Category Archives: Death

Time’s Gentle Admonition: George Herbert Faces Death

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J. R. Ring, Harvest (1885)

This is the fifth time in ten years of blogging that I have observed the feast day of poet-priest George Herbert—”the greatest devotional poet in the English language”[i]—with a reflection on his poetic “heart work and heaven work.”[ii] For me, in our spiritually impoverished secular age, he remains an indispensable guide for a life of prayer. As I wrote in a previous post,

“Herbert’s passionate engagement with the Transcendent––among us, within us, over-against us––was not theoretical or abstract, but intimate and experiential, employing the first-person form of lyric poetry to open a clearing where his inmost feelings could show themselves to both the speaker and his readers. In his striking play of words, images and sounds, a consort of meanings both public and private, we overhear Herbert’s prayers, and witness the argument of his soul. The brilliance of his poetic invention is never for its own sake. He seeks not to show off his skill, but to surrender his will.”

You can find more general information about Herbert’s life and works in the links at the end of this post. Today I want to look at two poems about the inescapable mortality of the human condition. In the first, “Time,” the poet meets up with the Grim Reaper, wielding his scythe used to harvest the ripe field of human souls. He is, of course, the personification of the temporal flow that sweeps us all toward death. Instead of cowering in fear, the poet initiates a playful bantering, as if Time were his equal. Courteously, Time calls the poet “Sir,” and lets him do most of the talking.

Meeting with Time, slack thing, said I,
Thy sithe is dull; whet it for shame.
No marvell Sir, he did replie,
If it at length deserve some blame:
     But where one man would have me grinde it,
     Twentie for one too sharp do finde it.

Perhaps some such of old did passe,
Who above all things lov’d this life:
To whom thy sithe a hatchet was,
Which now is but a pruning knife.
     Christs coming hath made man thy debter,
     Since by thy cutting he grows better.

And in his blessing thou art blest:
For where thou onely wert before
An executioner at best;
Thou art a gard’ner now, and more,
     An usher to convey our souls
     Beyond the utmost starres and poles.

And this is that makes life so long,
While it detains us from our God.
Ev’n pleasures here increase the wrong,
And length of dayes lengthen the rod.
     Who wants the place, where God doth dwell,
     Partakes already half of hell.

Of what strange length must that needs be,
Which ev’n eternitie excludes!
Thus farre Time heard me patiently:
Then chafing said, This man deludes:
     What do I here before his doore?
     He doth not crave lesse time, but more.

From the first moment, the poet disses Time—none other than Mr. Death—calling him “slack” (meaning lazy and slow), and mocking his scythe as shamefully dull. Herbert’s health was poor when this was written (he would die at 40), and his jibe may have been the black humor of a dying man: With such a failing body, how come I’m still here? You need to sharpen your blade, Mr. Death!

But the poet’s surprisingly light tone here is a form not of denial, but of faith. For the believer, Time’s fatal blade brings not annihilation, but new growth: “By thy cutting he grows better.” We’re not sure what Time makes of this argument, but when the poet begins a more speculative discourse about time and eternity, wondering whether they intersect or remain totally separate, Time loses his patience. Why is he standing here listening to this mortal prattle on, wasting Time’s time?

What do I here before his doore? / He doth not crave lesse time, but more. Mr. Death thinks the poet is stalling, trying to gain a little more time with his philosophical filibuster. But knowing the poet’s faith, we may assume that Time is mistaken. What the poet craves is not more time, but eternity: freedom from temporality itself, in “the place where God doth dwell” beyond the binaries of here and there, then and now, presence and absence.

When the 20th-century poet and critic Paul Zweig was diagnosed with lymphoma in his forties, he wrote about his oncologist’s assurances that he might still have a “long time” left.

“Listening to my doctor was delicate. I took in every shrug, every rise and fall of his voice. I weighed his words on a fine scale, to detect hope or despair. Then I called up another doctor, to hear how the words sounded in his voice. I triangulated and compared all to find something that would shut off the terror for a while.” [iii]

Zweig’s “terror” feels searingly authentic. Can we say the same about Herbert’s tranquility? And what happens next, when Time finally loses its patience with us? Herbert does not say. Cannot say, in fact. No one can. Does the silence after the final line signify emptiness (nothing at all), or absolute wholeness (God all in all)? Your answer will shape your religious practice.

Our second poem, “Life,” surprises us when we discover it’s really about death. But isn’t that how life is?—surprising us by coming to an end. Whether it be bitter or sweet, our continued existence seems so convincing. Until it’s not.

The poem’s imagery is very simple. A small bundle of cut flowers, already starting to wither by midday, becomes, through the poet’s act of sustained attention, a metaphor for his own mortality. The materiality of the flowers—which the reader is enabled by the text to see, smell, and touch—is a striking example of Herbert’s “sacramental poetics.” The 16th-century Reformation debates about real Presence haunted the religious poetry of the 17th century. What is the relationship between matter and spirit? Can bread and wine be God, and still remain their material selves? Or as Herbert put it, “how shall I know / Whether in these gifts thou bee so …” [iv]

The inseparability of sign and signified, visible and invisible, matter and spirit was foundational for Herbert. The sacramental bread and wine are capable of “Leaping the wall that parts / Our souls and fleshly hearts.”[v] (The HC 1633) But the sacred elements never vanish into abstractions, mere ideas. They remain material objects we can taste and see with our own material bodies. As Kimberly Johnson explains in Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England:

“Just as in the Incarnation the Word was made flesh, such that material and spiritual ontologies might be maintained simultaneously, Herbert’s poetics endorses a representational system wherein the material is not supplanted by spiritual significance but persists as a site of sensory participation … Poetry, as Herbert recognizes, is an embodied art. It activates the flesh as a perceptual instrument and preserves in its nonreferential features the incarnational properties of language, and it is because of these qualities that poetry serves, for Herbert, a sacramental function.” [vi]

In “Life,” the words that engage our senses are not disposable means for grasping abstractions; the flowers remain outward and visible objects in the world (heard, seen, smelled, felt) which are at the same time inseparable from the inward and spiritual meanings they signify. As you read the next poem, notice how the text takes hold of your senses.

