What we mean by love

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  - Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, and I am lucky that many of my friends have spent the day sharing quotes and reflecting on King’s legacy of firm love in the service of justice. I am partial to the quote above, and thought of it when I woke up this morning. I can’t think of a better challenge than to be an extremist for love.

Never satisfied by soundbyte answers, I asked myself this morning "what does love mean?" What does it mean to be an extremist for love? Most people think of themselves as loving, most people think that they are doing the right thing. History fixates on the obviously horrific practitioners of hate, but most people are not that sort of extremist. And yet we, motivated by love, reach wildly different conclusions about how to act justly.

I just started learning a song cycle by Lori Laitman that I will be singing in a recital in April. The last song of the cycle has captivated me – it feels like it was written for my voice, and the poem, like all the poetry in the cycle, regularly moves me to tears (this complicates my learning process, to say the least). The poem, Pioneer Child’s Doll, begins: Here, child, is what we mean by love. 

The poet, Judith Sornberger, described her inspiration in an interview. She saw pioneer child’s doll in a Nebraska museum: The head of the doll was actually an old, beat-up bedpost. You know, the knob at the top of a bedpost. How hard up would you have to be able to love a doll with that kind of head?

Here, child, is what we mean by love:

a block head doll of coarse-grained wood,

eyes two knife-pricks, mouth a crooked stab.

As we are given to love land

that few would covet, where no tree

dares stand up to the sky,

So shall you love her whose grain sack skirt

covers not petticoats, but sticks

whose curls must be imagined in the wood.

And as we break the stubborn sod

of our backs to know what we

can be on this earth,

So by the sweat of your palm

on her brow will you bring

to her flat face a sheen.

We know that love can transform, and we know that we are in need of transformation. About 6 times a day I pray Ignatius’ prayer for generosity: “Lord, teach me to be generous…”. I pray to be loving, to be kind, to be patient, to be fortified and transformed, to be better. And these are the prayers I think of as selfless. Could I sacrifice my prayers and my love to transform others instead?

Could love be the willingness to look at an ugly doll and see something lovely? Could it be the determination to be devoted to that which others would throw away? Could it be beholding the beauty in others? We lament that the world needs transformation, but are the true acts of heroism to see the world and behold in it the possibility of goodness? Isn’t that why we still envision Dr. King’s dream?

Maybe it’s more self-centeredness to imagine that the world hinges on how I see it, that if I look on it with love it will meet my expectations. I’m not sure I know how to pray for anyone other than myself.  A self-emptying prayer that turns me inside out could be the loving extreme to which Dr. King exhorts me.  Perhaps I am called to an outward facing love that wills the other into grace.

Love, grace, God, prayer – these things are the types of wonderful mysteries that we could talk about for eternity and never explain or exhaust.  Dr. King set big, lofty goals that stretch us and our world. For me, it’s goal enough to try each day to discover more of what we mean by love.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Stuffed with grace

What part of speech is "religious"? If you answered “adjective” you’re right, except, of course, when religious is a noun. Now remember: a religious is religious, but you can be religious without being a religious. Teaching is difficult for countless reasons, but one very time-consuming part of what I teach is that I am constantly clarifying what we mean by words that over centuries have acquired mind-boggling pluralities of meaning. Take Church: I am going to Church, that building on the corner is my Church, she’s part of my Church, I teach Church history. The more ordinary the word, the more meanings it has. Fathers of the Church, desert fathers, our Father, bless me Father for I have sinned, I have to ask my father.  Eucharist is a meal, a sacrifice, a gathering, a thanksgiving. And don’t even get me started on water, the simplest of symbols used in Christian worship. Water gives us life, water kills us, water cleans us, water gets us wet. It’s confusing and comforting – the simplest things in our lives are exploding with meaning. I was talking to a colleague recently about the time my apartment was burgled, and because we both work in theology I pretty quickly turned the conversation to how a concept of sacramentality helped me deal with the loss of objects. Things are important to us. Things, like people, can be stuffed with grace.  I didn’t have to feel guilty mourning the loss of things because my sacramental faith allows me to recognize their meaning. That’s what was on my mind recently when, with a wise and thoughtful group of people, the conversation turned to detachment. I get why detachment is attractive, and brilliant people have promoted it as a path to contentment, but I’m going to take a pass. Give me attachment , a passionate devotion to things, relationships, people, and life. I’ll take the pain when it comes – I’ve known grief, and it has shown me not the foolishness of my attachments but of the blazing heat of my love.  Grace allows the ordinary to be transformed into the extraordinary, and gives us permission to love the thing because we love the grace.

