, our anger, our
frustration, or our fear. The Psalms teach us a different way to pray:
they urge us simply to be ourselves with God, and to say what’s on our
mind and heart. They also remind us to keep coming back to the
foundation of our prayer, trust in God, and God’s time: “In thee my
succour grows: / From thee my freedom flows: / Lord, make no long
delay.” Read a contemporary Catholic translation of Psalm
70 from the Revised Grail Edition.
https://www.giamusic.com/sacred_music/RGP/psalmDisplay.cfm?psalm_id=282
Read the King James version of Psalm 70, and explore many other
translations:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+70&version=NIV
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Malachi Black, "Entering Saint Patrick’s Cathedral" (2020)
Read the poem here:
https://poets.org/poem/entering-saint-patricks-cathedral
Explore more poems by Malachi Black here:
http://www.malachiblack.com/
Hello there. Corinna Laughlin here with the poem of the week.
This week, I’ve chosen “Entering Saint Patrick’s Cathedral” by
Malachi Black, a brand-new poem which appeared earlier this year. Scott
Webster will read the poem, and then I’ll be back with some brief
commentary. Thank you, Scott. Malachi Black is a young
poet. Born in Boston, he now teaches at the University of San Diego, a
Catholic university, and themes of faith are woven through a number of
his poems. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral is the Cathedral church of
the Archdiocese of New York. Of course, it’s much more than that. In
many ways, it’s an icon for the Catholic Church in the United States.
It’s welcomed Popes and countless visitors—not only Catholics but people
of all faiths. It’s also an icon of the Church in this country in its
setting—it’s not set among fields or in the middle of a park. It’s in
the heart of midtown Manhattan, surrounded by skyscrapers, cultural
landmarks like Rockefeller Center, and Fifth Avenue shops like Louis
Vuitton, Sak’s, Cartier, and even Victoria’s Secret. Amid the comings
and goings, the buying and selling, of one of New York’s busiest
streets, St. Patrick’s is a reminder of the presence and of the beauty
and importance of faith amid all the other aspects of life that demand
our attention. In his poem, Malachi Black vividly captures two
contrasting worlds: the world outside the Cathedral, and the world
inside. He steps out of the rain, and as the door slowly closes, the
sounds of the city fade and the quiet of the church takes over. The
rapid movement of the city—Black mentions cars, bicycles, trucks, and
taxis—gives way to stillness. The difference is stark—the door seals out
the world “like a coffin lid.” We know from the beginning that
the speaker isn’t here as a tourist. He comes in respectfully, carrying
his coat, dripping from the rain. He stands there and clears his throat,
about to speak. But first he takes a moment to get accustomed to the
atmosphere, so different from the haste of the exterior world. We get
the sense that the Cathedral is filled—not with people, but with
something else. The chill he feels is “dense” with “old Hail Marys,”
like whispered by the people in the pews. It’s as if every prayer
uttered here has left its mark, become part of the place. Above him, the
stained glass windows gather “the dead and martyred” in vivid color, and
before him is “the golden holy altar” and the pipes of the organ, both
of which are silent now, but which are filled with potential. The altar
holds “its silence like a bell,” and the organ, too, is “alive with a
vibration tolling / out from the incarnate / source of holy sound.” The
altar, on this quiet, rainy day, is like a bell, waiting to ring; and
the organ—like those “old Hail Marys”—has left its imprint on the place,
and is “alive” even when silent. At the end of the poem, as the
ceiling bends above him, “like an ear,” listening, he does not speak. In
this place, so filled with presence—of those who have come before, of
saints, of God—simply being present to all this is in itself prayer. The
poem ends with a simple statement: “My body is my prayer.” I am
reminded of some favorite lines from Emily Dickinson on prayer: “awed
beyond my errand — / I worshipped — did not ‘pray’ —“ (F525, 1863).
Although this poem is about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I
think it says something about all great cathedrals, and of course, I
include our own St. James Cathedral among them! A cathedral, by its
nature, stands in the heart of the city, immersed in the world, yet it
invites us to glimpse the world that is yet to be, the heavenly city.
When we pray here, we are never alone: we are surrounded not only by the
images of saints, but by the saints themselves, and those who have gone
before us—what the letter to the Hebrews calls “a great cloud of
witnesses.”
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"Mediterranean Blue" Naomi Shihab Nye Read this week’s
poem here:
https://poets.org/poem/mediterranean-blue Hello there.
Corinna Laughlin here with the Poem of the Week. This week, I’ve chosen
a poem by a contemporary poet, Naomi Shihab Nye. Jackie O’Ryan will read
the poem, then I’ll be back with some brief commentary. Naomi
Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a
Palestinian refugee father and an American mother. Now based in San
Antonio, Texas, she is one of America’s best-known poets, the recipient
of countless awards and fellowships. Her poetry highlights the
experience of women, of Arab-Americans, of her Mexican American
neighbors in San Antonio, of Muslims, and of refugees and immigrants.
She has written poetry and prose for children and young adults as well.
Nye has also devoted considerable energy to sharing the voices of other
poets, editing anthologies that bring poets from around the world to an
English-speaking audience. Nye has said: “to counteract negative
images conveyed by blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit
simple stories closer to heart and more common to everyday life. Then we
will be doing our job.” This poem, “Mediterranean Blue,” written
in 2019, is a perfect example of that approach. Back in 2013,
the Italian island of Lampedusa made headlines when a ship carrying more
than 500 asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea in North Africa, sank just
off the coast. 366 people died. The death toll was higher partly because
the boat was so overcrowded, partly because those on board did not know
how to swim. One survivor said, "I'd never been in a body of water
before. I was trying to stay afloat by splashing my hands like a dog."
Many of us may not realize that this influx of migrants is ongoing.
On one day, September 20 of this year, 26 migrant boats landed at
Lampedusa in 24 hours, bringing 263 asylum seekers to Italy. At the
island’s intake center for refugees, over a thousand people are crowded
into a facility designed for 192. This is some of the context
for this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. The words “Mediterranean Blue” evoke
a beautiful color—we are used to seeing these words on a paint tube or a
crayon, perhaps. But here, our attention is immediately drawn to the sea
crossed by refugees like those wrecked off the coast of Lampedusa. The
poem is as much about Nye’s own experience as it is about theirs: “If
you are a child of a refugee, you do not / sleep easily when they are
crossing the sea / on small rafts and you know they can’t swim.” She
thinks of her own father, and the deep sorrow that is part of the
refugee experience: Though he cast aside everything he knew, “tried to
be happy, make a new life,” there was something in him “always paddling
home,” clinging to things that reminded him of where he began, as a
drowning person holds on to whatever is floating in the water. Leaving
home has internal consequences as well as external ones. Only in
the second part of the poem does Nye speak directly to the reader about
the experience of modern-day refugees. “They are the bravest people on
earth right now,” she says; “don’t dare look down on them.” Nye reminds
us who these people are—people like us, “each mind a universe,” filled
with detail and with memory, and with “love for a humble place” – love
for their home. They have let go of all that to risk the sea in which
they can’t swim. How could we not “reach out a hand,” if we can?
I think part of what makes this poem so compelling is that Nye
unapologetically involves herself and her own story in a poem about
refugees crossing the Mediterranean today. Looking at them, she sees her
own father, and she recognizes the humanity of each of these people, the
value of their individual experience, their memory. For me, this poem is
a reminder that compassion doesn’t come automatically: it’s something we
need to work at and to foster in ourselves, by intentionally recognizing
ourselves and our own immigrant histories in the headlines around us.
For Nye, this active compassion is an essential part of the
poet’s task. I want to let Nye conclude our reflection today – this is
part of an interview with the poet from 2015, in which she talks about
the poet’s civic responsibility.
https://poets.org/text/video-naomi-shihab-nye-poets-civic-responsibility
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Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Binsey Poplars, felled 1879" My
aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in
leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank On meadow & river & wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew — Hack and rack the
growing green!
Since country is so tender To touch, her
being só slender, That, like this sleek and
seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at
all, Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of
havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a
rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.
We have met Gerard Manley Hopkins—poet and Jesuit
priest—a couple of times in this series. In his poem “God’s Grandeur,”
which we read back in April, we saw the strong ecological bent of
Hopkins’ poetry, which comes through in this poem as well. “Binsey
Poplars” is a short lyric, an elegy for a grove of aspen trees.
In the first part of the poem, Hopkins evokes the distinctive beauty of
the aspen tree, a type of poplar tree with fluttering leaves (which
appear with some frequency in English poetry!). Hopkins describes them
as “airy cages” that “quelled” or “quenched” the “leaping sun,”
beautifully evoking the way the sun shines through the trees. The Latin
name of these trees, populus tremula, arises from the distinctive
movement of the aspen’s leaves, and Hopkins evokes that playful movement
in the poem, describing how the trees “dandled a sandalled shadow.”
Even as he evokes their beauty, we sense the poet’s shock and
sadness. His “aspens dear” are “felled, felled, are all felled”: the
repetition of the word suggests the blows of the axe which cut them
down. Hopkins laments, “if we but knew what we do / When we delve or
hew.” Nature, he says, is “tender,” and her “being” is “slender” –
nature has the delicacy of an eye, and is as easily harmed or destroyed.
Why does Hopkins mourn the loss of these trees so much? Aren’t
there still plenty of aspens in England? In a journal entry written
about six years before “Binsey Poplars,” Hopkins wrote: “The ashtree
growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I
heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that
moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of
the world destroyed any more.” That word “inscape” is one of
Hopkins’ coinages. It could be defined as the distinctive inner nature
or shape of a thing – its uniqueness. That’s why he laments the Binsey
poplars—because even though there are many trees left, there’s nothing
quite like those particular trees – “after-comers cannot guess the
beauty been.” Just ten or twelve strokes of the axe and the trees are
gone. Worse than gone, they are “unselved,” another Hopkins coinage
which points to the destruction of their distinctive identity.
The poem ends with a series of repetitive phrases—“the sweet especial
scene / Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene.” That
repetition has a musical quality, almost like a song fading away. The
words are simple, but they highlight, once again, the reality that
something unique, something “especial,” has vanished in the destruction
of this row of aspen trees. I chose this poem at this time
because Hopkins so beautifully captures the real sadness we experience
when we witness the destruction of the natural world. A few weeks ago,
the row of elm trees along Marion Street, planted about the time of the
Cathedral’s dedication, was cut down. The trees had to be removed
because of Dutch elm disease, but knowing that did not make it much
easier to see them taken away. On a much larger scale, we have all
experienced a sense of loss at the destruction caused by the wildfires
across the west coast—millions of acres destroyed; trees and animals
gone; countless “inscapes,” as Hopkins would call them, lost to us.
Hopkins looked at the world with an artist’s keen awareness of the
beauty around him. In his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis says that
this faculty of seeing the beautiful in nature is not tangential to the
ecological movement – it is key to protecting the earth and its
creatures. Pope Francis writes: “By learning to see and appreciate
beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has
not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be
surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and
abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change,” he says,
we all need to learn to see the world with a poet’s eyes.
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Emily Dickinson, “These are the days when birds come back”
(130) c. 1859 These are the days when Birds come back — A
very few — a Bird or two — To take a backward look. These are
the days when skies resume The old — old sophistries of June — A
blue and gold mistake. Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee —
Almost thy plausibility Induces my belief. Till ranks of
seeds their witness bear — And softly thro’ the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf. Oh Sacrament of summer days, Oh Last
Communion in the Haze — Permit a child to join. Thy sacred
emblems to partake — Thy consecrated bread to take And thine
immortal wine! For these days of late summer and early
fall, I’ve chosen a favorite poem by Emily Dickinson, “These are the
days the when birds come back.” Jackie O’Ryan will read the poem, then
I’ll be back with some brief commentary. Thank you, Jackie.