I Made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
                      My life within this band.
But Time did becken to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
                      And wither'd in my hand.

My hand was next to them, and then my heart:
I took, without more thinking, in good part
                      Times gentle admonition:
Who did so sweetly deaths sad taste convey,
Making my minde to smell my fatall day;
                      Yet sugring the suspicion.

Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye liv'd, for smell or ornament,
                      And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my sent be good, I care not if
                      It be as short as yours.

Following the structural pattern of the 17th-century “poetry of meditation,” whose sensuous imagery was strongly influenced by the Ignatian “application of the senses” to biblical visualizations, “Life” begins by declaring its topic. The speaker has made a “posie” (meaning both a posy of flowers and the “poesy” of Herbert’s verse, adroitly binding those flowers to the written text which offers them to our senses). Next comes a statement of the meditation’s purpose: by comparing his life to the flowers, the poet will “smell my remnant out.” Using the verb’s secondary meaning—to discern as if by smell (think of “sniff out”)—the poet proposes to reflect on the remainder of his life. The rest of the poem moves through a series of sensations and feelings to reach its conclusion of acceptance and resolution in the face of death.[vii]

Before the first stanza ends, the flowers have already withered, though the day is but half done. In the second stanza, the poet absorbs the flowers’ fate with his senses, his feelings, and his thought. He can’t help but “smell” his “fatall day.” This time, however, the sense of smell seems less metaphorical: even the reader cannot miss the whiff of decay.

And yet, Time’s admonition is “gentle.” The flowers are not mowed down by a sharpened scythe, but softly “beckened” to “steal away.” The idea of death is so “sweetly” conveyed by this natural process that it feels sugar-coated and easy to swallow. And like the flowers which have spent their allotted time pouring out their sweet fragrance, the poet resolves to follow their example “without complaints or grief.” As long as his “sent” (scent) is fragrant with goodness, then whatever the actual date on which he is sent to God, all is well. How long we live doesn’t matter nearly so much as how well we live.    

In our own violent and dispirited age, we may wonder over the lack of anguish, or fear, or rage, or grief in these poems. Where is “the terror?” How gently—and confidently—do Herbert’s speakers go into death’s good night. Many will find such tranquil surrender to be false, naïve, archaic, unrealistic, incomprehensible, or simply impossible. Nevertheless, Herbert’s poetry remains to pose the vital question: Are we still capable of imagining “Such a Way, as gives us breath … Such a Life, as killeth death?” [viii]

Going gently: The Starry Mountain Singers perform Sam & Peter Amidon’s exquisite arrangement of “All Is Well.”

Previous posts about George Herbert:

Heart Work and Heaven Work (2015)

“Flie with angels, fall with dust”— Appreciating George Herbert (2019)

Tune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace — George Herbert’s “Denial” (2020)

“Though the whole world turn to coal” — George Herbert’s “Virtue” (2023)

[i] Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, UK/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xxi. This extensively footnoted collection is indispensable for navigating Herbert’s  17th-century idioms and discovering the wide variety of interpretive strategies applied to his deeply-layered texts over the years.

[ii] This term was applied to Herbert by his contemporary Richard Baxter, a Puritan divine. Herbert’s feast day is February 27.

[iii] Paul Zweig, Departures (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), q. in Death (Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 4, Fall 2013, p. 210). Zweig wrote this c. 1981, and died in 1984.

[iv] George Herbert, “The H. Communion” (W).

[v] Ibid., “The H. Communion” (1633).

[vi] Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 60-61.

[vii] Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 58-59. This classic study covers the poets who applied the spiritual exercises of the Counter-Reformation to their poetry and compositional practice: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Richard Baxter, and Robert Southwell.

[viii] George Herbert, “The Call.” This beautiful poem, set to a memorable tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is #487 in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982.

“Though the whole world turn to coal”—George Herbert’s “Virtue”

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“Only a sweet and virtuous soul, / Like season’d timber, never gives …”

Today is the feast day of George Herbert (1593-1633), one of my favorite poets. It is fitting that we remember him at the beginning of Lent, for his poems are imbued with the season’s themes of repentance and renewal. He was a student of what the Book of Common Prayer calls our “unruly wills and affections,” and could be brutally honest about his own need for divine grace. 

I have posted reflections on his life and work before. In Heart Work and Heaven Work (2016), I wrote: 

The Herbert whom we meet in his poems is a person very much in process: unfinished, imperfect, always aspiring to something higher. He cared deeply about formation and growth – his own as well as that of his congregation. As poet and priest he used all possible art to move those with ears to hear.

And in “Flie with angels, fall with dust”—Appreciating George Herbert (2019), I celebrated the way he perceived the spiritual richness of the world:

Herbert’s spiritual environment seems so alive with correspondences between visible things and deeper, invisible realities. The Mystery of the world is met in the humblest of circumstances. The burning bush flashes through the surface of the ordinary. Everyday phenomena are saturated with significance.

This year let us honor “the holy Mr. Herbert” (as his parishioners called him) by examining a single poem. Perhaps we will make this an annual tradition on February 27. For today, the poem is “Virtue.”

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
The bridal of the earth and sky; 
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, 
For thou must die. 

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave 
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; 
Thy root is ever in its grave, 
And thou must die. 

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, 
A box where sweets compacted lie; 
My music shows ye have your closes, 
And all must die. 

Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
Like season’d timber, never gives; 
But though the whole world turn to coal, 
Then chiefly lives. 

“Sweet rose … thy root is ever in its grave.”