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.                                      - God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins

A cold and broken hallelujah

Every year my mother takes great delight in ‘changing the clocks’, because rather than fuss with the hands on the clocks in the great room she actually switches the clocks, pulling out the winter clocks and stuffing the summer ones away. With the time change coming even later than usual this year, I have spent the last few mornings stumbling around trying to get out of the house in the dark, going so far as to walk directly into a door late last week.

Leaving my late afternoon class a few days ago the teacher commented that starting soon the sun would be going down closer to the beginning of class than the end. I looked out the windows of the new class building as dusk fell at dismissal time and thought “for someone who gets sad in the fall, I’m doing OK. The sun is setting and my mood is all right”.

Then I got in the car and put on Rufus Wainright and that all changed.

The first time I remember having an emotional response to the autumn was while I was still in elementary school. I felt nostalgic and a little melancholy and very confused about why these feelings had seemed to come from nowhere. Even now, away from the town where I spent the autumns of my youth, the smell - rare in the city - of burning leaves takes me back to that revelatory afternoon on the swingset, a little amazed that the seasons could affect me so powerfully, and a little, well, sad.

Every year I think maybe this is the year I can write about seasonal depression, and despite always writing a bit that springs from it, I can never quite write about it. For a while it was because I was embarrassed and ashamed, but that’s not really it any more. Now when I try to write about it I become totally stuck, because I just don’t understand it.

Can I live with that mystery? I have no idea why, at this time of year, every goodbye and disappointment I’ve ever had becomes wrapped up in each sunset. I don’t know why the way the falling leaves match the stripe of yellow down the center of the road makes my eyes well up through all of October. Maybe this is just when I mark the passage of time - New Year’s never really did it for me, but I can mark the time by each somber, sensitive fall.

Tonight’s sunset, marking the bridge between the commemorations of All Saints and All Souls, really threw me, even though I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other people talking about nothing that had anything to do with sadness or darkness. Without my knowledge or will thoughts crept in of those who are on the other side whose closeness we celebrate these days. There’s a reason so many cultures remember their dead this time of year. I beg the forgiveness of my Southern Hemisphere/Equatorial friends, on whom some of the fall-in-New-England imagery might be lost.

The evenings get dark and I do too. Even though I can’t explain the darkness, I fear a part of me has started to take comfort in the yearly ritual of staring out the window at sunset, brooding, or as Hopkins writes in verses that could have been written for me “grieving over Goldengrove unleaving”. Despite the heartache there’s something oddly beautiful about being pushed and pulled by nature, year after year. I didn’t always know what I know now: that this will pass, and that April will see us all alive again. Despite Eliot’s claim that April is the cruelest month, I know the cruelest is October, mixing memory and desire even as our dull roots grow duller, well aware of the long sleep that is coming next.

I have spent some stretches in very dark places, and my spirituality has been shaped by that. Life is hard; it’s a blessing anyway. We are confronted with incomprehensible suffering; God exists anyway. Sadness can stretch us across herself like we’re prisoners on a rack; we worship anyway. In our cold and broken halleluiah faith breaks forth, quietly resolute, sometimes too weak to even be a sign of determination, just there, in a silent confidence that defies the present pain.




