Living Wittily

Ultimate Grace for Our Ultimate Concerns

John Donne is one of the greatest English prose writers. He was also one of the most accomplished and metaphysical of Seventeenth Century poets. His sermons and poems are richly embroidered with imagery and allusions, classical and biblical, theological and philosophical, many of them obscure and at best enigmatic to those less familiar with Donne's cultural and intellectual worlds. He treated the big themes of human existence and the overwhelming questions posed to the guilty conscience by a God whose love and justice he saw as absolute, and therefore absolutely decisive for the destiny of each individual soul, including and especially his own.

Anguish and ecstasy, fear and joy, guilt and forgiveness, desolation and consolation; such are the poles of human experience between which Donne composed his sermons and poems. And when allowances are made for the rhetoric and discourse of Seventeenth Century divinity, many of the poems still speak with universal relevance to those deep inner turmoils of conscience and those serial disappointments that can so dishearten us when we would be better than we know we are.

The tortured uncertainties of Romans 7 describe Donne's oscillation between regretted sin and longed for holiness. "For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do....O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Few poets have faced death with such honest human terror balanced by a faith "troubled on every side but not distressed...perplexed but not in despair,...cast down but not destroyed..." And he often finished his most searching poems with recovered assurance resonant with Paul's great sigh of relief - "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord...."

Here is one of my favourite Donne poems - for those not familiar with it remember Donne's name was pronounced "Dun" - and so the wordplay becomes a playful dialogue with God in a prayer about Donne's ultimate concerns.

 

HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
by John Donne

I.
WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
    Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
    And do run still, though still I do deplore?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.

II.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
    Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
    A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.

III.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
        And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                    I fear no more.

Wild geese, Loch Skene, and our place in the world

 

  

In Scotland the wild goose is an image that goes back to early Christian days. The Iona Community has almost made the metaphor its brand name. Migration as the search for food and home, the costly but lifegiving freedom of flight, the forward lunge of the wings, the honking in unison of a long skein, the collaborative use of the slipstream, the lead goose giving direction and creating impetus - it isn't hard to see the spiritual implications of wild geese in flight.

The photo is of Loch Skene - at this time of year a major stop-off point for migrating geese. Long noisy skeins of them fly over our house. A field a mile away was brown with grazing geese and must present a headache and dilemma for farmers who see young grass being eaten with frightening thoroughness.

Mary Oliver's poem about Wild Geese is one of her best, and she is one of the best North American poets writing today. You can have your own go at working out the significance of the migrating goose for our understadning of the human journey, the spiritual quest, the hunger for home, for community and for what lies ahead. For now, here's Mary Oliver's take on those chevrons of fellow pilgrims and travellers on this beautiful fragile planet

.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 

  .

 

Attentive to a different light - Rebecca Elson, Astronomer Poet

The slim volume of Rebecca Elson's poetry, Responsibility to Awe, sits on my desk at College. Elson was a gifted astronomer, combining intellectual curiosity with creative cognitive insight and these focused on the vast complex questions of existence. Around the time when Hubble was sending back images of our universe that are at once beautiful and terrifying, expanding beyond previous imagination the exploding, extending immensity of what we call space, the totality of what exists. Her scientific work 'focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death'. She was fascinated by dark matter, "hidden mass which can be inferred only from its influence on observable objects". 

 It's no surprise she is a poet. Precise observation, imaginative reflection, contemplative gaze, the instinct not only for fact, and its significance, but also for its hiddenness, mystery and capacity to provoke questions rather than provide answers. I've often thought the fusion of intellectual penetration and empirical observation, with contemplative wonder and patient humility before what can't be exhaustively explained or dequately described, could produce a rare form of poetry - and for that matter theology! 

This collection of poems and extracts from her notebooks was written when she knew she was terminally ill, and its contents are by turns poignant and playful, questioning and serene, drawn from recalled memory or pushed towards anticipated realities. The result is a book that invites the reader into an intimate conversation not only about dark matter, but about what matters, and why.

The title, A Responsibility to Awe, describes the disposition of the true scientist - and though she wouldn't naturally draw the inference, it describes also the proper disposition of the true theologian, and indeed the true worshipper of the Triune God of love made known in Jesus Christ.

Telescopes

Those few brave pilgrims

standing white robed

At the edge

of earth and sky

On their dark mountain

in the thin dry air,

for all their altitude

no nearer, really, to the stars.

 

But hopeful

and so patient,

high above the traffic

of the lowlands, tracking

the minutiae of the Universe

attentive to a different light.

Now read Psalm 8.