The poem has been called “one of the purest lyrics in the language.” [i] The predominance of one-syllable words exemplifies its “fine poetic thrift.” [ii]  The sixteen short lines, divided into four quatrains, overflow—almost miraculously—with diverse images, references and meanings. For example, “The bridal [wedding] of the earth and sky“ invokes the Easter Vigil’s Exultet: How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined. “Thy root is ever in its grave” describes the paradox of mortal life with stunning brevity: even at our liveliest, we are dying creatures. Or as we say on Ash Wednesday: Remember that you are dust. 

The poem’s opening line establishes rhythmic beat of successive iambs (short-long): “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright.” This pattern is more or less followed in the first three lines of the first three quatrains, but each fourth line slams on the brakes with its sober message of mortality, delivered in a series of strong beats like the striking of a drum or the tolling of a bell: For thou must die … And thou must die … And all must die.

Although an apocalyptic wisdom throughout the poem reminds us that days end, flowers wither, seasons pass and worlds burn (“turn to [char]coal”), the first three quatrains seem more celebratory than melancholy. The word “sweet” occurs six times. The inevitable terminations of temporal existence need not diminish whatever pleasures and joys we experience in the moment. However, as the poem’s conclusion insists, the “soul”—our innermost self or enduring identity—can partake of something deeper and more lasting, an essential and enduring stability at its core.  

The governing images of the final quatrain, “season’d timber” and “turned to coal,” each call up a constellation of meanings. Timber suggests both the cedars of Lebanon and the cross. And the seasoning of wood represents the testing of the soul, which, by God’s grace, “never gives”—never gives in, never gives up. As Herbert scholar John Drury explains, “Timber is seasoned by being left to dehydrate out of doors undercover for several years, enduring, like the soul, the extremes of weather and the seasons. After that it is stable and strong.” [iii]

But wood is flammable, and the doomsday image of a world-ending fire takes us to the brink of ancient fears of annihilation. But Herbert deftly steers us instead into a place of hope and promise. Wood tested by fire can become a glowing ember, an image of liveliness. Likewise can the tested soul become “a quick [living] coal / of mortall fire,” as Herbert says in another poem, “Employment (II).” And even should the world’s last embers cool and turn to dust, the soul which belongs to God will “chiefly” live. “Chiefly” means particularly, or mostly, but it may also reference Christ, the Chief of history, in whom all are made alive.

Unlike the last line of the first three quatrains, with their percussive stresses hammering out our doom, the stresses of the very last line, reduced from four to three, seem gentler and, aided by the use of a two-syllable word, more lilting: “Then chief-ly lives.” Try reading just the fourth line of each quatrain in succession, and notice the difference in tone at the last.

As it always is with God, life has the last word.

[i] Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Johns Hopkins, 1968), cited in Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81. I am indebebted to Professor Wilcox for her richly annotated collection of Herbert’s English poems, each of which also includes summaries of the best Herbert criticism over the years. Since his poetry can be difficult and many of his terms archaic, her book is indispensable.

[ii] John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 59. A must-read if you want to go deeper.

[iii] Ibid., 59.

All Souls Day: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

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Gravestone, Peacham, Vermont.

Our experience shows us that death does not break our kinship bond. We turn to one another for help and support regardless of which side of death our relatives are on.

— Martin Brokenleg [i]

We pray for the dead, believing that, as they are drawn nearer to God, they are enabled to grow in the knowledge and understanding of God, in the service of God, and in the joy and fulfillment of God’s renewing love. We do not pray for the dead as those without hope, but trusting that the faithfulness of God will bring them to the completion and bliss for which every human soul was created. 

— Jon Hart Olson [ii]     

 

On All Souls Day (November 2), we call the dead to mind with stories, mementos, photographs, and rituals. In some ways, the dead never leave us. We still use the language they invented, live in the houses they built, learn from their wisdom, pay for their sins. And we carry their DNA inside our bodies. Bill Holm, a Minnesota poet, has noted the strong resemblances between his own living and dead:

When Jona at sixty traveled 
to her father’s farm in Iceland, 
the relatives looked down
at bony knuckles, veins
popping up, said: “See!
She has the Josephson hands
even after a hundred years…”

Now, when I bellow at parties, 
or look down at my own hands;
knuckles growing, veins
rising as I age, I think:
I’ll be living with all 
these dead people inside me.
How will I ever feed them?
They taught me, dragging carcasses
a thousand winters across
the tundra inside their own bodies. [iii]

“How will I ever feed them?” We certainly contain and nurture the legacy of the dead in our culture, in our very bodies, but is there any form of continuing relation with the dead as discrete entities who remain other than ourselves? Do the dead still exist somewhere, and can we still be in relation with them? In both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the hero descends to the underworld to speak with the dead and get their advice. However eerie, it was a sensible quest. The dead have “been there, done that.” They possess the voice of experience. Robert Pogue Harrison explains what Homer and Virgil were up to when they put words in the mouths of the shades in Hades: “We lend voice to the dead so that they may speak to us from their underworld—address us, instruct us, reprove us, bless us, enlighten us, and in general alleviate the historical terror and loneliness of being in the world.” [iv]

As a person of faith, I believe this continuing presence to be more than the lingering effects of the departed on our bodies and our psyches. The communion of the living and the dead possesses an ontological dimension. The afterlife has an existence, a reality, outside our imagination. And it is not only in the past. It is part of our present, and our future. Whether we live or die, we all belong to a larger divine wholeness—“all the company of heaven”— from which we can never be separated. This wholeness, for which there are many names, is the Love that binds us all together. This interconnection, this “communion of saints,” cannot be broken, even by death.

Such radical sense of interdependence, where we all, as John Donne put it, “lie open to one another,” may not come naturally to people who value privacy and individuality and have the means to live without others. Among the world’s poor, however, survival depends on mutuality. People pool and share their resources, with no illusions that they can make it on their own. Community and family are absolutely necessary, and this solidarity is not broken by death. 