Spring and Fall: to a Young Child
--G. M. Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

In defense of gratuitousness

I kicked off my summer vacation right, having lunch with a wonderful friend. She's someone with whom I can talk about things that really matter: fears and frustrations, hopes and goals. Both of us articulated writing as one of our summer goals, and the conversation turned to favorite tools (typewriter for her, pen and notebook for me), topics, and genres.

After a few minutes one of us (I don't remember who) was brave enough to say the P-word: Poetry. We both admitted there was something a little pretentious about writing poetry. I used to write quite a bit, and most of it was crap but some of it wasn't terrible. Now I write infrequently, only when I'm just bursting and the poetry nearly writes itself. There's not a lot of craft or discipline or even art to it. I rarely share what I write because it feels presumptuous to think that I could possibly have something worth saying and that I believe I have expressed it beautifully.

Presumptuous, pretentious...and gratuitous. Poetry is so unneccessary, so impractical. Why not write an essay or an article? But all creation is gratuitous - even ours. If it was good enough for our Divine Creator, it should be good enough for me.

Some volumes came from Amazon today. I had decided I couldn't go any longer without the Four Quartets on my nightstand. Skimming some of the new selections I was overwhelmed at how much they made me feel. Emotion may be gratuitous too, but it is also beautiful, beautiful enough that it is worth whatever creative labor or happy accident that inspires it.

I'll never be a T.S. Eliot, but I don't have to be. To say what I have to say and to participate in the divine creation are worthy goals. They may be gratuitous, but so are many holy things.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. - T. S. Eliot, from East Coker, Four Quartets

My heart broke loose on the wind

In the 1200s St Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy.

That’s not the lede I expected to write about my recent trip to the symphony, but all of my reflections on the premiere of Lieberson’s Songs of Love and Sorrow led me back to a lesson I’d taught on Dominic earlier that day. Composed as a companion piece for Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, Songs of Love and Sorrow also sets poetry by Pablo Neruda, this time putting the powerful Chilean poetry in the mouth of a baritone rather than a mezzo-soprano.

As a stereotypical stodgy New Englander, a lot of Neruda’s work feels foreign to me. His expressions of emotion are tactile and earthy, with a lack of inhibition that makes me feel even more uptight in comparison. I’m probably not alone in approaching Neruda (and anything else that challenges me that much) with an overly intellectual detachment, trying to analyze its rich physicality with the sobriety of an over-trained mind. Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente [Full woman, flesh-apple, hot moon] – for we priggish Americans, it can be easier to hold images like that at arm’s length.

That detachment was impossible last night. Lieberson’s evocative setting energized Neruda’s poetry, but even more revelatory was the very experience of live music.

We are bodies, living in a world we can touch, feel, see, smell, hear. The sonic experience of orchestral forces in a live setting is incomparable, a fact of which I am reminded on every trip to the symphony. The magic of skill and intention forming sound waves that surround us is a perfect example of the blessings of our physical world. Add to that the power of a perfectly calibrated human voice – an example of every part of the human body working together perfectly, art truly incarnate - and you have a recipe for transformation.

Cantas y al sol y a cielo con tu canto/tu voz desgrana el cereal del día,/hablan los pinos con su lengua verde: trinan todas la saves del invierno. [You sing, and your voice peels the husk /of the day’s grain, your song with the sun and the sky,/the pine trees speak with their green tongue:/all the birds of the winter whistle.]

A rich human voice, an orchestra, an emotive musical setting of sensual poetry created the perfect storm, tearing me away from the elite intellectualism honed over many years in the ivory tower. My brain was ripped out and I was only body, heart and blood and guts and skin.

So what does this all have to do with St Dominic? The Albigensians, like many before and after them, professed that the human body and all other matter was evil. Although the Albigensian heresy died out in the decades following Dominic’s preaching, that principle still lives in the hearts and minds of many Christians. We go to church and are scared to open our mouths and sing, never mind move our bodies or touch the person next to us. We believe our faith and our identity are found in what we think rather than how we embody that belief through physical action. Trying to stay on the right side of gluttony we avoid any indulgences, ignoring the many gifts of God that come to us through our sensations. We’re mostly brain, a little heart, and no guts. We’re scared – of sin, of our appetites, of our power.