Emily Dickinson never went far from home. Indeed, for most of her life,
she never left her house and garden. That being said, it wasn’t just any
garden. From a very young age, Dickinson learned to love gardening. As
an adult, she maintained an extensive garden, and even had a
conservatory for rarer plants indoors. She also kept an herbarium, a
common hobby at the time—an album in which she collected pressings of
more than 400 different plants, each labeled with its Latin name. When
she was a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson was pretty
miserable—except when she was studying botany! Dickinson’s
niece, Martha Bianchi, left a description of Dickinson’s garden. “There
were long beds filling the main garden, where one walked between a
succession of daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths in spring—through the
mid-summer richness—up to the hardy chrysanthemums that smelled of
Thanksgiving, savory and chill, when only the marigolds... were left to
rival them in pungency.” All of this found its way into
Dickinson’s poetry, which is full of close observation of the natural
world. She saw more in her small corner of New England than most of us
see in a lifetime! She describes a hummingbird as “a resonance of
emerald.” Bees are “black, with Gilt Surcingles – Buccaneers of Buzz.” A
snake is “a narrow fellow.” A frog is the hoarse “Orator of April.”
Dickinson’s descriptions of nature are as accurate and carefully
observed as they are idiosyncratic. In this early poem, written
when she was about 29, Dickinson captures the feeling of the transition
between the seasons, when fall has arrived but summer is not quite gone.
The birds are there—but just “a Bird or two.” The skies are still “blue
and gold,” but this is not really summer—this is “sophistry,” a
“mistake,” a “cheat.” The bees are not fooled by this “fraud.” And yet,
the poet is willing to be deceived and to believe it is still summer,
until the falling of the leaves, and the flying of seeds through the
air, and the change in the atmosphere put the question beyond any
doubt--summer is over. In the last two stanzas, the diction
changes. Instead of language of deception and fraud, Dickinson describes
this in-between time in much more elevated terms: “Sacrament,” “sacred,”
“consecrated,” “immortal.” She begs to join in this “communion,” to be
herself a partaker of the “bread” and “wine” of these last of the summer
days. This poem shows us Dickinson’s careful attention to the
natural world. She speaks of nature in a way that is both playful and
reverent. Nature is like a sacrament—a means by which God’s grace comes
to us. Dickinson was a contemporary of the
Transcendentalists—people like Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, and
others. But Dickinson was never really a Transcendentalist—for her,
nature was never interchangeable with God; nature was rather a gift of
God, a sign of God’s reality and presence. And in that belief,
Dickinson, always a non-conformist, is actually quite Catholic! In his
encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis has
written: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence,
there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail,
in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass
from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the
soul, but also to discover God in all things” (233).
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August Prayer Abbot Jeremy Driscoll, OSB
The monks chant their prayer in the hot church but their heart is
not in it. Only their vows bring them and keep them at the hot and
useless task. Gone are the sweet first good days when prayer
and singing came easy Gone as well many brothers who used to stand
here singing
the feasts with them. They know there are ways to beat this heat
and that Americans everywhere are finding them but they beat instead
the tones of psalms
and, by beating,
fall through the layers of heat
and the layers of prayer
And are standing there now
only with their sound
and their sweat everything taken from them except the way
that this day in August has been.
(1989; first published in The Night of St. John, reprinted in Some
Other Morning, Story Line Press, 1992)
Hello there! Corinna Laughlin here with the poem of the
week. For this week, I’ve chosen a poem by a living poet – Jeremy
Driscoll, who is the Abbot of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon. Scott Webster
will read the poem “August Prayer” and then I’ll be back with some brief
commentary. Thank you, Scott. Jeremy Driscoll is a monk,
priest, theologian, liturgist, scholar, and now Abbot at Mount Angel
Seminary in Oregon. He’s also a poet. This poem, “August Prayer,” was
published in 1989. The motto of the Benedictines is “ora et
labora,” “prayer and work,” which is reflected in the “horarium” or
daily schedule of the monks, which follows a fixed rhythm of just that –
times for prayer and times for work. At Mount Angel, the monks
gather for prayer in the church six times each day, in addition to time
set aside for quiet reflection and lectio divina at other times during
the day. In addition to daily Mass, the monks chant the Liturgy of the
Hours. In his Rule, St. Benedict wrote that “nothing is to be
preferred to the Work of God”—his way of referring to the shared worship
of the community. Driscoll’s poem captures how difficult this work can
be at times—the weariness, the discouragement, the boredom that can set
in. The monks are in the church chanting, Driscoll says, “but their
heart is not in it. / Only their vows bring them and keep them / at the
hot and useless task.” They remember the “sweet first good days” when
this way of life felt easy and pleasant; and they remember those who
have gone away. The “heat” in this poem is not that of an
August day in Mount Angel—which can get very hot indeed! The
“heat” stands for all the circumstances, internal and external, that
make it hard to live the religious life in our times. Our culture
extends all kinds of promises for happiness, fulfillment, and
satisfaction. Driscoll evokes the language of advertising: “there are
ways to beat this heat / and… Americans everywhere are finding them.”
But the monks, weary though they are, decline these offers. “They beat
instead the tones of psalms.” And eventually, persevering in the “Work
of God,” they get somewhere. Not to a vision of the heavens, but to a
place where “everything [is] taken from them / except the way that this
August day has been.” They are left with nothing, nothing but the
present moment—and that in itself is transcendent. I think this
is an appropriate poem as our local Church observes a Year of the
Eucharist. Participating in the liturgy is not always “sweet” and easy.
The rhythms of the Mass are so different from anything else we do during
the week; the culture in which we live has many ways of hinting to us
that liturgy, and worship itself, is useless or irrelevant. We are
surrounded by voices telling us that there are better ways to “beat the
heat,” to use Driscoll’s phrase. And there are challenges from within us
as well: weariness, impatience, or just busy-ness can make it hard to
continue to put in the effort to participate in the liturgy. In those
times, we need to do like Driscoll’s monks: pray anyway, letting our
vows—our baptismal promises—“bring” us and “keep” us, not because of
what we can get out of it, but because it is who we are. “August
Prayer” was published in a collection called The Night of St. John. St.
John of the Cross described the spiritual life as a journey in the dark,
an ascent of Mount Carmel. He described this journey in these words:
“nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And on the mountain, nothing.”
“August Prayer” reflects this deep reality of the spiritual life: that
even in prayer, we need to let go of our desire for results, for
completion, our desire to feel something. There will be moments of
exhilaration, moments where we feel close to God, and such moments are
gift, but they are not the goal. All we can do is continue at the “hot
and useless task,” knowing that it is not our work, but the “Work of
God.”
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The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by
Vélasquez) Denise Levertov She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice is his—the one who had looked at
her, once, across the crowd, as no one ever had looked? Had seen
her? Had spoken as if to her? Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now? Hands he’d laid on
the dying and made them well? Surely that face—? The man
they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. The man whose body
disappeared from its tomb. The man it was rumored now some women had
seen this morning, alive? Those who had brought this stranger
home to their table don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. But
she in the kitchen, absently touching the wine jug she’s to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening, swings round and sees
the light around him and is sure.
The
Emmaus story in the Gospel of Luke is one of the most familiar, and one
of the most mysterious, of the Resurrection narratives. Two of Jesus’
disciples—we don’t know their names—are on their way out of Jerusalem,
headed for the village of Emmaus. Along the way, they meet a stranger,
and fall into conversation. Of course, all the talk is about the news -
about Jesus, who has just been crucified. The two disciples talk about
the destruction of their hopes that he was the Messiah, but the stranger
responds to the news differently. He points them to the Scriptures and
explains how all of this was foretold to them—this is the only way the
Messiah’s destiny could unfold. Only when the three pause at an inn for
the night, and the stranger breaks bread with them, do they recognize
Jesus – and he immediately vanishes. And they hurry back to Jerusalem to
tell the others what has happened. It’s a colorful story, and
has been a favorite for artists. There’s the journey and the
conversation with the stranger… and that moment of recognition, when the
stranger breaks bread and gives thanks, and the two disciples realize
who he is. “The Servant-Girl at Emmaus” by 17th century Spanish
painter Diego Velazquez, also depicts the moment of recognition—but from
quite a different perspective. At first glance, the painting is of a
servant girl working in a kitchen, perhaps about to fill that pitcher
she is touching. In the foreground we see a wonderful still-life, where
the artist showcases his ability to capture many different textures –
silver, earthenware, enamel, linen, wood, weaving. We may need to take a
second look before we notice the Emmaus story unfolding in the upper
left, where Jesus is about to break the bread. Only then do we start to
notice other details rich in meaning: a dove that looks like it is about
to break free, and a white napkin or rag, suggesting the burial cloth
left behind in the empty tomb. The center of the painting, of
course, is the girl. From her attentive expression, we know she is
listening to what is happening in the room beyond—and we know that she
knows something! Denise Levertov’s poem imagines the girl’s
thoughts during this moment of suspense. In her telling of the story,
Jesus is no stranger to this young woman. She has encountered him
before. “Surely that voice is his—the one who had looked at her, once,
across the crowd, as no one ever had looked? Had seen her? Had spoken as
if to her?” She recognizes his voice because she has spent time
listening to his teaching. She recognizes his hands—“hands he’d laid on
the dying and made them well”—because she has witnessed Jesus at work.
The disciples will come to recognize Jesus when he breaks the bread, but
this young woman—who has brought the bread to the table—already knows
who he is. Velazquez’s painting beautifully captures a moment of
stillness and recognition. Levertov’s poem lets us see what happens
next, when the girl “swings round and sees / the light around him / and
is sure.” There is a theme that runs through the Resurrection
narratives, and indeed, through the Gospels: Jesus chooses women, often
women who are outsiders, to be his witnesses. They are the first to
recognize him as the Risen Lord, the first to tell the apostles the good
news. And that sends a clear message to every Christian: we need
to listen to each other, especially the voices of those we might
consider to be “outsiders.” Because when we really listen to the witness
of others, we aren’t just learning about them; we are glimpsing God in
them. Both the painting of Velasquez, and the poem of Levertov, invite
us to recognition: to see Christ in the breaking of the bread, and in
each other.
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Caedmon Denise Levertov All others talked as if
talk were a dance. Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet would break the
gliding ring. Early I learned to hunch myself close by the
door: then when the talk began I'd wipe my mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn to be with the warm beasts, dumb among
body sounds of the simple ones. I'd see by a twist of lit rush
the motes of gold moving from shadow to shadow slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs. The cows munched or stirred or were
still. I was at home and lonely, both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me––light effacing my feeble beam, a
forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying: but the cows
as before were calm, and nothing was burning, nothing but I, as
that hand of fire touched my lips and scorched my tongue and
pulled my voice into the ring of the dance. Hello there.
Corinna Laughlin here with the poem of the week. This week,
we’re reading Denise Levertov’s “Caedmon,” in which she takes on the
voice of Caedmon, who is honored as the first known poet to write in the
English language. Scott Webster will read the poem, then I’ll be back
with some brief commentary. Thank you, Scott. It is
thanks to St. Bede the Venerable, the 7th and 8th-century English monk
and historian, that we know Caedmon’s story. Caedmon was a herdsman,
entrusted with the care of animals at the abbey presided over by St
Hilda in Whitby. Under her leadership, the arts flourished, and Bede
describes evenings when the harp would go round the room, with each
person singing and playing to the best of their ability. I think
many of us can identify with Caedmon, who, when he saw his turn coming,
would slip quietly away and go back to his place among the animals. But
one night, he had a dream in which an angel appeared to him and asked
him to sing about God’s creation. And Caedmon did. When he woke from
this dream, he remembered what he had sung. Not only that, he found the
gift persisted, and he was able to compose verse on all kinds of sacred
subjects. At Hilda’s invitation, he became a monk of the abbey, and the
author of many poems. Levertov tells Caedmon’s story in the
first person. Talk, he says, is a dance, something the others do
gracefully, but he is just a clodhopper, getting in the way. He seems to
be more at home among the animals—“dumb,” that is, silent, “among body
sounds,” not voices. But he is not quite comfortable there, either. He
is “at home and lonely,” “both in good measure.” He is drawn both to the
lighted hall and to the dark stable. Caedmon sleeps among the animals,
but I think we can sense that Caedmon is already a poet - he can see by
the light of a rush bits of chaff from the hay, floating in the breath
of the animals like motes of gold. Into this peaceful scene
comes an angel—a fiery vision, with feathers of flame, a forest of
torches and sparks. But nothing is on fire—except Caedmon himself. The
fire touches his mouth, scorches his tongue, and Caedmon joins the
dance. Levertov uses here an image right out of scripture. In
the sixth chapter of Isaiah, we hear of the prophet’s call. In a vision,
an angel takes a burning coal from the altar of God, and touches the
prophet’s mouth with it. It is a purifying fire, but also suggests the
urgency of his mission. He will speak God’s words, in his own voice. The
poet’s call is like the prophet’s call, a collaboration between God and
the individual. And like other prophets—Jonah, for example—Caedmon runs
from his call, a reluctant prophet, until at last, with some prompting
from God!, he lets himself be “pulled… into the ring of the dance.”