In her study of Mexico’s Días de los muertos, Juanita Garciagodoy writes that the poor do not regard the self as “atomistic, independent of the social body that constitutes its extended family and community. The physical body is not the private property of its owner with the array of rights to privacy and individualism and the independence from relations, friends, and neighbors the body of the typical “first worlder” claims. People are felt to be connected radically.” This connectedness includes the departed, as the Days of the Dead make clear. “Those people’s spirits are still part of the unit of the living. There is no question about their desert to be humored, fed, entertained, and regaled on dates of remembrance. Those who live with this understanding know that no one is an island.” [v]  

Dead or alive, we’re all in this together. The Mexican calaveras, cartoonish depictions of skeletons performing the activities of the living, make this point with comedic verve. I once saw a woodcut of three skeletons in festive dress, arms around each other, smiling and waving as they looked me in the eye. Below them, like a postcard greeting, were the words, Wish you were here!  

Gravestone, St. Peter’s churchyard, Lewes, Delaware.

My father died when I was 21. One of my best friends died when we were 30. But for the most part, death kept its distance in my younger days. Lately, however, the losses have begun to mount. The pandemic, tragically, has taken vast multitudes—“a huge number, impossible to count.”[vi] And on a personal level, the vanishing of loved ones grows way too frequent now that I’ve reached a certain age. In the past few years, I’ve addressed personal loss in my writing, and in honor of All Souls, my Day of the Dead “altar” will be a brief florilegium—flowers for the dead, if you will— from four of my requiem posts. 

When two of my most beloved elders, Joe and Phyllis Golowka, died within weeks of each other, I wrote (and preached) “You say goodbye, I say hello”: A Requiem Sermon. 

This is the story that God’s friends stake their lives on:
God has loved us into existence.
God sustains us every step of our life’s journey.
And even after our bodies give out,
God loves us too much to let us go.

Bill Fisher, born five days earlier than I, was a close friend for 59 years. In his final days, after he slipped into unconsciousness, I gave him last rites, and his earthly companions sang him to rest. In Paradisum: On the Death of a Friend, describes what happened next.

I entered his room alone to sing him one more song, “Waterloo Sunset.” We had both loved the quirky music of Ray Davies, and the song’s image of crossing over the river “to feel safe and sound” seemed so fitting.

And I won’t feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset
I am in paradise 

Another friend was taken suddenly early this year. In “When I begin the long work of rising”—A Tribute to David Fetcho, I quote one of his songs:

I want to go with you
to the other side of the light
where we’ll see
what the shadow reveals
will be such a relief …
time in its disguises 
won’t fool us anymore …

Days tumble on with minds of their own
they breathe in our lives, and make them their own
and time, time disappears
like the wind from a sail …
and every good day will be 
just another good day
of eternal life. [vii]

Anise Stevens, my sister’s child, left us far too soon at age 49. She died in the first minute of dawn on New Year’s Day, 2019. Through my tears, I preached “Trailing clouds of glory” at her requiem.

In her last weeks, Anise wondered about what lay ahead. That is the question. My sister Martha said to me before the funeral that her daughter is “on her way.” Then she recited Wordsworth’s evocative image of the next life as our native home to which we shall one day return:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting 
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home. [viii]

The author lays California wildflowers on the grave of William Wordsworth in St. Oswald’s churchyard, Grasmere, England (July 16, 1994).

I have always found Wordsworth’s hopeful and exuberant spirit an inspiration, so much so that I marked my fiftieth birthday with a pilgrimage to the poet’s grave. After nine miles of rambling through the Arcadian charms of English countryside, I arrived at dusk. I had brought along my copy of The Prelude, with two wildflowers from home, an orange California poppy and a pink Farewell-to-Spring, pressed within its pages. As a quarter moon set over the darkening hills beyond St. Oswald’s churchyard, I took out the flowers and laid them on the grassy grave. Then, in the fading light of a summer evening, I spoke the lines which epitomize my own trust in the providence and grace of the human journey:

The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide 
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! [ix]

[i] Martin Brokenleg, “Mitakuya owasin: You are all my relatives,” in The Witness, Vol. 76, No. 11 (Nov. 1993), p. 8. Brokenleg is an Episcopal priest and a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe.

[ii] Jon Hart Olson, newsletter of Christ Church, OntarIo, CA (Nov. 1994). Jon was an Episcopal priest, colleague, mentor and friend.

[iii] Bill Holm, “Genealogy,” in The Dead Get By with Everything (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991) 14.

[iv] Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 150-1.

[v] Juanita Garciagodoy, Digging the Days of the Dead (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 269.

[vi] Revelation 7:9, from the liturgical readings for All Saints Day.

[vii] David Fetcho, “Just Another Good Day.” You can listen to the song here: https://soundcloud.com/ds_feco/just-another-good-day

[viii] William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Chiidhood.”

[ix] William Wordsworth, The Prelude, I.14-18. Wordsworth’s image is a happy reversal of Milton’s melancholy account of the Expulsion from Paradise, where the first humans’ outward journey has dimmer prospects: “The World was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way” (Paradise Lost, 646-649).

“What do I know?”

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Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul (1601). Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo.

In the year 1570, Michel de Montaigne, age 36, was riding “an undemanding but not very reliable horse” through the woods near his Dordogne estate. It was a leisurely outing, a respite from his duties in local politics and the management of the family lands. He was accompanied by some of his workers, one of whom decided to show off by racing his powerful farm horse to the front of the line. But the show-off misjudged the width of the path. Instead of dashing triumphantly past Montaigne’s horse, he rammed it from behind, “striking us like a thunderbolt with all his roughness and weight, knocking us over with our legs in the air.” 