But to look at the people who truly embrace the physicality of our creation, they don’t slide into gluttony or sin but achieve something truly mystical. Earth’s crammed with heaven/and every common bush afire with God (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). By means of all created things, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). The king saw his image/in your faces/when he made you mirrors of/all heaven's graces,/a garden of surpassing/sweetness, a fragrance/wafting all graciousness (Hildegard von Bingen).

It’s easy to spend a lot of time with my head in the clouds, hoping for things not seen. But everything in the here and now was created and proclaimed good – including us. What a gift it is to get out of our heads and into our bodies, touching the earth that sustains us, touched by the art that occasionally inflames our senses until our old ways burn up and we become something new in their clean, pure ash.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. - Neruda

Set down this: Making peace with the Magi

If you’re looking for a way to get me riled up, hide one of my favorite books. Two nights ago I couldn’t find my edition of T. S. Eliot. It was Epiphany and I wanted to read “Journey of the Magi”. I had done a ferocious cleaning before I left for the holidays and was terrified I had thrown the book away. I was preparing to dump everything in my apartment onto the floor when I found Selected Poems on a shelf.

Like a good girl I read Journey of the Magi, which to be honest has never been among my favorites. The opening sections on their journey and arrival in Judea are richly descriptive, beginning with the hook that has always reeled me in: A cold coming we had of it. The end of the poem is where the language takes my breath away – the repetition of words and phrases, the stark expression of the Magi’s harsh and bitter agony. As enamored as I am of the language in that section, I always end my reading dissatisfied, wondering “what the hell do they have to be so distressed about?”

In the same pile as my poetry and journals I keep a small photo album that was a Christmas gift years ago. My brother made me the album in grade-school art class, writing my name on the front in puffy paint. Before I returned to Boston that year I filled the album with photos of my family over the years. My toddler self looks up at my father in one of the photos as he makes a face back at me. There are group photos of cousins, my mom yelling at my uncles, my dad hiding behind a cereal box while my brother displays the half chewed contents of his breakfast in an open mouth.

I looked over those photos on Epiphany because they had surfaced in the scramble to find the poems. I wished I had those whiny wise men in front of me so I could shake them, point to a 20+ year-old photo of myself and my grandmother and say “Look, this is the Incarnation! Look how good it is!” Still pretty irked at the wise men, I took a day to think about it. Since I first read Journey of the Magi I have been haunted by that last stanza. I am moved by the beauty of the text but could never get behind the dark conclusion to the adventure of the Magi. What about their journey could make them feel so...Prufrockian?

And then, appropriately, an epiphany.

We returned to our places, those kingdoms, but no longer at ease here. The Magi followed their guts, their instincts, that star, having an adventure, exploring a mystery. And then they went home, having played their part in salvation history.

"Every great getaway has a moment when you want to pack it up and stay. That's how I ended up with a timeshare in Port Arthur, Texas." (Jack Donaghy) Our lives take certain tracks from which significant deviations are not always possible. These tracks are valorous, beneficial. We live in webs of relationships, alliances and dependencies, and when we glimpse another good life that is not ours, we can’t rip ourselves from the fabric into which we are knit. The lives we return to are tainted once we’ve tasted something else. Like the Magi we may be a little less at ease, and perhaps a little less attached to the lives to which we are bound.

What I do is me, for that I came.

Even for someone as prone to tears as I am, I know I have finished a good biography if I cry at the end when the subject dies. The last book that moved me like that was Christophe Wolfe’s biography of J. S. Bach, and it goes without saying that I knew what was coming in the end. “Winston & Franklin” on the other hand, made me eager for the demise of both protagonists. Last night I got misty reading the end of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani. I’ve always admired Hopkins’ poetry (and Mariani’s, for that matter) but had only a passing familiarity with the circumstances of his life - I knew he was a convert, a Jesuit, lived throughout Great Britain, died young, achieved no literary fame in his lifetime.