Caedmon’s story is a story of vocation—where our gifts and abilities
meet God’s mission. To conclude our reflection, let us listen
to the poem traditionally called “Caedmon’s hymn”—considered the oldest
poetry in the English language, and the only poetry of Caedmon that
survives. This translation from Old English is the work of Elaine
Treharne of Stanford University. Now we ought to praise the
Guardian of the heavenly kingdom, The might of the Creator and his
conception, The work of the glorious Father, as he of each of the
wonders, Eternal Lord, established the beginning. He first created
for the sons of men Heaven as a roof, holy Creator; Then the
middle-earth, the Guardian of mankind, The eternal Lord, afterwards
made The earth for men, the Lord almighty.
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Variation on a Theme by Rilke (The Book of Hours,
Book I, Poem 4) Denise Levertov All these images (said
the old monk, closing the book) these inspired depictions, are
true. Yes—not one—Giotto’s, Van Eyck’s, Rembrandt’s, Rouault’s,
how many others’— not one is a fancy, a willed fiction, each of
them shows us exactly the manifold countenance of the Holy One,
Blessed be He. The seraph buttress flying to support a cathedral’s
external walls, the shadowy ribs of the vaulted sanctuary: aren’t
both—and equally— the form of a holy place?—whose windows’ ruby
and celestial sapphire can be seen only from inside, but then only
when light enters from without? From the divine twilight, neither
dark nor day, blossoms the morning. Each, at work in his art,
perceived his neighbor. Thus the Infinite plays, and in grace
gives us clues to His mystery. Corinna Laughlin's
commentary We met Denise Levertov earlier in this
series, when we read her wonderful poem “Annunciation.” Levertov was a
20th-century master, born in England in 1923, who died in Seattle in
1997. Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to read three poems by
Levertov for this series. These are all poems in which she responds to
other works of art—both poems and the visual arts—in interesting ways.
In this poem, Levertov reacts to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke—in
fact, she is responding to Rilke’s poem “You, Neighbor God” we read last
week. As you’ll recall, Rilke’s poem, spoken in the voice of an
old monk, questioned the images we make of the divine, which can stand
like a wall between us and God—getting in our way when we try to connect
with God. In this poem, Levertov responds to that concept. As
Levertov’s poem begins, the “old monk” closes a book, perhaps a book of
images of Christ, and roundly declares—contradicting Rilke’s old
monk!—that “all these images… these inspired depictions, are true.” Even
more, “each of them shows us exactly / the manifold countenance / of the
Holy One.” Far from distracting us or deflecting our attention from God,
Levertov’s speaker says, these “true” images reveal to us “the manifold
countenance” of God. God has one face, but it is “manifold”—so these
contrasting images can all be said to be true. Giotto – Van Eyck –
Rembrandt – Rouault – artists with such different visions, such
different ways of seeing the world – all had something in common: they
all depicted the true, though “manifold” image of God. In the
second part of the poem, Levertov distances herself still further from
Rilke. She uses an extended metaphor here—the image of a cathedral. She
speaks of the flying buttresses, the exterior supports which are such a
prominent feature in some of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the ribs
of the sanctuary—in other words, the exterior and the interior of the
building—and she asks, aren’t both of these, equally, intrinsic to “the
form of a holy place”? Without one or the other, the building cannot
stand. Where Rilke described a wall of framed images, Levertov
describes stained glass windows. The flying buttresses of a Gothic
cathedral developed to allow for ever-larger stained glass windows. You
could even say they are at the service of the windows! Stained glass
doesn’t look like much from the outside—it has to be viewed from within.
And yet, the windows require light from the outside, in order to be
seen. The light does not “glance off the frames like glare,” as Rilke
described. Instead, it shines through, and brings the windows to life.
The stained glass windows of a great cathedral demand an
interchange between outside and inside which, for Levertov, suggests the
interchange between earth and heaven, human and God. Art is a way to
glimpse God, and in fact a way to play a holy game with God: “Thus the
Infinite plays, and in grace gives us clues to his Mystery.” In
1999, Pope St. John Paul II wrote a letter to artists which resonates
with Levertov’s response to Rilke and her faith in the power of art.
“Every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost
reality of humanity and of the world. It is therefore a wholly valid
approach to the realm of faith, which gives human experience its
ultimate meaning…. In order to communicate the message entrusted to her
by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far
as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of
God…. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the
message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish
the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying
the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.”
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You, neighbor God Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
From The Book of Hours, written 1899-1903, published 1905
Translated by Babette Deutsch (1941) You, neighbor God, if
sometimes in the night I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe; and I know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there to reach it to you,
groping in the dark. Always I hearken. Give but a small sign. I am
quite near. Between us there is but a narrow wall, and by
sheer chance; for it would take merely a call from your lips or from
mine to break it down, and that without a sound. The wall
is builded of your images. They stand before you hiding you like
names. And when the light within me blazes high that in my inmost
soul I know you by, the radiance is squandered on their frames.
And then my senses, which too soon grow lame, exiled from you, must
go their homeless ways. Corinna Laughlin commentary
Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria
Rilke in 1875 in Prague, in what was then known as Bohemia. He was a
citizen of Europe, who traveled widely and lived in Germany, France, and
Switzerland, and who wrote in both German and French. A significant
figure in European literature of the 20th century, Rilke associated with
some of the major artists of his time, including Rodin—as a young man
Rilke served as a secretary to the great sculptor. Rilke was drafted
into service in World War I, a traumatic experience for him. He died of
leukemia at the young age of 51. Rilke was raised by a devoutly
Catholic mother, and though he did not practice his faith as an adult,
faith in God was at the heart of his life and art. “You, neighbor God”
is an early poem from Rilke’s first book, called The Book of Hours.
These poems were inspired by Rilke’s extensive travels in Russia, and
the poet takes on the persona of an old monk in several of the poems,
including the one we just heard. The first part of the poem is
quite playful. It’s easy to picture the scene – as he knocks on the wall
to check if an elderly neighbor needs anything—" I know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there to reach it to you.” Notice
how the roles are reversed: here is the speaker offering to help God if
God should need help in the night! But the tone shifts, as the speaker
pleads for some indication of God’s presence. “Always I hearken. Give
but a small sign. I am quite near.” God and the speaker are so close
together, but there is a separation – one which, surprisingly, either of
them could break through. “it would take merely a call from your lips or
mine to break it down.” The turning point of the poem is the
line: “The wall is builded of your images.” The thin separation between
the speaker and God is made of his images of God. Rilke is perhaps
thinking here of the iconostasis which is often the most prominent
feature in Orthodox churches. The images get in the way, Rilke says,
hiding God – and when the internal light by which he knows God shines
within him, that light is “squandered on the frames” of these images
instead of illuminating God himself. The human senses are “exiled” from
God, “homeless.” As Catholics, we are firm believers in images.
We surround ourselves with statues and images of saints, and even of
God. Our use of images is firmly grounded in the theology of the
Incarnation – as St. Paul said, Jesus “is the image of the invisible
God, the firstborn of all creation.” But the images we make can
be limiting, and, yes, get in the way, like Rilke’s wall. I think of
recent debates about images of Jesus, who, though he was, obviously, a
person of color, is most often depicted with European features and skin
color. If these are the only images of Christ we can imagine, they can
distort our understanding of who Jesus is. Images of the divine
are an essential part of how we pray and worship as Catholics. But
perhaps Rilke’s poem can invite us to think about the images of God we
depend on. Are they helping us pray—or do they sometimes get in the way?
The Bible invites us to think of God not in one way, but in many ways.
Creator, Light, Rock, Stronghold, Husband, Mother, Rescuer, Father.
All these images reveal something of God to us—but of course, none of
them says it all.
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“My own heart let me more have pity on” Gerard
Manley Hopkins, SJ (1844-1889) My own heart let me more have
pity on; let Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, Charitable;
not live this tormented mind With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless,
than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst's
all-in-all in all a world of wet. Soul, self; come, poor
Jackself, I do advise You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size At God knows when to
God knows what; whose smile 's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times
rather — as skies Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
We met Gerard Manley Hopkins earlier in this series, when we read his
wonderful poem “God’s Grandeur.” Today we read another Hopkins sonnet.
Scott Webster will read the poem, and then I’ll be back with some brief
commentary. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a tremendously gifted man.
An extraordinary and innovative poet, a brilliant classical scholar, a
gifted musician, a talented artist, a faithful and conscientious
priest—Hopkins was all of these things. And yet, through much of his
life, he was tormented by a sense of failure and inadequacy. His poems
were seldom understood, much less published; several of his assignments
as a Jesuit were in inner-city parishes where he felt exiled from the
natural world he so loved, or in schools where his humbling inadequacies
as a teacher were always on display. “If I could but get on, if
I could but produce work, I should not mind its being buried, silenced,
and going no further,” he wrote to his friend, the poet Robert Bridges,
“but it kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget. After all, I do
not despair, things might change, anything may be; only there is no
great appearance of it…” In 1884, Hopkins was assigned as
professor at University College, Dublin, which was not the great
academic institution it is now. It was a poor, struggling college, and
Hopkins was overwhelmed with a sense of isolation and failure and
entered what we would recognize now as a deep depression. “My spirits
were so crushed,” he wrote, “that madness seemed to be making
approaches—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for not
managing myself better and contriving a change” (to Robert Bridges, 1
September 1885). Out of this experience of darkness came a
series of remarkable poems, which Robert Bridges called “the terrible
sonnets” because of their content. Of these poems, Hopkins himself wrote
that they came after long silence “like inspirations unbidden and
against my will.” In these sonnets, Hopkins addresses himself directly
to God with great honesty, with language that resembles some of the
psalms and the prophets. He writes of his sense of uselessness, of
impotence, and of difficulty in praying—in one poem, he describes prayer
as being like undelivered letters to a loved one far away. We
don’t know the exact order of the terrible sonnets, or sonnets of
desolation, as they are sometimes called, but the poem we just heard is
usually placed towards the end of the sequence, because it expresses a
glimmer of hope. In this poem, Hopkins addresses himself,
entreating himself to be kinder to himself. The first lines give a vivid
picture of his helplessness and mental anguish. He begs that he might
“not live this tormented mind / With this tormented mind tormenting
yet.” The repetition in those lines—“tormented mind, tormented mind,
tormenting yet”—vividly suggests the endless cycle of negative thoughts.
This state of mind is like a prison – Hopkins gives an unforgettable
image of “groping round my comfortless.” In the second part of
the sonnet, Hopkins addresses himself as “Soul, self,” and then shifts
the tone—“poor Jackself.” “Soul, self,” are grand, impersonal terms;
“poor Jackself” is humbler, more human, more conscious of weakness.