Montaigne flew a good ten yards beyond his fallen horse, losing consciousness when he hit the ground, “with no more movement or sensation than a log.” His companions thought him dead, and sought to carry his inert body back to his home. Along the way, however, he began to revive, “but only little by little and over so long a stretch of time that at first my sensations were closer to death than to life.”

Over the next few hours, Montaigne’s thoughts “floated on the surface of my soul … not merely free from unpleasantness but tinged with that gentle feeling which is felt by those who let themselves glide into sleep.” For that blessed interval, the pain of his body did “not belong to us.” When that pain finally entered his conscious awareness, its severity felt like a second brush with death, but without the dreamy gentleness of his initial encounter with fatal proximity.

The last thing his mind recovered was the memory of his accident. At first he thought he’d been hit by a stray bullet. The Wars of Religion had reached the Dordogne, and the distant pop of primitive firearms was not uncommon in his neighborhood. Eventually, his memory of colliding horses returned, “but that perception had been so sudden that fear had no time to be engendered by it.” And whatever happened next—his horse disappearing under him, his flight through the air, the hard landing and loss of consciousness—remained an utter blank.[a]

Although Montaigne’s Essais are an essential part of the literary canon, I must confess that I had not read his account of this unfortunate fall until my later years—last month, in fact, about twelve hours after I flew off my bicycle to make my own painful fall to earth. Such a timely reading was itself an accident. I happened to have with me Patricia Hampl’s reflections about Montaigne in The Art of the Wasted Day, and when I opened the book in my hospital room the next morning, her chapter about his fall was the next one up.

My own Montaigne moment occurred after the penultimate session of the Olympic Track & Field Trials in Eugene, Oregon, where I was spending ten days in athletics heaven. Bicycling across the University of Oregon campus at dusk, I was surprised to discover—too late!—that the sidewalk suddenly morphed into three descending steps, the kind of impossible shape-shifting that only happens in bad dreams or cartoon catastrophes. I remember a violent bounce off the first step, but not what happened next. I probably squeezed the brakes, pitching the bike into a forward roll and throwing me into space, but I retain no memory of my flight path. I can only recall the moment of impact and the immediate sensation of pain in my right side and shoulder. Thankfully, my head was untouched. Unlike Montaigne, however, I did not drift in a painless state of gentle detachment. But I did have the experience of a certain doubleness in my awareness. While part of me was howling with pain, another part was busy assessing the damage, noting the details, and wondering at the strangeness of my new reality.

Thanks be to God, I was soon supplied with angels of mercy—three students, plus a nurse who had finished her shift at a Catholic hospital only two blocks away. These angels helped me hobble to the emergency room. After two days in hospital, I was on the highway home with my wife at the wheel. Three and a half weeks later, I’m pretty much back to normal life while awaiting the orthopedic verdict on a displaced clavicle.

“I am myself the matter of this book,” said Montaigne of his immense and influential collection of essays. Although his voice is very personal in its wide-ranging reflections on self and world, vivid stories about himself are rare in his writings. Many have attributed the inclusion of his riding accident to its significance as a turning point for Montaigne. A year after his fall, he would withdraw from the world for a life of reading, thinking, and writing. For the next 22 years until his death, he spent the majority of his days philosophizing in the stone tower adjacent to his house.

His near-death experience had produced a clarity of purpose. Close encounters with extinction tend to focus the mind on what truly matters. Since I’m not going to be here that long, how shall I spend the time that remains? But what happened to Montaigne was more than a sense of heightened resolve. It also sparked a new perception of how consciousness works. Hampl describes this pivotal shift:

“In being knocked off his horse, he experienced the doubleness necessary to empower personally voiced writing. He experienced the fall—but he also observed the fall. Both. In separate but related strands of consciousness he experienced, and he saw the experience.”[b]

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Hampl compares Montaigne’s fall to the conversion of Saul. While the Book of Acts (9:1-6) says only that Saul “fell to the ground” in the face of blinding revelation, Caravaggio’s biblical painting makes it a fall from a horse, dramatizing the image of transformation as a great tumble from the heights of control and self-assurance, terminating in a shocking, shattering thud. Thus did Saul become Paul, someone altogether new. 

As for Montaigne, he might not have invented the personal essay had he not first been knocked silly, discovering in the process that the self is not just trapped within its own individual experience, but is capable of a larger, less narcissistic, more reflective understanding of mind and world. As Hampl writes, Montaigne’s head wound “gave him a new, enlarged consciousness. In his Essais he found the purpose of this self: to see and then to say. The personal essay was born of a smack upside the head.”[c]

Montaigne’s fall changed the course of his life, but it also changed his relation to death. He struggled with the fear of it through the loss of his father, brother, best friend and five infant daughters, not to mention the persistent slaughters of the religious wars. But when, in the first hours after his fall, he hovered in a strangely tranquil state of letting go, death appeared to have a “friendly face.” It seemed no longer a feared stranger or an impersonal nullification, but a companion as near to us on our first day as our last. 

For the rest of his life, the embrace of our mortality would be a recurring theme. His essay, “To philosophize is to learn how to die,”[d] offers various perspectives to help us live with death:

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it … Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls, or a pin pricks, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?”

Why are you afraid of your last day? It brings you no closer to your death than any other did. The last step does not make you tired: it shows that you are tired. All days lead to death: the last one gets there.

‘Leave this world,’ Nature says, ‘just as you entered it. The same journey from death to life, which you once made without suffering or fear, make it again from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.’

I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. I once saw a man die who, right to the last, kept lamenting that destiny had cut the thread of the history he was writing when he had only got up to our fifteenth or sixteenth king!

Que sais-je?

And what has my own fall produced in me? I am not Paul. I am not Montaigne. But after that close encounter with the precipitous boundary of my existence, can I remain the same person I was before my short flight into the unexpected? 

The meanings of that Oregon night are still sinking in. Time will tell what I will make of them, or what they will make of me. As Montaigne always said, “Que sais-je?” [e]

[a] Michel de Montaigne, “On Practice,” in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003), II:6, pp. 416-427.