On the other side of having read this biography, that’s still the story. I now have a greater understanding of his trademark sprung rhythm, a term for which I’d only had cocktail-party level comprehension. New Hopkinsian terms like inscape and instress have worked their way into my vocabulary and will likely disappear once I’m off what promises to be a “Hopkins kick” and have moved on to another temporary obsession.

Every biographer is going to focus on one element or another of a subject’s life, and throughout much of this book we read about Hopkins desire for sacrifice - he sacrifices reputation and relationship to ‘swim the Tiber’, he sacrifices his writing and creativity seeking obedience to his order, and he sacrifices much of his health in that same spirit of obedience. From what I know of Mariani’s other writing, the biographer has undertaken spiritual journeys of his own, including the Spiritual Exercises. The knowledge, both intellectual and spiritual, of Hopkins’ Catholic (and Jesuit) world makes all the difference in his writing about the poet. I imagine it is hard to write about a man who punished himself too much - who probably took himself too seriously - while loving and respecting the man and his actions. Mariani never laughs at or dismisses Hopkins’ deep desire for sacrifice or communion with God.

What I do is me, for that I came. I know I’m not the only person for whom that is one of Hopkins’ most memorable lines. My little liturgist rises up at this affirmation that what we do matters - not what we think, or believe, or intend, or someday might do.

I realized about 2/3 of the way through the book that I was basically reading from poem to poem. Though I gave attention to and was interested in the circumstances of his life, all the while I was measuring out Hopkins’ life in sonnets. I turned each page hoping to see more of his familiar poetry, accompanied by the circumstances of its writing and by Mariani’s unparalleled insights on its inspiration. But would the poet have read his own life the same way? Would he have agreed with posterity on the reason for which he came?

What I do is me, for that I came. We can think we know what it is we do, for what it is we come, but perhaps like our friend Gerard that which survives of us won’t resemble our dreams and intentions. Knowing the future’s uncertainty what else can we do other than catch fire, draw flame, keep grace, offer ourselves over to God and to each other? Perhaps Hopkins would have been even more prolific, more genius (is that a possibility?) had he not indulged his religious scruples. But the brilliance that we have from him was born in that intersection of devastating sacrifice and creative indulgence. His reality - his ‘me’ - was the filthy manger in which his spark took flesh.

For that I came. The eager and inspired want to know what “that” is. It is music, it is sport, it is health, it is justice - we have ideas of our purpose and our end. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we just slog through, with no sense of what makes us most ‘me’, what will survive, and what may reach beyond us across years to help others suss out dappled things, bright wings, God’s grandeur, our end.

Abide with Me

Abide with me, fast falls the even tide
The darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Darkness. Last night as I drove out of the city I happened to be driving just at sunset, which has never been a good time for me. Like a lot of people sensitive to light and seasons, my mood dips when the sun goes down in the late fall and winter. I am helpless against the power of the earth as it turns and tilts.

I need Thy presence every passing hour
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter's power?
Who but Thyself my guide, and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me.

Grace. I teach about grace a few times a year, always with a sense of guilt - how can i stand before people and try to explain that which cannot be explained? Grace - friendship with God. Grace - participation in the life of God. Grace - God working in the world, on us and with us.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless
Ills have no weight and tears no bitterness
Where is death's sting? where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still if you abide with me.

Grave. In the darkness of night our world can indeed seem grave, when we are confronted with tragedy and sadness, the pain of those we love and the challenges of being alive in an imperfect world. It may be then that our only triumph is our hope.

Hold now Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Life. Throughout my life, abide with me. Is this not the root of all our prayer? God, whatever you are, however you come to us, as love, as goodness, as blessing, as grace, be with us. Abide with us. Teach us to hope in you, to serve your light, to trust against our senses and against our despair. Prepare us for the dawn of heaven's morning and remind us that the shadows of this earth are indeed vain and no match for your Light.