Kathleen Raine, Good Friday and the Healing Reality of the Garden

The biblical narrative sometimes turns on the encounters that take place in a garden. The garden of Eden is a place of creation and destruction, of carefree joy and cosmic tragedy, of divine fulfilment and human failing. And however we read that story, it portrays in poignant poetry the two poles and entire latitude and longitude of human experience, from innocence to shame, from life affirming stewardship to earth shattering grasping. Gethsemane is the garden where the tragedies and triumphs of human  sinfulness become concentrated on the soul of the One who gathers within one human being, the cosmic and human toxins of creation alienated. The Gospel phrase for this anguish, "sweating great drops of blood", and the location of the garden of Gethsemane, make this Gospel episode a cross section of a fallen creation, exposing the age rings of human history which has sweat its own great drops of blood.

I think it's no accident, or incidental stage setting, that the tomb was in Joseph of Arimathea's garden, and that garden the place of resurrection. There's something wonderfully playful about that line of John's, explaining Mary Magdalene's grief-stricken confusion, "thinking him to be the gardener...". Eden the place of lost innocence, Gethsemane the place of God's angst, and that morning scene of so human trauma, of grief and joy, of disbelief and scared to admit it faith - so much of what matters in our faith begins or ends up in a garden.

Kathleen Raine wrote about the garden in terms that make it clear it is a place of healing, and not a place of unreality and retreat from the world. Her poem suggests it may be that we enounter what is most real, most urgent for our flourishing, and most telling for our humanity, in a garden.

I had meant to write a different poem....

I had meant to write a different poem,
But, pausing for a moment in my unweeded garden,
Noticed, all at once, paradise descending in the morning sun
Filtered through leaves,
Enlightening the meagre London ground, touching with green
Transparency the cells of life.
The blackbird hopped down, robin and sparrow came,
And the thrush, whose nest is hidden
Somewhere, it must be, among invading buildings
Whose walls close in,
But for the garden birds inexhaustible living waters
Fill a stone basin from a garden hose.
I think, it will soon be time
To return to the house, to the day’s occupation,
But here, time neither comes nor goes.
The birds do not hurry away, their day
Neither begins nor ends.
Why can I not stay? Why leave
Here, where it is always,
And time leads only away
From this hidden ever-present simple place.

Kathleen Raine

Literary criticism, love story and good poetry

I hadn't realised that Joy Davidman, who married C S Lewis, was such an acerbic but accurate critic in her own right.  Her letters are entertaining, educational, funny, understanding of what makes a human life well lived or not, and have a value beyond whatever light they throw on Lewis and her relationship with him. This book helps to establish her as a strong personality, and a complex rich character with her own indivoduality. An intellectually gifted woman of philosophical and literary sharpness, a writer for whom honesty and integrity  are essential for a valid and worthwhile aesthetic, and therefore a centre stage player alongside Lewis, not a foil for his cleverness nor a hanger on who eventually became a permanent fixture in Lewis's life and affections.

These letters help explain why a man who was curmudgeon and children's writer, literary scholar and Oxbridge snob, Christian and confirmed bachelor with views that still anger even moderate contemporary feminists, ended up surrendering bachelorhood and all the other defining characteristics in the embrace of a friendship that grew into one of the great love stories that preserves love from facile romance or low commitment partnership. This was a marriage, the joining in companionship of two soul friends, a coalescing of life interests and startling life differences that had no chance of working except as two protagonists negotiated the risks attendant on an act of folly made only as secure as the commitments of love ever make anything. 

And out of that relationship the late flowering and fulfilling of two people each having a second chance - Davidman post divorce and Lewis post bachelorhood. The love story that gave us A Grief Observed; there's a book to reckon with - little more than a long essay, but the most touching report from the far country of grief, concerning intense sorrow, theological dispute with the Almighty, and the searing honesty and bewilderment of a heart and mind cruelly robbed of their greatest treasure. The dramatisations in Shadowlands only approaches the impact of the book - but though Joss Ackland and Anthony Hopkins in two separate productions, capture the joy and grief of Lewis, neither productions does the same justice to Joy and her capacity to avoid the shadow of Lewis, and at times her ability to out Lewis Lewis.

These letters are a delight to read. The several long ones to Aaron Kramer are amongst the most incisive criticism I've read in years. She must have been hard to keep as a friend, because she was hard on her friends. But Kramer had the sense to believe her when she tore into him "for his own good". I hadn't heard of Kramer before, and in a footnote she commends one of his 4 line poems -

Tired

Tired are my feet, that felt today the pavement;

Tired are my ears, that heard of tragic things -

Tired are my eyes, that saw so much enslavement;

Only my voice is not too tired. It sings.

 

How good is that. The last line is almost Isaianic in its defiant optimism, its hopeful perspective, its trust in music and the human voice as means of reconfiguring a world awry and broken by the unholy trinity of power, greed and inhumanity. This is a book that educates at different levels, and in several directions. That's often the case with the correspondence of the best letter writers.

Mary Oliver - a poet's gestures towards holiness

Mary Oliver at her didactic best - which means she teaches us without trying to, what we learn being a by-product of what her poems do to us, in us and for us.

