Sabbath Poems
1999 VI
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.
I don't know another poem that speaks so audibly into that experience we all have of looking backwards in order to understand where we are now, how we came to be here, and the mystery of seeing blessing at times and in places we never thought them to be. The wearyingly repetitive cliche of 'the journey' has lost for many of us the freshness of that metaphor before it became banal. It is now overused, and a lazy way of talking about change, development, and even an excuse for making decisions and taking turnings that turn out to be wrong choices and missteps.
But Berry is too allergic to cliche to reiterate the obvious. Instead, he takes us into his confidence from the start, with the inclusively knowing words, 'We travelers'. He has taken time to consider the meaning of travelling from 'here' when we are not sure where 'there' is. We 'can't see ahead', and in that phrase Berry touches a raw nerve. Often enough I've said, and heard said, "Just as well we don't know what's ahead of us.' There is an ancient wisdom in that recognition that life is lived in the now, and if we knew in detail what is coming it would inevitably skew our decisions, distort our choices, tempt us into hedging our bets and thus failing to live the life we have because we are so anxious to anticipate and even control, the life that is ahead.
So we can't see ahead; but if we take time to stop and look backwards, we can see the road we have come, "Along which blessings now appear." It's that word now. Only when we stop and look back, and survey the scenery, and trace backwards from where we are to where we were, only then do we see what was there to be seen all the time. "Risen" always has a double entendre for people of Christian faith, whether or not Berry intended it. I think he did. The triple use of the word blessing, and the common trope of light / darkness as attributes of God, suggest Berry's own inner standpoint is trustful of the often unseen presence of God
"From sightlessness to sight", from shadow to light, blessings that went unnoticed 'now appear / risen.'
"and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark."
To stand at the edge of a forest, or pause on a mountain path, is the action of someone for whom travelling is more than movement from here to there. It is considered movement, the stopping is a required interlude in a reflective journey, and turns mere journey into attentive travelling on the alert for epiphany. The purposeful patience required in keeping going is sustained because we are "by blessing brightly lit', by a light that dazzles.
Every time I read this short poem it reminds me of much better known lines from Henry Vaughan which I assume Berry knows
“There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness.”
And whether or not the allusion is intentional, Berry's poem is a developed paraphrase of Vaughan's speculative theology, acknowledging the cataphatic and apophatic tensions in Christian theological talk of God. Those tensions create a force field within which theology is wrought, seeking to articulate that which is revealed and that which is hidden, the gift of revelation and the divine reticence in mystery, the via positiva (light) and the via negativa (darkness).
So we travel...by blessing brightly lit, looking back the way we came, along which blessings now appear, risen.
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