Hopkins is doing here just what he begged for at the beginning of the
poem: having pity on himself in his humanity. “Call off thoughts
awhile,” he says, and leave room for comfort, for joy, and for whatever
God has in mind: “God knows when to God knows what.” The poem ends with
a remarkable image of God smiling. God’s smile is “not wrung”—we can’t
force it. It comes unexpectedly, like sky appearing “betweenpie”
mountains, shedding light on “a lovely mile.” At the end of the poem,
nothing has changed—but hope has entered in. In this poem, and
in the other terrible sonnets, Hopkins acknowledges the darkness he is
experiencing, but he does so with the tools and the language that his
faith gives him. He never stops wrestling with God. As one commentator
has said, “Like Jesus’ cry on the cross, Hopkins’s sonnets of desolation
are addressed to God and are themselves consolations.”
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George Herbert, “Love (III)” from St. James Cathedral, Seattle on Vimeo. |
Love (III) George Herbert Love bade me welcome. Yet my
soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let
my shame
Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the
blame? My
dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my
meat:
So I did sit and eat. Last week, we read Herbert’s poem on the
Holy Scriptures, which prompted reflection on the Liturgy of the Word at
Mass. With today’s poem by Herbert, “Love,” we’ll reflect on the Liturgy
of the Eucharist. Scott Webster will read the poem, and then I’ll be
back with some brief commentary. This poem, like all of
Herbert’s work, is rich in Scriptural allusion and full of evocative
imagery. Herbert sets up an almost romantic scene, as the speaker is
invited in for a meal by Love, but draws back, before being urged to
come in and eat. Think of the Song of Songs, the great love poem of the
Bible, which describes a similar encounter between love and the lover at
the gate, coming close and then moving away. Of course, meals have great
resonance in the New Testament. Think of the miraculous feedings and the
Last Supper accounts. Think of some of the parables of the Second
Coming: “Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on
his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have them recline
at table, and proceed to wait on them” (Luke 12:37). Herbert
imagines what that moment would be like, when Love—which is, of course,
another name for God—becomes the servant, waiting at table. And he finds
it very uncomfortable. The speaker of the poem hangs back in the
doorway, “guilty of dust and sin.” It’s an odd phrase, “guilty of dust.”
Herbert is alluding to original sin—the propensity to sin that is part
of our human condition. This awareness of sin pulls him back as soon as
he is invited into the divine presence. It’s a pattern in the
Scriptures, whenever someone encounters God. Think of the prophet
Isaiah, or St. Peter after the miraculous catch—“depart from me, Lord,
for I am a sinful man.” The speaker inches forward, then draws
back. At the same time, there is a wonderful intimacy in the language
used – “ah, my dear,” he says to Love, “I cannot look on thee.” This is
not the meeting of strangers, but of intimate friends. Love does not
brush away the speaker’s concerns, or say that there has been no sin or
wrongdoing; instead, Love reminds the speaker simply that God is God:
“who made the eyes but I?” Sinful though we are, we were made for this –
our eyes were made to look at God. In the last stanza, the
speaker continues to hang back. “Let my shame / Go where it doth
deserve.” Even that is no argument, Love says, because Love has already
borne “the blame.” The cross has taken away everything that would
prevent us from approaching God. The speaker is running out of excuses!
“My dear, then I will serve,” he says: you sit down—let me serve you.
It’s Peter’s response to Jesus’ washing of the feet. But that is not
what Love has in mind. “You must sit down and taste my meat.” Love is
going to do the serving here. It is for love to give, for us to receive.
At last, in the final, and shortest line of the poem, the speaker gives
in: “so I did sit and eat.” The sinner lets go and Love prevails.
I am reminded of the words of the great 13th century mystic St.
Catherine of Siena: “By this light I shall come to know that you,
eternal Trinity, are table and food and waiter for us.” As I
mentioned last week, we have begun a Year of the Eucharist in this local
Church, the Archdiocese of Seattle. For me, Herbert’s “Love” is the
perfect meditation on this central mystery of our faith. If you think of
the pattern of the Mass, it is not unlike this poem. We have come to the
table at God’s invitation, but again and again we pause and acknowledge
our sinfulness. “Lord, have mercy.” “Forgive us our trespasses.” “Lord,
I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.” We do not do this
to beat ourselves up or prove anything. We do this because this
awareness of our own sinfulness is the natural human response to being
in the presence of God! Throughout the Mass, Love is leading us to
the table, where all we can do is receive the free gift of the God of
love. There is no earning this gift. As Archbishop Etienne said in his
homily at the beginning of this special year of the Eucharist, “we can
be deceived in thinking that the Eucharist is what we do. It’s what God
does. It’s the work of God upon us. It’s the work of God for our
redemption.” (Read or listen to that homily here:
http://www.nwcatholic.org/news/local/year-of-the-eucharist-begins-in-archdiocese-of-seattle.html)
All we need to do—all we really can do—is what the speaker of Herbert’s
poem does: respond to the invitation, and let God work in us.
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George Herbert The Holy Scriptures II OH
that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie!
Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine, But all the
constellations of the storie. This verse marks that, and both do
make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion, These three make up some
Christians destinie: Such are thy secrets, which my life makes
good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring, And in another make me
understood.
Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse:
This book of starres lights to eternall blisse. We met
George Herbert earlier in this series, when we read his poem “Easter
Wings.” Herbert was many things—a well-born and well-connected man of
the world, and a country parson. His contemporaries marveled at his
faith. One biographer wrote that Herbert “never mentioned the name of
Jesus Christ, but with this addition, ‘My Master,’” and that when it
came to the Bible, he would say “That he would not part with one leaf
thereof for the whole world.” He called the Bible “the book of books,”
“the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort.” In this
sonnet about the Holy Scriptures, Herbert gives us an insight into how
he himself read the Bible. Anyone who has been scanning the skies
looking for Comet Neowise will appreciate Herbert’s metaphor at the
beginning of the poem. “Oh, that I knew how all thy lights combine, /
And the configurations of their glory!” The verses of the Scriptures are
likened to stars, which are beautiful in themselves, but which also
relate to each other in wonderful ways—forming “constellations.” The
Scriptures mean more in relation to each other: just as different herbs,
mixed together, become a healing medicine, a powerful “potion,” so
different verses, combined, “make up some Christian’s destiny”—in other
words, reading the Scriptures makes sense of our lives. And our lives
make sense of the Scriptures: “such are thy secrets, which my life makes
good, / And comments on thee…. Thy words do find me out, and parallels
bring.” The right way to read the Scriptures, Herbert suggests,
is with open eyes and imagination, letting the Scriptures speak to one
another—since one passage can shed light on another. But we also need to
let the Scriptures read us, since we can only understand our own lives,
our “destiny,” in light of the Scriptures. “Stars are poor books,”
Herbert concludes, but the Bible, “this book of stars,” shows the way to
“eternal bliss.” I thought this poem was especially appropriate
as we have begun a Year of the Eucharist in this local Church, the
Archdiocese of Seattle. Every time we gather around the altar to
celebrate the Eucharist, we first gather around the ambo—the table of
the word of God. And when the Scriptures are proclaimed, something
happens. As it says in the introduction to the Roman Missal, “God speaks
to his people, opening up to them the mystery of redemption and
salvation, and offering spiritual nourishment; and Christ himself is
present through his word in the midst of the faithful.” The
Liturgy of the Word at Mass is not a review of salvation history. It is
a conversation. We are invited to a way of reading, praying, and
reflecting on Scripture that is not unlike what Herbert describes in his
poem. The readings from the Old and New Testaments speak to each other
and shed light on each other—and they speak to us and shed light on our
lives, too. As Archbishop Etienne wrote in “The Work of Redemption,” his
Pastoral Letter for this Year of the Eucharist, “When we allow ourselves
to listen, really listen, to what the Scriptures are saying to us in our
own lives and to the reality we are living in, extraordinary things can
happen. When we honestly reflect on our lives and the challenges we face
as a society in light of the Scriptures, we open ourselves up to God’s
transforming power.” One of Herbert’s first biographers wrote,
“Next God the Word, he loved the Word of God.” May the same be said of
each of us!
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St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) The Pillar of Cloud
(“Lead, Kindly Light”) Lead, Kindly Light, amid
th'encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am
far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to
see The distant scene; one step enough for me. I was not ever
thus, nor prayed that Thou Shouldst lead me on; I loved to choose
and see my path; but now Lead Thou me on! I loved the garish day,
and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, Which I have loved long
since, and lost awhile! (Written at sea, 1833)
John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801 into an upper middle class
family with strong Protestant roots: his mother was from a family of
French Huguenot refugees. He dated his spiritual awakening to the age of
fifteen, when he felt an “inward conversion of which I was conscious
(and of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet).”
For Newman, the way to God was always through books. His
autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua – the “apology for his life”—is as
much about what Newman read as what he did. He writes in intricate
detail of the thinkers and ideas that fascinated and shaped him.
Newman was ordained an Anglican priest in 1825 and became a curate in
Oxford, where he was also a fellow at Oriel College. His specialty was
Patristics—the study of the Fathers of the early Church—and what he read
slowly led him towards the Roman Catholic Church. For Newman,
becoming Catholic was not a quick or easy decision. He knew that if he
became a Catholic it would cost him friends as well as his livelihood,
since he would not be able to function as a member of the Anglican
clergy nor retain his Oxford fellowship. But for Newman, simply setting
aside difficult questions was never an option. Newman wrote, “The one
question was, what was I to do? I had to make up my mind for myself, and
others could not help me. I determined to be guided, not by my
imagination, but by my reason.” Newman wrote in a diary in 1829, “I am
now in my rooms in Oriel College, slowly advancing and led on by God's
hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me.” It was
during this time of uncertainty and exploration—two steps forward, one
step back—which lasted more than ten years—that Newman wrote the poem we
just heard, which he entitled “The Pillar of Cloud,” but which is known
more familiarly as “Lead, Kindly Light.” In the book of Exodus,
the pillar of cloud leads the Israelite people in their wanderings
through the desert. It is the very presence of God in their midst, both
showing the way and protecting them in their wanderings. In this poem,
Newman invokes God as the “kindly light,” the one thing shining in the
midst of the darkness. There is no view of the “distant scene,” nor is
the path clear—there is just enough light to take one step at a time.
Newman acknowledges how difficult this is, this taking one step
at a time. “I loved to choose and see my path,” he says. But that sense
that he could direct his own course was an illusion, rooted in “pride.”
Now, he says, “Lead thou me on.” He has to yield his own will and
trust in God’s guidance, trust that the God who has blessed him in the
past will be with him in the future. The poem ends with a glimpse of the
end of this journey – “with the morn, those angel faces smile, / Which I
have loved long since and lost awhile.” The sense of loneliness,
darkness, and uncertainty we feel in the first two stanzas ends with a
wonderful sense of recognition and light. In 1845, Newman
entered the Catholic Church. He became an Oratorian priest, and was
named a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. He made many contributions to
theology, which have had an enormous impact, especially at the time of
the Second Vatican Council—hence Newman is sometimes called “the absent
Council Father.” Newman’s concept of the “development of doctrine” is
one of those contributions—he argued that Church doctrine, while
unchanging, does get developed and refined through the ages as human
reason engages with divine revelation. It’s no surprise that
the same man who wrote “Lead, kindly Light” would argue that the
Church’s understanding, too, can advance step by step, in pursuit of the
“Kindly Light” that is the living presence of God in our midst. As
Newman said in a homily, “Let us beg and pray Him day by day to reveal
Himself to our souls more fully, to quicken our senses, to give us sight
and hearing, taste and touch of the world to come; so to work within us,
that we may sincerely say, 'Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and
after that receive me with glory."
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The Kingdom of God By Francis Thompson
(1859-1907) “In no strange land” O WORLD invisible, we
view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable,
we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! Does the fish
soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air— That we
ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving
soars!— The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own
clay-shuttered doors. The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing! ‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd
faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing. But (when so sad
thou canst not sadder) Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine
the traffic of Jacob’s ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing
Cross. Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry,—clinging
Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of
Gennesareth, but Thames!