"It is salvation if one can step forth from the

clutter of one's mind into that open space --

that almost holy space -- called work.

I suppose only a poet would talk about work like that? Or at least someone for whom work results in the expression of the self in creation towards communication. The fashioning of meaning, ideas and image from words, touching the inner lives of others through the shared currency of a vocabulary congruent with experience, discourse with a shared language though perhaps different accents, these are indeed gestures towards holiness.

And then these lines -

Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in

my heart. It's going to take something I can't

even imagine, to put them all out.

As a writer, a theologian, and a teacher, I recognise in these lines that same gesture towards holiness. The sacred source of ideas, meaning, and the words that enable one mind to share with another some of those fires, lies somewhere between the intellect, the heart and the will. She is describing something deeply and definitively human.

(From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2010, page 52.)

Hubble, Poetry, Creation and Christ

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

by: Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

• ITH this ambiguous earth

  His dealings have been told us. These abide:

  The signal to a maid, the human birth,

  The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

   

  But not a star of all

  The innumerable host of stars has heard

  How He administered this terrestrial ball.

  Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

   

  Of His earth-visiting feet

  None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,

  The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

  Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

   

  

  No planet knows that this

  Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

  Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,

  Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

   

  Nor, in our little day,

  May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

  His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

  Or His bestowals there be manifest.

   

   
  

  

  But in the eternities,

  Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

  A million alien Gospels, in what guise

  He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

   

  O, be prepared, my soul!

  To read the inconceivable, to scan

  The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

  When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

R S Thomas, the Crucified God and the virtue of metaphysical humility

Chris McIntosh is a fellow enthusiast for the poetry of R S Thomas. Indeed she is an RST pilgrim who recently went looking again for the haunts of the finest religious poet of the second half of the 20th Century (see her post for 17 July). She asked in her recent comment if I'd come upon Thomas's 1990 collection, Counterpoint, and confesses reluctance to write about them. And when you read them you can understand why the hesitation. Yet they are a remarkably important contribution to Christian thought, representing a voice too often muted in Christian spirituality. So at least some thoughts and initial reflections.

Some of the poems in Counterpoint assert faith at its most interrogative, that is, to read them is to be interrogated, asked questions we'd rather not answer, but that won't go away. And for those who need certainty and not only assurance but chronic reassurance, some of them contain carpet pulling assertions that leave comfortable faith discomfited on the floor. And some of them contain that pastoral tenderness that was seldom sentimental, but understood and respected human fragility, shared that wistful longing to know, to really know, who God is and what God is about, in a world with so many hard and dangerous places, so many dark corners, so much that causes hurt.

Much of Thomas's poetry is therefore in the minor key, and much that would be called negative emotion is drawn into a vision of human existence where the negative has its positive counterpoint, and the minor anticipates the major, even when the major is indicated rather than intimated. To change the metaphor, Thomas's poetry, like Van Gogh's painting, acknowledged, even celebrated light, but against cobalt blue, implied menacing shadow, even in some paintings, impressions of unrelieved dullness or darkness. The contrast of dark and light, minor and major, despair and hope, doubt and faith, carefree joy and recurring sorrow, mirrors for Thomas the poet the task of Christian theology, which is not to explain away the negative, or deny it, or make such experience occasion for guilt. For Thomas any escapist or triumphalist theology lacks a sufficient metaphysical humility, claims more than is warranted by human experience, and simply leaves unaddressed by Christian theology those experiences inevitable in mortal existence, of ambiguity, of desolation, of existential ache for meaning, belonging and hope. You can't have Van Gogh without the cobalt blue - the starry night is glorious because as well as the swirling spheres of coarse brushed gold, there is the background of contrasting space, distance, darkness.

  At times in the Counterpoint collection, there is a sense of a Christian holding on to faith by fingertips and precarious toe-holds. But taken as a whole they are poems of astonishing grasp, a profound Christian theology in which God is neither trivialised nor analysed, but acknowledged as the overwhelming Reality that permeates and penetrates a universe in which all human existence would otherwise be fleeting accident registering for nanoseconds in a story bleakly eternal. Thomas's poetry has as its theological sub-structure the Christian story. And the four suites of poems in Counterpoint demonstrate a soul that has learned metaphysical humility, not docility, not resignation, Thomas is not God's 'yes-man'; but in his questioning he will accept neither trite answers nor final negations. Because at the heart of Thomas's poetry, as the glowing core from which his creative energy was drawn, is the cross, the crucified Christ, the God who scandalises all theology by being born human, suffering, dying, and thus through love defiant in resurrection, contradicting the tendency of the universe to atrophy and die. Wherever else the universe is going, according to Thomas it will not outrun the grasping arms of the crucified God. Here is just one poem, whose last clause captures in six words, the eternally patient movement of God, outwards in Love, towards a recalcitrant but cherished creation.