[b] Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (New York: Viking, 2018), 214.

[c] Ibid., 215-216.

[d] The Complete Essays, I:20, pp. 96, 107, 103, 99.

[e] Montaigne’s motto (“What do I know?”) reflected his suspicion of certainty and final conclusions, and his inquisitive open-mindedness.

“When I begin the long work of rising”—A Tribute to David Fetcho

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David Fetcho.

“So my expectations are modest: that for some folks unknown to me, my music and poetry might open a window–maybe just a little bit–and allow them to get a glimpse of the secrets of their own heart as it tries to make sense of this world.”

— David Fetcho

I last saw David Fetcho at a funeral one year ago. I had flown to California to preach at the requiem for Stephen O’Leary, a fellow shape note singer. At the reception afterward, David and his wife Susan joined me in singing “Farthest Field,” a parable of resurrection and reunion beyond this mortal life.

I know one day I’ll leave my home
Here in the valley and climb up to that field so fair
And when I’m called and counted in
That final tally, I know that I will see you there.
Oh, walk with me and we will see the mystery revealed
When one day we wend our way up to the farthest field. 

The three of us had worked out the harmonies years before, and we loved to sing that song whenever we met up. When David and Susan dropped me at the Oakland airport that evening, we had no idea we had sung together for the last time. A few days later, the pandemic began to enclose us in our respective bubbles, two states apart. Then, a week ago, David had a massive stroke. He died yesterday afternoon. 

I first met David and Susan at the California Shape Note Convention in January 2000. They introduced themselves at the lunch break. After hearing my opening prayer that morning, they suspected we were kindred spirits. We quickly discovered a multitude of common bonds, including creative liturgy, filmmaking, music, theater and dance, theology, and radical Christianity. We met for a long conversation the next day, sharing our dreams of provoking a renaissance of wonder among God’s friends. Most of our grand collaborative hopes never materialized, but our periodic exchanges of ideas and passions always nourished our own ongoing projects. We were like an ancient trading culture. I’d show a film they hadn’t seen. They’d read me a poet I didn’t know. Whenever we met, we’d find ourselves taking notes, exchanging the names of works or artists to explore. And when we did manage a collaboration—a creative liturgy, a workshop, a video production—it was always a joy, with a surplus of invention and a minimum of ego. 

David Fetcho, late 1973.

Music was at the heart of David’s many creative gifts. He sang Gregorian chant as a Catholic choir boy, and mastered the accordion in the polka culture of his native Pittsburgh. Coming of age in the 1960s, he breathed the experimental air of the psychedelic San Francisco sound and the “new music” avant garde. His influences ranged from Meredith Monk and David Byrne to late medieval Ars Nova, contemporary world music, and American Sacred Harp singing. In 1970 he got access to a sophisticated Moog synthesizer left over from a Jefferson Airplane project, and began a lifelong exploration of electronic music. But his embrace of complex synthesized music never eclipsed his love of acoustic simplicity. He recently called the alto recorder his primary instrument.

For many years, David collaborated with Susan, an accomplished dancer and choreographer, to create 14 dance productions, touring in Australia, New Zealand, Bali, the U.S. and Canada. He also composed scores for various dance and theater companies, as well as film and television productions. But after decades as a collaborator, David made the courageous decision, at age 67, to produce his first solo work, using the name of his Slovak grandparents before it was Americanized: Fečo. The resulting song cycle, Watch It Sparkle, is a deep river of sounds and rhythms carrying his distinctive vocals and haunting lyrics through an immense cognitive terrain. 

David resisted terms like “experimental” or “avant-garde” for his new venture. He preferred to call it “medieval folk music for the 21st century.” It’s not easy or casual listening, but the listener who consents to the journey will be richly rewarded, perhaps even transformed. Critic Brian Leak encourages us to take the plunge: “As thematically dark as some of the songs are, there’s still a joyful complexity holding it all together.” And Layla Marino writes, “dsfečo’s first solo album has it all: complex song composition, beautiful, emotive melodies, just the right amount of dissonance and well-placed syncopation and vocals which drive home the point of all this strange music.” 

The final song of the cycle, “Just Another Good Day,” celebrates the eternal Now where we can, even in this life, rest in the stillness of Being, where transcendence and immanence meet in the arrested moment. It was the first thing I put on when I heard the news of David’s death. 

I want to go with you
to the other side of the light
where we’ll see
what the shadow reveals
will be such a relief …

time in its disguises 
won’t fool us anymore …

Days tumble on with minds of their own
they breathe in our lives, and make them their own
and time, time disappears
like the wind from a sail …
and every good day will be 
just another good day
of eternal life. 

Susan and David Fetcho, May 2006 (Jim Friedrich)

“Time of Quarantine,” recorded in his basement in June 2020, knows no such lightness of being. The present moment is heavy with longing for the return of a lost world: “dearest friends may fall / and sorrow’s tide wash over all.” The unwavering close-up of David singing is powerfully intimate (especially so now that he’s gone), yet we see a certain inexpressiveness in his face (but not his voice!), as though another power is speaking through him. This is not a performance, but a message. And the message is hope: 

If there’s a meaning to be found, 
it’s that love can still abound 
in this time of quarantine … 

What is the meaning of this plague we see? 
Even in our shelters we are not alone: 
our hearts can bridge the distance 
although we stay at home. 

Oh where is the time and place 
when I can finally touch your face 
and hold you like I did before 
this time of quarantine? 

And when we look back upon these days, 
we’ll remember how it felt to say, 
“We’re all in this together. 
We’ll make it through together.”