Commentary by
Corinna Laughlin Francis Thompson was a remarkable figure
by any measure. Born in 1859, he was compared to Keats and Shakespeare
in his lifetime, and although his reputation declined after his death,
many of his poems, in particular his masterpiece, “The Hound of Heaven,”
have never gone out of print. Thompson was raised in a devoutly
Catholic family. His family hoped he would be a priest, and he was sent
to a minor seminary, but he was awkward and shy and was deemed
unsuitable. He was sent to study medicine, a subject for which he had no
vocation and little interest. He was too timid to tell his family that
he wanted to be a writer—all they wanted to talk about was “cricket” and
“wars,” he later said—and things began to go downhill for Thompson.
After an illness, Thompson became addicted to opium. Things got so bad
that Thompson ended up on the streets. He was homeless in London for
three years and could only be reached by general delivery to the “Post
Office, Charing Cross, London.” It was poetry that eventually
pulled him back from the brink. All this time, Thompson had continued to
write. He submitted some poems to a Catholic editor, Wilfrid Meynell,
which were published. When Meynell met the author, and realized that he
was totally destitute, he and his wife Alice helped Thompson get off the
streets and (at least for a time) overcome his addiction.
Thanks to the Meynell’s intervention and support, Thompson became a
writer—though never a prolific one. He wrote essays and reviews for
various journals, and he continued to write poetry as well, eventually
publishing three books. At the same time, he was never what you
might call “normal.” He would suddenly get up from the table and
disappear at mealtimes, and a friend wrote that “No money... could keep
him in a decent suit of clothes for long. ...He passed at once into a
picturesque nondescript garb that was all his own and made him resemble
some weird pedlar or packman.” In spite of all the darkness
Thompson had experienced in his life, and his repeated bouts with
depression, his faith was ultimately full of hope. “I do firmly
believe that none are lost who have not wilfully closed their eyes to
the known light: that such as fall with constant striving, battling with
their temperament, or through ill-training circumstance which shuts them
from true light, &c.; that all these shall taste of God's justice, which
for them is better than man's mercy.” Thompson died of
tuberculosis on November 13, 1907 at the age of 48. The poem
we’re reading today, “The Kingdom of God,” was one of Thompson’s last
poems, not published until after his death. The poem begins with a
series of paradoxical assertions – we see the invisible, we touch the
intangible, we know the unknowable, we take hold of the
“inapprehensible.” We have access to the world of the spirit. It is not
far away--we do not need to look to the stars to find God. In fact, we
need not go elsewhere to seek God any more than the fish needs to search
for the water or the eagle the air. In other words, God comes to us in
our own element—God is our element. The divine is
close—if we were listening, we could hear the wings of angels beating at
our “clay-shuttered doors.” But with our “estranged faces”—not looking
for God—we don’t see “the many-splendored thing.” Nevertheless,
God is everywhere, accessible to all who call upon him. At the end of
the poem, Thompson alludes to his own experiences on the streets of
London. In the depths of sadness, he says, “cry,” and there will be
Jacob’s ladder, linking heaven and Charing Cross. Ask for help, and
Christ will walk on the water, not far away on the Sea of Galilee, but
nearby: on the Thames. In this poem, Thompson’s very Catholic
imagination is at work. As Catholics, we firmly believe that we can
touch the invisible through the tangible—anointed with oil, we are
sealed with the Holy Spirit; bread and wine become the Body and Blood of
Christ. Thompson reminds us that the divine presence is everywhere. The
poem reflects the words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel: “The coming of the
kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here
it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the kingdom of God is among you.”
The kingdom of God unfolds in our own circumstances, in our own place
and time. We just need the eyes to recognize it.
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Song Silence By Madeleva Wolff, CSC Yes, I shall take
this quiet house and keep it With kindled hearth and candle-lighted
board, In singing silence garnish it and sweep it
For Christ, my Lord. My heart is filled with little songs to
sing Him— I dream them into words with careful art— But this I
think a better gift to bring Him,
Nearer his heart. The foxes have their holes, the wise, the
clever; The birds have each a safe and secret nest; But He, my
lover, walks the world with never A place to rest. I found
Him once upon a straw bed lying; (Once on His mother’s heart He laid
His head) He had a bramble pillow for His dying, A stone when
dead. I think to leave off singing for this reason, Taking
instead my Lord God’s house to keep, Where He may find a home in
every season
To wake, to sleep. Do you not think that in this holy sweetness
Of silence shared with God a whole life long Both he and I shall find
divine completeness Of perfect song? Sister Madeleva
Wolff was a renowned educator and administrator, a poet, and a scholar
who in her lifetime rubbed elbows with Edith Wharton, G. K. Chesterton,
Helen Hayes, Thomas Merton, and many other luminaries. She was also a
religious, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross for more than
fifty years. She is a figure who deserves to be better known!
Eva Wolff was born in Cumberland, Wisconsin in 1887. She had a fairly
conventional childhood—except for her exceptional intellect. Her gifts
were so obvious that her older brother dropped out of college so the
family could afford to send Eva to St. Mary’s College in South Bend,
Indiana. Eva had been planning to study mathematics, but she
soon switched to medieval literature, and discovered a love for
poetry—both studying it and writing it. It took everyone by surprise,
including Eva herself, when she decided to join the Sisters of the Holy
Cross. She entered the novitiate in 1908, when she was nineteen years
old. In religious life, she was given the name Madeleva, and soon
embarked on a distinguished career of study and teaching. Sister
Madeleva was among the first women religious to receive a Masters degree
from Notre Dame; she went on to complete a doctoral degree at Berkeley.
Later, she did post-doctoral study at Oxford with the likes of J. R. R.
Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. All this time, she was a full-time teacher and
administrator, eventually being appointed President of her own alma
mater, St. Mary’s College, where her innovative leadership gained the
college nationwide acclaim. She developed the first graduate study
program in theology for women religious and laypeople in the country,
and was instrumental in the Sister Formation movement, which advocated
thorough and high-level education for women religious. She was a force
to be reckoned with: “Moderation is a colorless, insipid thing,” she
wrote. “I know its practice to be well-nigh impossible. To live less
would not be living.” Throughout her busy life, Madeleva wrote
poetry, publishing a number of books, some of which were considered
controversial for the passionate language she used in writing about God.
Given the busy life of a sister, time was hard to come by; Madeleva came
to be grateful for her chronic insomnia which gave her time to compose.
“I love words because I love the Word,” she would say. “I know of no
discipline more merciless, more demanding, than the writing of good
verse—even if it doesn’t reach the levels of great poetry.” Madeleva
died in 1962 at the age of 77. Knowing a little of Madeleva’s
story, I think we get a better sense of both the sweetness and the
underlying tension of this poem, “Song Silence.” It’s a poem about
poetry—and about renunciation. “My heart is filled with little songs to
Him-- / I dream them into words with careful art,” she says in the
second stanza. But, she wonders, would it not be a better gift to
prepare “a quiet house” for the one who was laid in a manger as an
infant, who had no place to lay his head as an adult. “I think to leave
off singing,” she says, and dedicate herself instead to this quiet work
of contemplation, which she compares to the traditional domestic (and
typically feminine) task of housekeeping. In the last stanza, she asks a
question: “Do you not think that in this holy sweetness / Of silence
shared with God,” she and God both will find “perfect song”?
There is a sweetness in the poem, and an intimacy with God, whom she
calls “my lover.” But there is also a certain tension here, one that
many women felt at the time Madeleva was writing, in the 1940s and
1950s. She loves to “sing,” to write poetry, but wouldn’t silence be
better, after all? Wouldn’t her life be better spent in contemplation,
rather than in words—in keeping house, rather than singing? Madeleva
tells herself that she will dedicate herself to this sweet domestic
housekeeping for God. And yet, though the poem begins with a decisive
“yes” it ends with a question mark. Renouncing poetry is something she
is contemplating—but not doing, at least, not yet. I think this
poem illuminates what Madeleva’s biographer Gail Porter Mandell sees as
a keynote in Madeleva’s approach to life—what Madeleva herself referred
to as the “relaxed grasp.” Madeleva held on to what mattered—but, in
keeping with her vow of poverty, she held even precious things like
poetry with a certain lightness, a “relaxed grasp,” a “holy
indifference,” always preparing herself to let them go if God willed it.
For Madeleva, this “relaxed grasp” was true freedom. In speaking of her
own vocation, she wrote: “Only when one has given not only all his
actual self, but all his potential self, is he free.”
Read more about Madeleva here.
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Light Shining out of Darkness BY WILLIAM
COWPER 1 God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to
perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the
storm. 2 Deep in unfathomable mines Of never-failing
skill, He treasures up his bright designs, And works his sov'reign
will. 3 Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, The clouds
ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings
on your head. 4 Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But
trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence He hides a
smiling face. 5 His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding
ev'ry hour; The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the
flow'r. 6 Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work
in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.
Cowper’s poem is so well-known as a hymn text that it can be
easy to dismiss. It’s a poem about God’s Providence, which guides
everything that happens to us, and about God’s designs, which are far
beyond our ability to understand, but always for our good. “Behind a
frowning Providence / he hides a smiling face” has entered the language
and become a cliché. To be honest, it can all sound a bit pat. But this
poem is the fruit of Cowper’s painful experience in a lifetime of
intense suffering and religious struggle. William Cowper was
born in 1731 into a quite distinguished family—his mother was a Donne,
related to John Donne, and his father was connected to the Earl Cowper,
the lord chancellor of England. His life was marked by early tragedy—his
mother died when he was just six years old, and he then went to boarding
school, where he was systematically bullied. These two experiences are
thought to have contributed to Cowper’s many, serious, and extended
bouts with mental illness. The first of these came in 1763, when Cowper
was 32 years old. He had been nominated for a significant post in the
House of Lords, which would require a public examination. The thought of
this examination before the entire House of Lords brought on a psychotic
episode. Cowper became convinced that he was damned and attempted
suicide. Cowper spent many months in an asylum and during his
recovery, he had a profound conversion experience in which he felt in a
profound way God’s mercy for him and for all sinners. He was one of the
“fearful saints” he talks about in the poem. Cowper became a parishioner
of John Newton—the famous slave trader turned minister--who invited him
to contribute hymns to a new hymnal he was preparing. Newton wrote
“Amazing Grace”; Cowper wrote “O for a closer walk with God” and the
poem we just heard, among others. Cowper continued to struggle
with mental illness after his conversion. All his life, he considered
himself an outsider, both socially and spiritually: a “stricken deer,
that left the herd / Long since,” as he wrote in one of his poems.
Knowing a little of Cowper’s story, “Light Shining Out of Darkness”
takes on new meaning. The darkness of which Cowper speaks was something
he knew from experience; the fear he mentions, he felt; the hope he
expresses, was what he longed for. The first stanza of the poem
draws on Biblical language. “He plants his footsteps in the sea, and
rides upon the storm.” The language recalls the psalms, especially Psalm
104: “You make the clouds your chariot, traveling on the wings of the
wind.” The imagery also evokes the story of Christ, walking on the water
and stilling the storm. This language speaks of the power of God, but
also reminds us of the desperation of the Apostles in the boat, crying
out for the Lord’s help. In the stanzas that follow,
Cowper uses a series of images and comparisons to highlight the hidden
quality of God’s Providence. It is like treasure hidden in a mine; like
storms of rain pent in a dark cloud; like a smile concealed by a frown;
like a sweet flower hidden within a bitter bud. God is present, but
hidden. I think the key word of this poem is found in this
first stanza: “mysterious.” God’s ways are not clear or even
intelligible to us most of the time. Providence—that sense of God’s
guiding hand in history and in our own lives—is also mystery.
Cowper offers no key to understanding God’s provident care. Rather, he
insists that only God can do that: “God is his own interpreter, and he
will make it plain.” Only God can reveal to us how his Providence is
governing our lives, and our world. God’s ways are a profound
mystery--but our faith tells us there is always mercy and there is
always hope.
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Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill” Does the road wind up-hill all
the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey
take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof
for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from
my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet
other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will
not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort,
travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds
for all who come.