They set up their decoy

in the Hebrew sunlight. What

for? Did they expect

death to come sooner

to disprove his claim

to be God's son? Who

can shoot down God?

Darkness arrived at midday, the shadow

of whose wing? The blood

ticked from the cross, but it was not

their time it kept. It was no

time at all, but the accompaniment

to a face staring,

as over the centuries

it has stared, from unfathomable

darkness into unfathomable light.

R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems, (Bloodaxe, 2004), page 108.

Four question marks in one poem. And those last six words. Van Gogh's starry night again?

Mary Oliver, Staff Retreat and learning to pay attention to our lives.

Been away from here for a few days.But been doing other things that brought me into good company, lovely countryside and conveyor belts of rain! Been at Grasmere with the good folks of Northern Baptist Learning Community sharing their staff retreat and helping provide guidance and stimulus towards renewal and refreshment after a long demanding year. So we had some of Mary Oliver's poems, an eclectic choice of music that reflects my own enthusiasms, a number of pictures and images which express beauty and the joy or sadness that intermingles with our lived experience. And I shared a few soliloquies inspired by several biblical encounters with Jesus - never been sure if they were worth doing more with, but the consensus seems to be a yes. So we'll see.

What became evident though is that on a retreat occasion, a poet like Mary Oliver has the ability to open new doors of perception, encouraging a more attentive, less cursory viewing of the world - to gaze rather than glimpse, to notice rather than merely register, to greet whatever and whoever we meet, with "Hello", rather than to act ignorantly, that is in a way that shows we do not really know or want to know those other presences that would grace our lives if we gave them the time of day, and a little space.

Throughout her recent work there are a number of light-hearted but not insignificant poems about her dog Percy. Here's one that I find irresistible because it is about a dog and books, or in any case about a dog impatient with stupid humans who bury their face in paper instead of looking at the beauty, the fun and the excitement of a colourful world laden with smell and sound.

Percy and Books (eight)

Percy doesn't like it when I read a book.

He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

The tide is out and the neighbour's dogs are playing.

But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

 

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

Let's go.

With summer here, an academic year formally completed tomorrow, I'm with Percy. Let's go! Need a holiday and it will come in a few weeks. Meantime in order to enjoy it, I'm going to try to decelerate gently, a foot movement that doesn't come naturally to me. To help me I'll slowly work through several thin books of Mary Oliver's poems, and learn again how to pay attention, to say hello, and give time of day to whoever asks it, or even whoever doesn't.

Poetry, the hidden treasure of the heart, and being made to feel differently

Amongst the subsidiary blessings of being a staff member at the Scottish Baptist College, is a generous books allowance to underpin our personal research and help us keep abreast of new work in the subject areas we teach. Of course there are those who call such blessings a perk - but that's cos they don't have the high vocational commitment of the bibliphiole for whom a book is synonymous with blessing, and reading an activity that Philp Toynbee called "the royal way to God".

This week the book allowance for the next academic year becomes available. And I don't have what I often have, a long list of waiting to be bought goodies - perks - ehhh - blessings. Which said, there are a few essentials that are food for the soul, the heart and the spirit - before we ever get to the mind.

Mary Oliver is a poet entirely comfortable swimming in the emotional depths, yet possessed of an uncomfortable and discomforting instinct for bringing our own more hidden emotions to the surface; not to embarrass or frighten, but to reconcile us to the richly textured, gloriously ambiguous world of our own deep feelings. And she does this in ways so deceptively simple that only because I know her ways with words, am I expecting to feel differently by the time I reach the end of one of her poems. But how I then feel, is still a surprise, because the reading of the poem becomes a medium of self-discovery, the poem itself a field in which, ploughing, I discover hidden treasure. Then again my own reading self is also the field in which the treasure is hidden - there but undiscovered, till her ploughshare turns the soil and there I am, laughing, or crying, daring or caring, restored or reconciled, interested or integrated, convinced or content, - the alternatives are endless, but the point is, I seldom read one of her poems without thinking and feeling differently about life, the world, me, those I love, problems I have or that have me, hopes fiercely cherished or disappointments that weigh heavy.

I've often enough said that the poets are the ones who take us to the heart of things, and to the heart of our own hearts. Mary Oliver's best poetry performs such cardiac surgery using words as both scalpel and needle, skillfully healing and repairing that centre of our being which gives our lives rhythm, oxygen and the vital energy for life. And in the process, she brings to the light of our days, treasures we did not know we had, treasure we did not know we were. Tomorrow I'll post one such poem - read earlier in the week, in the middle of a jaded afternoon to each of our staff members, read and heard by each as a benediction framed in loveliness, and welcomed as a gentle corrective for lives perhaps too prone to self-important anxiety about getting the job done. Whatever is true of my colleagues, Mea culpa!