[Music: Eventide William Monk (19thC)
Words: Henry F. Lyte (19th C)]

Here and but the Beholder Wanting

I just found this from about two years ago, before my days of blogging when I used to simply bore BOC-ers with my ramblings in the membership newsletter. Although this was my 'message from the President' in the newsletter, there isn't much in it about opera. There's plenty about poetry and beauty and nature and music - a few of my favorite things.

"Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty…". So begins one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. The poet is Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work I would still love even if he hadn't been a Jesuit. The poem is Hurrahing in Harvest, which always inspires some appreciation for this transition between the seasons. I've never been a big fan of fall, often finding myself "grieving over Goldengrove unleaving" during the month of October, to quote another Hopkins poem addressed to a child with whom I share a name.

So it is good for me to be reminded of the barbarous beauty in this transition into the seriousness of winter from the summer frivolity which consumes cities like ours; cities doomed to months of dismal, short days and soggy, sloppy sidewalks. Hopkins, with his trademark sprung rhythm, describes fall's "silk-sack clouds", and "azurous hung hills" which are "very-violet-sweet!" In the final stanza Hopkins hits us with the punch line: "these things were here and but the beholder wanting".

How much beauty in our lives is just waiting for us to behold it? Who are the people we don't appreciate? What loveliness looks back at us from the mirror every day as our minds race along not noticing? How glorious is it to open our mouths and have beautiful sounds come out, to be able to run scales and match pitches and infuse words with new meaning through music? All of this can be easy to forget when we are in the practice room struggling with a phrase, convinced that all the beauty in the world and all the beauty in us just isn't enough.

Since I am teaching full-time this fall, I leave you all with an assignment: behold something beautiful this month. If you are lucky perhaps you will have the same experience as Hopkins' anonymous beholder: "The heart rears wings bold and bolder/and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet."

(For extra credit, go read some Hopkins.)

Two poems

Heaven
by William Heyen
Henry Thoreau’s last words: “Moose … Indian.”
Joe DiMaggio’s: “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”

Henry died never having gone to bed with a woman.
Joe enjoyed dozens, but in the end loved only one,

& believed that after he’d signed his last ball or bat,
he’d find her waiting in Yankee Stadium in starlight.

Henry died younger, & wasn’t sure about the out-there,
except it sounded transcendentally beautiful, whether

or not it was cognizant of him or was just a cowbell
thunking in the mind of the great Oversoul,

but if it at least proved amenable
to hounds, bay horses, turtledoves, what the hell.

Maybe Henry is in Joe’s penthouse, Joe in Henry’s cabin,
maybe Joe is writing books, Henry hugging Marilyn,

maybe Henry is hitting homers, & Joe is fishing Walden,
maybe Joe & Hank are pals, & Marilyn ecstatic with Emerson.

Reading "Heaven" in The Atlantic reminded me I'd never shared this, which I read in the same magazine while in West Virginia, and which moved me so much I mouthed the words over and over in the collegiate auditorium in which we were taking our rehearsal break.

Celebration
by Grace Schulman

Seeing, in April, hostas unfurl like arias,
and tulips, white cups inscribed with licks of flame,
gaze feverish, grown almost to my waist,
and the oak raise new leaves for benediction,
I mourn for what does not come back: the movie theater—
reels spinning out vampire bats, last trains,
the arc of Chaplin’s cane, the hidden doorways—
struck down for a fast-food store; your rangy stride;
my shawl of hair; my mother’s grand piano.
My mother.

How to make it new,
how to find the gain in it? Ask the sea
at sunrise how a million sparks can fly
over dead bones.

Both of these reminded me I should never write any more poems, ever again.

the wall is builded of your images

I read an absolutely precious prayer written by a young boy that demonstrated absolutely charming care for God. It reminded me of this, one of my favorite poems:

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 with 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.