All of David’s work was grounded in a deep faith, a questioning mind, and a compassionate heart. In the 1970s, he and Susan belonged to the Bartimaeus Community in Berkeley, a communal experiment of the Evangelical left which included influential theologian/activist Ched Myers. Over the years, the Fetchos have worked creatively with many different church bodies, but in the years I have known them they have never had a lasting church home. I suspect that their belief in the deep connection between art, faith and imagination has never quite found a satisfactory institutional shelter. As David wrote to me in 2015:

“I want to look for a future shape of the Church unbound from the arbitrary conventions and protocols of manufactured traditions, and converted back to the one deep and abiding tradition of God’s self-expression in the multi-sensual forms of the world, and through the expression of human creative imagination lifted into the prophetic dimension.”

But to some extent, David and Susan found their true “church” in the community of singers who gather regularly to make a joyful noise with the expressive choral tradition of American shape note music. As a faithful supporter of singings in the San Francisco Bay Area, David was known not only for his strong voice, but also for his warm and welcoming encouragement to novice singers.  

Shape noters from all over have been posting fond remembrances. A Bay Area singer wrote: “David’s resounding voice was one of the first that truly stirred me at a local singing. I matched his tone next to me, in the lower tenor octave, and discovered the full sound in my own chest that you all have heard roaring from the alto bench in years since. He has driven me to countless Healdsburg singings, when I haven’t taken the weekend to cycle to them, and soothed me with such a gentle presence, calm with grounded wisdom.” 

In the following video, David and Susan lead a 2013 Palo Alto gathering in singing Rainbow: “Thy ways abound with blessings still, / Thy goodness crowns the years.” David’s radiant joy was a familiar sight at so many singings. He will be dearly missed.  

At last Sunday’s annual Seattle Sacred Harp Convention (on Zoom), 75 singers sang “Christian’s Farewell” for David. The final verse ends, “When I am done, I will go home / Where Jesus is smiling and bids me to come.” Dante’s Commedia reaches a similar conclusion, envisioning “the whole universe alight with a single smile” (Par. xxvii.4-5). To connect two such diverse sources to find a shared meaning is the kind of intertextual play that David’s brilliant mind was always quick to produce. But now he no longer needs to conceive the smile. He can enjoy it face to face. 

The ladder between earth and heaven (Daniel Cooney)

The shocking suddenness of David’s physical absence is hard to accept. I will be a long time sounding his name into the silence. But a Mary Oliver poem he sent me years ago brings comfort: 

When death
carts me off to the bottomlands,
when I begin
the long work of rising—

Death, whoever and whatever you are, tallest king of
tall kings, grant me these wishes: unstring my bones;
let me be not one thing but all things, and wondrously
scattered; shake me free from my name. Let the wind, and
the wildflowers, and the catbird never know it. Let
time loosen me like the bead of a flower from its wrappings
of leaves. Let me begin the changes

Slowly
up the hill,
like a thicket of white flowers
forever
is coming.

This video, perhaps the last recording David made, was shot at sunset on January 18, 2021.

Love Among the Ruins: Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy”

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Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) on the road to Naples.

Alexander:       “Where are we?”
Katherine:       “Oh, I don’t know exactly.”

— Opening lines of Journey to Italy

 

The first shot of Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film, Journey to Italy, is through the windshield of a speeding Bentley on an open stretch of country road. It is an image of pure velocity, revealing neither origin nor goal, but only the fact of motion. Inhabiting the subjective eye of the camera, we know only that we are rushing forward, out of the past, into the unknown.

Then we see who is inside the car. Alex and Katherine Joyce are Londoners, on their way to Naples to sell a villa inherited from their Uncle Homer. We deduce from their clothes—his tweed jacket and her leopard-skin coat—that they are a couple of means, accustomed to shaping their own story. But the names “Joyce” and “Homer,” invoking the great voyager Ulysses, suggests that their journey will take them beyond the familiar into the land of unknowing. “Where are we?” “Oh, I don’t know exactly.”

For the Joyces, Naples, along with nearby Vesuvius and Pompeii, is radically elsewhere—neither Rome nor Milan, and certainly not London. In the Italian south, modernity has not erased the archaic remnants of mythic memory or silenced the primal voices of earth, sea, and sky. The ancient past is not dead and gone. It speaks through rituals and ruins. It erupts from the depths of history, utters forgotten tongues.

Time slows in the south. The north’s purposeful hurry dissipates beneath the Neapolitan sun. The forward rush of the opening scene is replaced by aimless drift. A firm sense of story—beginning, middle, and end—dissipates into Mediterranean languor. The eventful developments we expect from movie narrative are absent. Like Dante in the dark wood, Alex and Katherine have strayed from the straight road of storytelling. They have lost their way.

The Italian south doesn’t create their malaise; it reveals it. “I’m getting sick of this crazy country,” Alex complains. “It poisons you with laziness. I want to get back home, back to work.” Without the familiar fictions of their London life, the habitual doings and distractions which postpone the honest reckonings of a hungry heart, they find themselves face to face with the alienation, egoism and fatigue of a failing marriage. They hardly know what to say to each other. When they do, the words are often abrasive or wounding.

Rossellini’s leads were actors whose own lives were in emotional disarray. Both Ingrid Bergman (Katherine) and George Sanders (Alex) had recent divorces, and Bergman’s current affair with Rossellini—a scandal at the time—was coming apart. She was tearful on the set. Sanders, recruited precisely for his sour and cynical manner, was also unhappy. With his biggest roles behind him, what was he doing with a largely nonprofessional cast in a low-budget art film?

Rossellini’s practice of handing out dialogue at the last minute kept his actors off balance, so they couldn’t overthink their performance in advance . Trained in the conventions of Hollywood’s highly scripted and plot-driven narratives, Bergman and Sanders often seem at a loss in a film where so little happens. His confusion and her uncertainty infused their roles with authenticity, blurring the line between fiction and documentary.

“All those shots of eyes looking.” —Jacques Rivette

“The film opens a breach and all cinema on pain of death must pass through it.”