Every Christian lives their faith in their own
way. For some, faith is tranquil; for others, stormy. Rossetti was
definitely one of the latter. Her faith story brings to mind St. Paul’s
words to the Philippians, “work out your salvation with fear and
trembling.” (Philippians 2:12) Faith did not come easy to
Rossetti. She was hyper-conscious of her own flaws and exerted a rigid
control over herself even with close friends. A biographer has written
that her self-control was so extreme that she “retreated behind a mask
of excessive and sometimes offensive politeness,” in an effort to offset
what she saw as her besetting flaws of pride and anger. This
poem, written in 1858 when Rossetti was 28 years old, takes the form of
a dialogue, questions and answers, between two voices. We don’t really
know who either the questioner or the respondent is. But we soon
recognize that much lies beneath the surface. The first
questions are simple, almost childlike. Is it all uphill? And how long
will it take? We are reminded of the proverbial child’s question, “are
we there yet?” The answers to these questions are affirmative. Yes –
this journey is uphill all the way, and it’s not short: it will last
from morning until night – a lifetime. The questioner goes on to
other questions about the end of the journey. How is one to know the
place? What if you get lost? And the answers come, reassuringly. There
will be a place to stay – “a roof for when the slow dark hours begin.”
And there is no getting lost – “you cannot miss that inn.” Others have
done this before, and there will be no waiting: there is room for all,
“beds for all who come.” This poem is full of hope. To every
question, there is a reassuring “yes.” And yet, I find the poem quite
challenging as well. The responses are certainly hopeful, but they are
also vague and sometimes even a bit ominous. When the questioner asks,
“shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak,” the response comes: “Of
labour you shall find the sum.” Whose labor is being referred to here?
It sounds like the “sum” of comfort will depend on the labor of the
individual. In this poem, the uphill journey is, of course, a
metaphor for life itself, with all its challenges; and the inn where we
rest at the end of the day can be read in a variety of ways. On one
level, it speaks of heaven—“in my Father’s house there are many
dwelling-places.” The inn can also be read as the grave that awaits us
all, the “roof” under which we shelter during the “slow dark hours.”
At another level, we can read “Up Hill” as a poem about anything
that is really worth doing. Think of all the uphill journeys in our
lives – and in our society. As Rossetti’s poem makes clear, these
journeys will take everything we have. The answers to our questions will
not come clear and absolute. Little signs of hope are all we are going
to get. In 1865, Rossetti wrote another poem, which is a
companion to “Up Hill.” Entitled “Amor Mundi,” or “Love of the World,”
it also features two speakers in a dialogue. One invites the other on a
journey, this time, a downhill journey: “The downhill path is easy, come
with me an it please ye, / We shall escape the uphill by never turning
back.” At the end of that poem, we realize where that this downhill path
is “hell’s own track.” And the consequences are bleak: “too late for
cost-counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
If it’s easy, Rossetti says, be suspicious of it: everything worth doing
is difficult.
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Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud by JOHN DONNE
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou
think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou
kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much
pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best
men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost
with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us
sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more;
Death, thou shalt die.
John Donne was born in 1572 into a staunchly
Catholic family. His uncle was a Jesuit priest, Jasper Heywood, who
spent his life in exile. While a student at Cambridge, Donne refused to
take the oath of supremacy acknowledging the authority of England’s
monarch over matters of religion, and was denied his degree as a result.
He studied law, traveled widely, and even joined the fight against the
Spanish Armada. He had a chequered life story, and is as well known for
his remarkable love poems as he is for his sacred poetry and his
sermons! He eventually joined the Church of England, and in 1615 became
a priest, serving as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. He was
a renowned preacher. He preached his most famous sermon, “Death’s Duel”
before the court of King Charles I in February, 1631, just a few weeks
before his own death. Death was a constant in Donne’s life. He
and his wife, Anne, had twelve children—two of them were stillborn, and
another three died before the age of ten. Anne died just five days after
giving birth to their last child. In 1623, Donne had a near-fatal
illness about which he wrote in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,
which include the famous passage, “never send to know for whom the bell
tolls; it tolls for thee.” All of these experiences
shaped Donne’s attitudes, and his later works are deeply religious—and
sometimes quite dark. In “Death’s Duel,” his famous “last” sermon, Donne
writes that we are doomed from our very birth: “This deliverance, from
the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another
death, the manifold deaths of this world; we have a winding-sheet in our
mother’s womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into
the world wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.”
In the Renaissance convention, death is a fearsome opponent, who
pursues us and inevitably triumphs. But in this famous sonnet, “Death be
not proud,” Donne approaches death in a very different way. Addressing
death directly, Donne mocks death’s power. “Death, be not proud,” he
says. “Some have called thee mighty and dreadful, but thou art not so.”
No, death in this poem is not strong, but weak. Donne builds his case as
the sonnet unfolds. Rest and sleep are common images for death and these
are pleasant things; then death must be, too. The best among us die
young, and what do they find but “rest of their bones, and soules
delivery.” Both good things. In the second half of the sonnet,
Donne hammers home his point. Death is a slave to so many powers--fate,
chance, kings, and desperate men, poison, war, and sickness, all of
which control death’s power. So what reason does death have to be
proud? Death is not in charge. Donne’s final stroke is at
the end of the poem. The real reason death can’t win—is that we can’t
die. After the sleep of death, “we wake eternally.” Donne is evoking St.
Paul in I Corinthians, and the fundamental Christian belief in the
resurrection of the dead. “If the dead are not raised, neither has
Christ been raised… If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we
are the most pitiable people of all. But now Christ has been raised from
the dead.” As Christians, the Resurrection isn’t something that happened
once to Jesus – the Resurrection is our destiny too. “Just as in Adam
all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in
proper order: Christ the firstfruits; then, at his coming, those who
belong to Christ… For he must reign until he has put all his enemies
under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
This sonnet wonderfully and dramatically reaffirms this basic Christian
belief. Because Christ is risen, death has no dominion over him—or over
us. Because Christ is risen, we will rise. The liturgy says this so well
in the Easter Sequence: “Death and life have contended in that combat
stupendous. The prince of life who died, reigns immortal.”
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And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains
green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures
seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our
clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark
Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my
arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my
Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor
shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In
Englands green & pleasant Land.
William Blake
Corinna Laughlin's commentary
William Blake has been called the greatest artist
England ever produced. He was an extraordinary figure—a genius in the
visual arts as well as one of England’s greatest poets. Born in 1757, he
had a vision of God at the age of four, and saw a tree full of angels.
These early spiritual experiences shaped him for life. He was profoundly
Christian, but also deeply eccentric, to the point that he was
considered mad by many of his contemporaries. Blake was a
craftsman, an engraver by trade. At night, he worked on his own
projects, in which image and text are married as they never had been
before. Blake never achieved much commercial success. His works are not
only utterly unconventional; they can also be quite cryptic. And he was
extremely opinionated, which probably did not help: “To generalize is to
be an idiot,” is one of his famous statements. Only long after his
death, well into the twentieth century, did Blake come into his own as
one of the great Romantic voices. “And did those feet,” which we just
heard, has become an unofficial anthem of England, and was even heard at
the royal wedding of Kate and William. Blake’s poem is at one
level very simple. Blake imagines a time when Christ himself, the Lamb
of God, walked the “mountains green” and the “clouded hills” of England,
now marred by “dark Satanic Mills.” It is a poem of resolve, as the
speaker decides to fight with every weapon at his command until England
is the new Jerusalem, “green & pleasant” again. In this poem, as
with all things Blake, there is more than meets the eye. Blake’s poem is
rich in literary allusions. Blake is drawing on a Grail legend,
the stories of King Arthur. As the story goes, when a young boy, Jesus
traveled with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea (the figure mentioned in
the Gospel as giving his new tomb for Christ to be buried). They came
all the way to England, to Glastonbury, to be specific.. After the death
and Resurrection of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is said to have returned
to England to become the first to preach the Gospel to the English.
Blake is playing on that legend. Notice how it’s all in the form of a
question—“did those feet,” “was the Lamb,” “did the Countenance.” He
knows it’s legend, but that doesn’t take away the amazement of Christ’s
presence right in his own world, in his own surroundings. “Was Jerusalem
builded here / Among these dark Satanic Mills” Blake asks. When
Blake wrote this poem (about 1804) the kind of mills we associate with
England’s industrial revolution did not yet exist, but they were on
their way. For Blake, the mill stands in for any rigid, dehumanizing,
and evil influence. In contrast, Christ is associated with the natural
world – light and green, and with all that is “pleasant.” The word
sounds banal to us, but it is a word that speaks of relationship to
humanity. (Notice the word is used twice in this short poem).
Blake is also deeply versed in the Bible, and that comes through here.
The poem recalls the language of the prophets. Blake refers to Christ as
“the holy Lamb of God,” a title for Jesus especially associated with St.
John the Baptist, who pointed out Jesus as “Lamb of God” and who also
ended up dead for speaking truth to power. The third and
fourth stanzas of the poem recall Old Testament prophets, particularly
Elijah. In the second Book of Kings, Elijah asks Elisha what he wants
from him. And Elisha answers that he wants “a double portion of your
spirit.” In other words, he wants to be twice the prophet Elijah was!
And the prayer is granted. Elijah is taken to heaven in “a fiery chariot
and fiery horses,” and young Elisha takes up the prophet’s mantle. Here
Blake is playing Elisha—taking up the prophetic task. The last stanza
recalls the book of the prophet Nehemiah, and the rebuilding of the
walls of Jerusalem. It seems appropriate to read this poem
right after Pentecost. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to rest on all
the disciples in wind and flame. In our Christian tradition, the Spirit
dwells within every member of the baptized. We are all called to be
prophets. Where are the prophetic voices of our own time? And what are
the “dark Satanic mills” in our day that need to be broken so that our
own land can be “green and pleasant” once again, revealed as the very
dwelling place of the Lamb of God?
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Some keep the Sabbath going to Church (236) Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886) Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep
it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an
Orchard, for a Dome – Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings – And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings. God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at
last – I’m going, all along.
Hello there! Corinna Laughlin here with the poem of the week.
For this week, I have chosen a classic by American poet Emily Dickinson.
Jackie O’Ryan will read the poem, then I will be back to offer a brief
commentary. Thank you, Jackie! You can see why we need
this Emily Dickinson poem right now! Emily Dickinson is one of the
greatest American poets; indeed, she is one of the greatest poets in the
English language. Born in 1830 in western Massachusetts, her childhood
was quite a normal one. Her father was a prominent attorney who even
served in the US House of Representatives. He was an imposing figure.
Dickinson admitted to a friend that she did not learn to tell time until
she was fifteen because she was too intimidated to tell her father she
didn’t understand his explanation. As a young woman, Dickinson
went off to school—Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke
College, in nearby South Hadley. Established in 1837 by Mary Lyon, an
extraordinary figure, it was one of the first and best colleges for
women in the United States. It was an intensely religious environment,
and the school proudly displayed the names of graduates who had gone on
to Christian missionary work around the world. During Emily
Dickinson’s year at Mt Holyoke, the students would be regularly
questioned about whether they were “saved” or not, and categorized as
“professors,” “hopers,” and “no hopers.” Emily Dickinson landed among
the “no hopers.” The preaching and the emphasis on an emotional
conversion experience was constant. This is a sample of one of Mary
Lyon’s addresses to the students: “Do you not know that you are now
exposed to God’s wrath, that a miserable eternity awaits you?” This
religious language was not unusual; in fact, it was typical of New
England religious experience at the time. The emphasis on
conversion may have been part of the reason she left Mt Holyoke after
just one year, still classed among the no-hopers. Back home in Amherst,
a religious revival was underway. Over the years, many members of the
Dickinson family had conversion experiences and became active members of
local congregations, but Dickinson did not. She gradually became a
recluse, living in self-imposed isolation from her community and even
from much of her family. There were many reasons for this, but her sense
of religious isolation surely played its part. So was Dickinson
a “no hoper”? I think her poetry gives us the clear answer to that—no!