Rainer Marie Rilke

The Infinite Loveliness

There was recently a piece in the Globe about music you should like but you don’t. The author mentioned that Joni Mitchell was on that list for him. That’s not terribly surprising since she is often an acquired taste. Unfortunately the most popular of her songs (Big Yellow Taxi, The Circle Game, etc) don’t represent the best of her work. I’ve never thought it was a beautiful voice, but her music is inspired and her singing is enviably fearless. The Globe writer mentioned a particular song – Rainy Night House – that crawled through my brain like a tune virus for the rest of the day.

Some pieces of art are so beautiful to me it hurts. Participating in their beauty leaves me thrilled but also sad, because it makes me aware of a level of genius – of sanctity?, blessedness? – that is beyond human grasp. I am wrapped up in gratitude for things that are so lovely while being more aware than ever of the gap between myself and the Infinite Loveliness.

What does this to me? Michelangelo’s David. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Eliot’s Choruses from the Rock (especially the last few stanzas). The Sanctus from the B Minor Mass. Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus. Hopkins’ Hurrahing in Harvest. Brahms’ Wir Wandelten. Joni Mitchell's The Last Time I Saw Richard. I try to sing these songs, to look at these works, to read these poems and letters and 80% of the time I end up in tears.

What does this to you?

O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.
O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;
The eastern light our spires touch at morning,
The light that slants over our western doors at evening,
The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,
Moon light and star light, owl and moth light,
Glow-worm light on a grassblade.
O Light Invisible, we worship Thee!

We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured pains of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light.
We are glad when the day ends,
when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.
We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;
Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.
Therefore we thank thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.
We thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.
And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.
And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!
- T. S. Eliot

Gettin' smudged

Happy Ash Wednesday to one and all. Or perhaps I should say "Penitent Ash Wednesday". Doesn't have quite the same ring.

Due to a combination of stress about a big liturgy day and passing out at 9:15 last night, I was wide awake at 4:14. Knowing my alarm would go off at 5:35 anyway I couldn't fall back to sleep, so around 5:15 I decided to pray the morning office. I always pray Evening Prayer during Lent, and thought this would be a great way to start things off. Plus, I love the Benedictus.

Well, my brain was in no state to pray anything, so that didn't go great. But I did kick off the season reading my favorite poem, TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday. Here's the final section:


Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

What I've done with my winter break

A few people suggested that I post while on my little break so that they could be kept up to date on what I am doing. Please don't take my silence as a sign of my ignoring your request, take it as a sign that I haven't been doing much of anything. Auditions start up again the first weekend of January; all I've been doing is working on some new rep, starting my training for my next race, and lying on the couch.

I did have a church gig today, and even though they read the shorter option for the Gospel, I've still got Anna and Simeon on the brain. In honor of our boy Simeon, here's some T.S. Eliot:

A Song for Simeon
T.S. Eliot

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

I suppose one of the reasons I so enjoy ol' Thomas Stearns is that he and I are equally fascinated with the liturgical calendar. See you on Ash Wednesday, T.S.

Thanksgiving

Today I am thankful that someone at church asked me if I was done with undergrad yet. I feel bad that I looked at her like she was crazy since I graduated 7 years ago. But at least I look good.

Seriously, I'm thankful for a warm house and warm meal. I'm thankful that my brother has a job at school that he loves, even if it means that he has to be away this weekend. I'm thankful I have 6 or 7 jobs I love up in Boston.

I leave you with one of my favorite poems. It's been described as trite and corny and I don't care:


Thank you for love, no matter what its outcome,
that leads us to the window in the dark,
that adds another otherness to others,
that holds out stars as if they were first diamonds
found in a mine that had been long closed down,
that hands out suns and makes us ask each morning:
What else do we need, picnickers in time?
Thank you for love that does not hang on answers,
that says, 'Enough's enough, to love is plenty...'
--- by such signs do we know the world exists,
amo ergo sum, thank you for that.
The miles, the years, the lives that lie between
--- they always lay there, and they always will,
but look, the loved one spans the dizzy distance
by the act of being, and we lovers turn
our faces steadily thou -wards as a field
of sunflowers like a tracking station turns,
charting its meaning by the westering sun.

- Bruce Dawe