She was nourished by the Bible, and her writing is profoundly imbued
with Christian themes. In one poem, she wrote simply, “I know that he
exists.” God is ever-present and a number of her poems are addressed
directed to Christ. But when it came to church, Dickinson
remained profoundly skeptical. That is clearly evident in this short,
playful poem. While others go to church, Dickinson stays home and keeps
the sabbath in her own way. She has everything she needs—a chorister, a
dome, and even a noted clergyman - God. I have always loved
this poem, but I have always mentally argued with Dickinson at the same
time. What about community? We need each other! We need our shared
worship. During this lockdown, however, I have found this poem to take
on a whole new meaning. Now, when we cannot gather as community,
“keeping the sabbath” in our accustomed way, we can learn from Dickinson
other ways to keep the sabbath. In particular, we learn that God speaks
to us through the beauty of the natural world, with birds as our
choristers, trees for a dome, even a little sexton or sacristan—and of
course, God, the most noted clergyman of all, doing the preaching. Most
of us hopefully have had a chance to do a little more walking, a little
more looking around, and have been able to sense in new ways God’s
presence in creation. In the final lines of the poem, Dickinson
says, “instead of getting to heaven at last, I’m going, all along.” This
attitude is so different from the theology she heard from the religious
leaders of her day. Heaven is not a reward for the few, bestowed by a
judging and reluctant God. Heaven is quite simply being in God’s
presence. I am reminded of the words of the French Carmelite
mystic, St Elizabeth of the Trinity: “It seems to me that I have found
my heaven on earth, because my heaven is you, my God, and you are in my
soul.” I think Elizabeth and Emily might have a lot to say to
each other!
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The Virgin at Noon | Paul Claudel It is
noon. I see the church, open. I must go in. Mother of Jesus Christ, I
do not come to pray. I have nothing to offer and nothing to ask.
I come, Mother, only to look at you. To look at you, to weep for
happiness, knowing that I am your son, and that you are there.
Just one moment while everything stops. Noon! To be with you,
Mary, in this place where you are. Not to say anything, but only
to sing Because the heart is too full; Like the blackbird that
pursues its idea In impromptu couplets like these. Because
you are beautiful, because you are immaculate, The woman at last
restored in Grace, The creature in her first dignity And in
her final glory, Just as she came forth from God in the morning Of
her original splendor. Ineffably intact because you are the
Mother of Jesus Christ, Who is the Truth carried in your arms, and
the only hope And the only fruit. Because you are the woman,
The Eden of the old forgotten tenderness, Whose glance finds the
heart suddenly And makes the pent-up tears overflow. Because
it is noon, Because we are in this moment, today, Because you are
there, always, Simply because you are Mary, Simply because you
exist, Mother of Jesus Christ, thanks be to you!
Translation by Corinna Laughlin
Corinna Laughlin's reflection:
Paul Claudel was born in 1868 into a typical bourgeois French
household. Though baptized a Catholic, religion was not really part of
his life and by his teens he was a non-believer. At the age of 18, he
went on a whim to Notre Dame in Paris for Mass on Christmas Day.
As he later wrote, he thought the ceremonies might give him some good
material for a few decadent poems. Later that afternoon, he returned for
Christmas Vespers. And something happened. “I was towards the
front of the crowd, close to the second pillar at the entrance to the
choir, to the right on the sacristy side. It was then that the event
happened which has dominated my entire life. In an instant, my heart was
touched and I believed. I believed, with such strength… that ever since,
no books, no reasonings, none of the vicissitudes of a restless life,
have been able to shake my faith, nor, truth to tell, even to touch it.”
Claudel tried to join the Benedictines, but was turned down. He entered
the diplomatic service instead, and served all over the world, including
the US, where he made the cover of Time magazine! His prolific
writing—poetry, prose, and drama—was deeply imbued with his Catholic
faith. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize six times. For
Claudel, that transforming moment of conversion was closely associated
with Mary. Though he did not know it at the time, he later realized that
his conversion had taken place as the choir began to sing Mary’s song,
the Magnificat. Claudel wrote, tongue in cheek, “After all,
woman, it was you who made the first move…. Everything that has happened
since, I can’t help it, you are responsible!” Something of that
same loving and playful tone comes through in today’s poem Claudel
describes entering a church at Noon, which is of course the hour of the
Angelus, a traditional Catholic prayer to Mary. But Claudel says,
surprisingly, “I do not come to pray. I have nothing to offer and
nothing to ask.” So why is he there? “not to say anything, but only to
sing.” He simply wants to be in Mary’s presence, as in the presence of a
mother. In the second half of the poem, Claudel meditates on the
uniqueness of Mary. Mary is the New Eve, giving us a glimpse of God’s
creation in its “first dignity,” before the fall; and she is also God’s
creature “in her final glory,” for in Mary’s Assumption, we glimpse the
dignity of each human person, destined to share in the Resurrection of
the Body. At the end of the poem, Claudel steps back from the
grandeur of this theologically rich imagery about Mary, and returns to
the simplicity with which he began. He gives thanks, simply because Mary
is there—simply because Mary is.
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Denise Levertov: “Annunciation” from St. James Cathedral, Seattle on Vimeo.
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Denise Levertov, “Annuciation”
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished, almost always a
lectern, a book; always the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings, the angelic ambassador,
standing or hovering, whom she acknowledges, a guest. But we
are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage. The
engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent.
God waited. She was free to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
____________________ Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or
another in most lives?
Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen
pride, uncomprehending. More often those moments
when roads of light and storm open from
darkness in a man or woman, are turned away from in dread, in a
wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives
continue.
God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
____________________ She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others, wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph. Compassion and intelligence fused in her,
indivisible. Called to a destiny more momentous than any in
all of Time, she did not quail, only asked a simple,
‘How can this be?’ and gravely, courteously, took to heart the
angel’s reply, the astounding ministry she was offered: to
bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in
hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in
slender vase of being, the sum of power– in narrow flesh, the
sum of light.
Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like
any other, milk and love–
but who was God. This
was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
____________________ She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted
teeth,
raging, coerced. Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the lily
glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings. Consent,
courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.
Corinna Laughlin's reflection During this
month of May, we are exploring poems about Mary. This week, we’ll
explore “Annunciation” by 20th century poet Denise Levertov. We have a
special guest reader this week, Cathedral parishioner Jackie O’Ryan.
Jackie will read the poem, then I’ll be back to offer a brief
commentary.
Denise Levertov was born in 1923 in Essex, England,
and died in 1997 in Seattle, Washington. Her mother was Welsh and her
father was a Russian Jew, who converted to Christianity and became a
minister of the Church of England. It was a very artistic household.
[ QUOTE FROM LEVERTOV ] As a young woman, Levertov moved to the
United States and considered herself an American poet. She was always
very engaged with justice issues, and served as the poetry editor for
the magazine The Nation for a number of years. She wrote about spiritual
themes all her life, though it was not until she was teaching at
Stanford in the 1980s that she began her own journey from agnostic to
Christian. In 1989, she moved to Seattle, where she lived near Seward
Park and fell in love with Mount Rainier. The mountain became a symbol
of God for her, always present, whether “out” or not. [QUOTE FROM
LEVERTOV] Levertov entered the Catholic Church at St. Edward’s
Parish in Seattle in 1990. She died in 1997 at the age of 74, and is
buried in Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetery. In this poem, Levertov
evokes familiar paintings of the Annunciation—“we know the scene,” she
says – the room, the book, the lily, the angel. But then she delves into
the part of the story we may not focus on. This is not a story about
“meek obedience,” she says, but “courage.” God did not require anything
of Mary—she was free to accept or to reject. That choice, Levertov says,
is “integral to humanness.” In the central part of the poem,
Levertov asks whether there are annunciations in everyone’s life—but not
everyone responds as Mary did. “Some unwillingly /undertake great
destinies, / enact them in sullen pride, / uncomprehending.” Others
simply turn away when a difficult path opens in front of them – “in
dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair / and with relief. Ordinary
lives continue.” When we refuse, Levertov says in a wonderful insight,
“God does not smite” us. But nevertheless, something is lost. “The gates
close, the pathway vanishes.” At the end of the poem, Levertov
comes back to that room where the angel is awaiting Mary’s answer.
Levertov gives us a unique and very relatable idea of what it meant for
Mary to be free from original sin: “she had been a child… like any other
child—but unlike others, wept only for pity, laughed in joy, not
triumph. Compassion and intelligence fused in her, indivisible.” It was
this freedom which allowed Mary to consent to God’s plan, not
reluctantly, but with total openness and trust. At the end of the poem,
Levertov imagines what happens next, after Mary’s consent, and the light
and transformation it brings: “The room filled with its light, / the
lily glowed in it, /
and the iridescent wings. / Consent, /
courage unparalleled, / opened her utterly.” Mary’s “Yes” to God
is not passive: consenting to God’s will is, rather “courage
unparalleled.”
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William Wordsworth “The Virgin” Mother!
whose virgin bosom was uncrost With the least shade of thought to sin
allied. Woman! above all women glorified, Our tainted nature's
solitary boast; Purer than foam on central ocean tost; Brighter
than eastern skies at daybreak strewn With fancied roses, than the
unblemished moon Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;
Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween, Not unforgiven the
suppliant knee might bend, As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in thee Of mother's love with
maiden purity, Of high with low, celestial with terrene!
Corinna Laughlin's reflection
May is Mary’s Month, so this month we’ll be reading poems about
Mary, from classic and contemporary poets. For this first week of May,
I’ve chosen William Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The Virgin.” William
Wordsworth was born in 1770 and died in 1850. There was a lot of sadness
in Wordsworth’s life, starting with the death of his parents – he was
orphaned by the age of 13. Three of his five children predeceased him.
He found his joy in the glorious landscape of the Lake District, where
he spent most of his life. That landscape filled his poetry. Wordsworth,
with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, became one of the great English
Romantic poets. They were pioneers of a new approach to poetry,
characterized by close observation of the natural world, simpler
language, and an emphasis on subjectivity—the interior life of the poet.
“The Virgin” is a later poem, part of a sequence of 47 sonnets
written in 1821 and 1822, when Wordsworth was in his early fifties. The
sonnets tell the whole story of the Christian faith in England.
Wordsworth was a staunch Anglican—who would, he said, shed his blood for
the Church of England. In this sonnet, Wordsworth expresses
great sympathy for Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The
poem is addressed directly to Mary. Wordsworth uses ideas and images
that recall Catholic beliefs about Mary: she is the Immaculate
Conception – in the poem’s most famous line, Wordsworth says she is “our
tainted nature’s solitary boast”—the one person free from original sin.
The imagery he uses to highlight Mary’s purity—comparisons to the ocean,
daybreak, the moon –all resonate with Catholic prayers about Mary, whom
we invoke as “Morning Star” and “Star of the Sea.” All of this
makes the turn the poem takes halfway through more shocking: “Thy
Image falls to earth.” Wordsworth is talking here about the English
Reformation, what has been called “the stripping of the altars,” when
statues of Mary and the saints were destroyed in an effort to purify the
faith of English Christianity. While later, images of Mary and the
saints, and tabernacles, would return to Anglican worship, at the time
Wordsworth is writing, that had not yet become common. At the
end of the poem, Wordsworth expresses his gentle sympathy with those who
turn to Mary in prayer. His language is quite tentative—“some… not
unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,” he says—notice the double
negative. Wordsworth understands why we Catholics are drawn to Mary, and
perhaps wishes that he, too, could turn to her in prayer. For
Wordsworth, Mary is the best of both worlds—she combines a “mother’s
love” and “maiden’s purity,” high and low, earthly and heavenly—“our
tainted nature’s solitary boast.”
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Poem of the Week: R. S. Thomas’ “Folk Tale” from St. James Cathedral, Seattle on Vimeo.
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R. S. Thomas, “Folktale” (1986) Prayers like
gravel flung at the sky’s window, hoping to attract the loved
one’s attention. But without visible plaits to let down for the
believer to climb up, to what purpose open that far casement?
I would have refrained long since but that peering once through
my locked fingers I thought that I detected the movement of a
curtain. Corinna Laughlin's commentary:
Today, we’re going to explore a poem by 20th century Welsh poet R. S.
Thomas. Scott will read Thomas’s short poem “Folk Tale” and then I’ll be
back to offer a brief commentary. R. S. Thomas is probably the
most renowned 20th century poet no one has ever heard of. He was born in
Wales in 1913 and died there in 2000. Ordained a priest of the Anglican
Church in Wales in 1936, he spent much of his life as a priest in small
parishes in rural Wales. In 1940, he married Mildred “Elsi”
Eldridge, a gifted artist. Her renown as a painter inspired him to “wish
to be recognized as a poet.” His first collection of poems
appeared in 1946, and many more followed. In 1996, he was nominated for
the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thomas was a bit of a Luddite, and his
son Gwydion later recalled sermons in which he railed against
refrigerators and other modern appliances. The only modern convenience
the family ever owned was a vacuum which they never used because it was
too noisy. The primary themes of Thomas’s poetry are the
landscape and seascape of Wales, the country people with whom he
ministered, and the elusive nature of faith and prayer. In
“Folk Tale,” Thomas evokes the familiar story of Rapunzel, who lived in
a tower, and let down her hair to admit her mother—and, later, her
prince. In Thomas’s poem, God is Rapunzel, hidden from view. Unlike
Rapunzel, there are no “visible plaits to let down for the believer to
climb up”—so why open the window at all? “I would have refrained
long since,” the poet says, “but that peering once through my locked
fingers I thought that I detected the movement of a curtain.” Looking
through “locked fingers”—through hands folded in prayer—he sensed
movement in that far off window, and this glimpse was enough to keep him
tossing gravel at the window, to keep him praying. In this poem,
Thomas playfully evokes the hard work that prayer is sometimes, and how
elusive God can seem. Only by recalling that “movement of a curtain,”
that sense of God’s presence, do we keep going, keep tossing gravel at
the window, like Rapunzel’s prince, and longing for union.
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God’s Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-1889) The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men
then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have
trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared,
smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and
shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being
shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the
last lights off the black West went Oh, morning,
at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over
the bent World broods with warm breast and with
ah! bright wings.
Corinna Laughlin's commentary:
On April 22, we observe the 50th annual Earth Day. So
this week, our poem is one with a strong ecological theme: Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” Scott Webster will read the poem, then
I’ll be back to offer a brief commentary. Gerard Manley Hopkins
was born in 1844. In 1866, as an Oxford undergraduate, he was received
into the Catholic Church by now St. John Henry Newman. This was a
momentous decision, as Hopkins knew he would face significant opposition
from his devoutly Anglican family, and indeed his entry into the Church
cost Hopkins friendships and caused estrangements in his family which
never fully healed. Hopkins had always loved poetry, but he
gave it up when he resolved to become a Jesuit. "By God's grace,” he
wrote, “I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it."
For seven years, he wrote almost nothing, until one of his Jesuit
superiors asked him to write a poem. This opened the floodgates of his
creativity, and Hopkins developed his unique voice and style in
extraordinary poems for the rest of his short life—he died at age 44 in
1889. In this sonnet, Hopkins describes the world being as being
“charged” with the grandeur of God. The word “charged” can mean “full”
or “loaded”; it can also suggest an electric “charge”—Hopkins is playing
on both meanings here. It’s characteristic of Hopkins to use a wonderful
variety of images to capture his meaning. The world is so full of God
that divinity flashes out, like light on a shaken piece of foil; it
oozes God, as a crushed olive oozes oil. Why, then, Hopkins
asks, do men not “reck his rod”—why do people not recognize God’s power
in creation? Instead, they keep at their destructive work,
exploiting creation, making it less divine and more human—the earth has
taken on our “smudge,” our smell. At the same time, ironically, we are
becoming ever more alienated from nature—we no longer touch it directly,
like a foot in a shoe. In the second part of the sonnet, Hopkins
gives a glimpse of hope. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down
things.” This idea of the deep, unique life that all living things have,
is one of the hallmarks of Hopkins’ thought. No matter how dark things
get, there is the hope of dawn, because God has not abandoned the
world—the Holy Ghost broods over the earth like a dove on her nest.
Hopkins’ ecological vision resonates with that of another
Jesuit—Pope Francis. In “Laudato Si,” his encyclical letter on Care for
our common home, Pope Francis writes: “The ultimate destiny of the
universe is in the fullness of God…. The ultimate purpose of other
creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving
forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which
is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces
and illumines all things.”
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Easter Wings by George Herbert Lord, who createdst man in wealth and
store, Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more, Till he became
Most poore: With
thee O let me rise As larks,
harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall
the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did
beginne And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne, That I
became Most thinne.
With thee Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie: For, if I imp my
wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Corinna Laughlin's commentary:
For this Easter week, I’ve chosen a
classic—“Easter Wings” by the 17th-century poet George Herbert.
Parishioner Scott Webster will read the poem, then I’ll be back to offer
a brief commentary. George Herbert was born in Wales in 1593. He
was a superb scholar, and poems by him survive not only in English but
in Latin and Greek! He had a brilliant academic career at Cambridge,
holding significant posts at a very young age, and then went into
Parliament. In 1629, at the age of 36, for a variety of reasons, he
changed course. He sought ordination in the Anglican Church, and became
rector at the tiny country church of Fugglestone St. Peter in Bemerton,
England. It was here that Herbert wrote “Easter Wings,” part of a
collection of poems called The Temple. His time as a country parson was
brief—he died of tuberculosis in 1633, at the age of 39. Herbert
was one of the “metaphysical poets,” along with poets like John Donne
and Andrew Marvell. Some of the characteristics of metaphysical poetry
are evident in “Easter Wings.” There’s an intricacy to the meter and
rhyme, and a strong central image or “conceit”: in this case, wings!
Herbert uses images of rising and falling, flying and sinking. When you
look at the printed text, you can see that wings isn’t just a dominant
image—it’s the shape of the poem itself! Why wings at Easter? In
the first stanza, Herbert talks about the creation story – how God gave
Adam (and Eve) everything, “though foolishly he lost the same,” becoming
“most poor.” But, Herbert says, if we rise with Christ, that first fall
will only “further the flight in me.” The second stanza echoes
that pattern, speaking this time not of Adam’s fall, but of his own.
But, he says, addressing Christ, “if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction
shall advance the flight in me.” “Imp” is a term from the art of
falconry, and refers to repairing a damaged wing with feathers from a
healthy one. In other words, sin is like a broken wing, preventing us
from soaring--but through our Easter union with Christ, we can fly with
his wings—we can rise. Herbert’s poem is a very clever
illustration of the Christian idea of the “felix culpa,” the “happy
fault.” This is a phrase from the Easter proclamation, the Exsultet,
which Father Ryan sang at the Easter Vigil. “O happy fault, O necessary
sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer.” Had Adam and Eve
not eaten the fruit, there would have been no need for Christ’s
redeeming action. God turns the fall into a blessing – giving us wings
to rise all the way to him. Happy Easter!
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Good Friday by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) Am I a stone,
and not a sheep, That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross, To
number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss, And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly; Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon – I, only I. Yet
give not o’er, But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more And smite a rock.
Corinna Laughlin commentary: Christina Rossetti was born in
London in 1830 and died in 1894. She was from a remarkably
talented family. Her siblings all did remarkable things – her brother
Dante Gabriel was a renowned poet and painter; her sister wrote a book
on Dante; her brother William a noted critic and editor. Through her
brothers, she was closely linked with the PreRaphaelite movement, and
she appears as the Virgin Mary in Dante Rossetti’s famous Annunciation,
and as St. Elizabeth of Hungary in a painting by James Collinson, to
whom she was briefly engaged. Rossetti had a happy childhood,
but in her teenage years she experienced the first of several serious
bouts with depression, something she would struggle with all her life.
Her Christian faith was at the center of her life and of her writing.
In her poem “Good Friday,” Rossetti asks herself a question. “Am I
a stone,” she asks, that she can stand beneath the cross and yet not
weep? She draws on details from the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion
and notes that everyone reacted to Christ’s suffering—the women wept;
Peter wept; the good thief was moved; even the sun and moon “hid their
faces in a starless sky” in eclipse. She feels like she’s the only one
who can’t seem to feel anything. Why can’t she feel?
Rossetti isn’t just beating herself up here. She’s giving an accurate
description of “acedia,” a spiritual torpor or apathy which we all
experience sometimes. Rossetti responds in a healthy way to acedia: she
acknowledges it and she prays about it. At the end of the poem, she
addresses Christ, saying, “Greater than Moses, turn and look once more /
And smite a rock.” Just as Moses, at God’s command, struck the rock so
that water flowed out for the Israelites to drink, Rossetti prays that
Christ will break her open, so that she can feel with him and for him in
his Passion. This year, as we celebrate Holy Week under
unprecedented circumstances, let’s not beat ourselves up if we find it
hard to feel through our distraction, busyness, or anxiety. Instead,
let’s pray with Rossetti for the grace to be broken open, to see and to
feel with Christ during these Holy Days. Have a blessed Holy Week.
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Enclosure Jessica Powers (1905-1988)
Gypsy by nature, how can I endure it— This small strict space, this
meager patch of sky? What madness once possessed me to procure it?
And deed it to myself until I die? What could the wise Teresa
have been thinking to set these bounds on even my little love?
This walling, barring, minimizing, shrinking— how could her great
Castilian heart approve? And yet I meet the morrow with
composure. Before I made my plaint I found the clue and learned
the secret to outwit enclosure because of summits and a mountain
view. You question, then, the presence of a mountain? Yet it
is here past earth’s extravagant guess— Mount Carmel with its famed
Elian fountain, and God encountered in its wilderness. Its
trails outrun the most adept explorer, outweigh the gypsy’s most
inordinate need. Its heights cry out to mystic and adorer. Oh,
here are space and distances indeed. (1944)
Reflection Hello there! Corinna Laughlin here. I’m the
Pastoral Assistant for Liturgy at St. James. Over the years, parishioner
Scott Webster and I have offered many literary evenings at the
Cathedral, reading and discussing stories and poetry. Since we can’t do
that right now, we’ve decided to offer a poem a week, virtually. Scott
will read the poem, and then I’ll offer a short commentary. The first
poem I’ve chosen is “Enclosure,” by Jessica Powers, also known as Sister
Miriam of the Holy Spirit, a Carmelite nun who lived from 1905 to 1988.
I think her experience of “enclosure” will resonate at this time when so
many of us are confined to our homes. Here’s Scott reading Jessica
powers’ “Enclosure.” Thank you, Scott! The poem begins
with a question—“gypsy by nature, how can I endure it?” Jessica Powers
was a bit of a gypsy. She grew up in an Irish Catholic household in
rural Wisconsin but after studies at Marquette, she moved to Chicago and
later to New York City at the age of 32. She spent five years in the New
York literary scene – writing for the New York Times and publishing
poetry. Then, in 1941, she moved back to Wisconsin and entered the
Carmelite Monastery of the Mother of God in Milwaukee. Jessica Powers
became Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit. Carmelites are
cloistered, which means they do not leave the monastery grounds, or
“enclosure,” except for essentials, like doctors’ appointments. Visitors
are traditionally seen at a distance, through a grille or screen. In
these days of sheltering in place and social distancing, we are all
getting a taste of Carmelite enclosure! Jessica Powers
wrote “Enclosure” about seven years after her entrance into the
monastery. In the first part of the poem, she humorously expresses the
frustration that comes with being enclosed—“walling, barring,
minimizing, shrinking.” What, she asks, could she have been thinking?
What could St. Teresa have been thinking? But in the second
part of the poem, Powers answers her own question. How can she endure
enclosure? Because God is present. She draws on the rich imagery of
Carmelite spirituality—mountains, wilderness, flowing water—to point
towards the rich interior landscape which is always accessible, even—or
perhaps especially—when we are “enclosed.”
Corinna Laughlin
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