— Jacques Rivette on Journey to Italy [i]

Journey is more than the story of a marriage. Its wider theme is the malady of the secular age. Both Alex and Katherine are imprisoned within themselves, unable to connect with each other or the world. To borrow a phrase from Jean-Luc Godard, they are “castaways of the western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity.” [ii]  Journey would pave the way for a cinema of alienation, haunted with the ghostly nonbeing of lives “lacking in purpose, in passion, in zest, in a sense of community, in ordinary human responsiveness, in the ability to communicate.…” [iii]

This was a new kind of cinema, born of twentieth-century trauma. After the Holocaust and Hiroshima, it became impossible to limit the art of film to self-contained stories, within which the actors can take action to resolve problems and produce definitive and satisfying conclusions. The damage and disfigurement of humanity, its existential crisis and utter lostness, had to find authentic representation in movies about “nothing.” That is to say, their true subject would not be a narrative but a condition.

French film scholar Antoine de Baecque writes about the impact on filmmakers of the shocking footage shot during the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The idea of “aestheticizing horror” through fictional recreations of the camps seemed obscene at the time. “I could never do that,” said American director Samuel Fuller. “How can you do it better than the Germans?”[iv]  But those terrible images lodged themselves permanently in the psyches of directors like Rossellini, Antonioni, Resnais and Godard. As de Baecque writes:

“These images born of the war, which deeply marked cinema and filmmakers at the time, did a kind of subterranean work, a ‘reworking’ so to speak, subconsciously—since they never actually appear in postwar films—and then resurfaced in films (often ten years later) in definite forms, like traumatic memory that, little by little, had bored its way into the history of cinema. An art form had lost its innocence, and the great auteurs would no longer be making the same kinds of films.” They could only “return to the real by getting out of the studio to film the world.” [v]

Skulls of unknown dead at the cave cemetery of Fontanelle in Naples.

In Journey, the memory of death resurfaces again and again. We see the charnel house skulls in a Naples cemetery, a funeral cortège rounding a corner to block our progress, and the ruins of Pompeii, where a thousand Romans were buried alive by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Even when Alex and Katherine bask in the pleasant Mediterranean sun, the volcano looms behind them as a reminder of mortality.

Sunbathing at Homer’s villa, with Vesuvius in the background.

Two people have lost their way in a world of death. Is there no exit? The spirituality of Naples wants to speak, but Alex has no ears to hear, no curiosity beyond his enclosure of self-absorption. Katherine, however, proves more adventurous. When she drives into Naples from the villa, the film cuts between her “entombment” inside the car and the fecundity of street life all around her—strolling lovers, pregnant women, sidewalk vendors. The contrast between the carefully composed studio shot of Katherine behind the wheel and the cinéma vérité footage of the street creates an unstable mix of fiction and documentary. The wall between herself and a wider reality is starting to crumble.

The polished studio shot of Katherine encased in her car contrasts with the documentary realism of the street scenes around her.

“That’s what God is for, to make our lies truth.”

— Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice

In writing about the novels of Iris Murdoch, theologian Paul S. Fiddes describes the ‘unselving’ of self-enclosed characters. He could be writing about the Joyces as well. Like Murdoch’s protagonists, they “learn, or fail to learn, to be truthful, which means giving attention to what is real around them. At one level … this means noticing people as they actually are, rather than as we want them to be for our convenience. It means delighting in all the contingent details of the world, recognizing the ‘otherness’ of people and things, and living with all the hazards of accident. At the very least the disciples of goodness accept the ‘muddle’ of the world, and at the best they experience its amazing variety as being the Sublime.” [vi]

Katherine’s tourist itinerary of Naples thus becomes something more: a journey into the depths of the past—the cave of an ancient Sibyl, an ossuary of anonymous skulls, galleries of Roman sculpture, the ruins of Pompeii. Here she begins to face what Rose Macaulay called “the ruins of the soul; the shadowy dreams that lurked tenebrously in the cellars of consciousness; in the mysterious corridors and arcades of dreams, the wilderness that stretches not without but within.” [vii] Remnants of a vanished past, signifying the paradoxical dance of time and eternity, interrogate the meaning of her present existence. As we are now, so you shall soon be. What are you doing with the tiny slice of time you’ve been given? When you’re gone, what remains?

In the archaeological museum, the eyes of the past interrogate the modern viewer.

 When Katherine looks at statues, they stare back. Who are you? The “I” of the camera, a third subjectivity, looks at both—at the statue, then at Katherine. In the museum and the other visited sites, the film becomes a documentary of Ingrid Bergman’s face, “a sensory surface on which the sounds and images are imprinted. The film appears to rest entirely on her reactions.” [viii]

When Katherine gazes into the sulphur pits of Vesuvius, where subterranean energies surface into visibility, we are reminded of Dante’s Inferno, the classic template for every descent into the soul’s hidden depths.

Katherine and her guide at the sulphur pits of Vesuvius.

Gustave Doré: Dante and Virgil in the 8th circle of hell.

The crisis point in Journey follows a bitter argument between Katherine and Alex. At the very moment Alex says the fatal word—“divorce”—they are interrupted by Burton, the villa’s property manager, who insists they come immediately to the excavation at Pompeii, where a pair of “bodies” is about to be uncovered.

When Pompeii was buried under six meters of volcanic ash two thousand years ago, its inhabitants died instantly. Their bodies dissolved over time, leaving hollow forms in the hardened ash. During the shooting of Journey to Italy, archaeologists were in the process of injecting plaster into those forms to recreate the ancient “bodies,” and Rossellini was allowed to film the fictional Joyces watching the real uncovering of a buried past.

“You must come!” Burton had told them. “Imagine—to actually see the shape of a man just as he was then, the moment when he was surprised by death.” In fact, what they do see is two people, a couple who took their last breath lying side by side as lovers.

The forms are real plaster, but at the same time they are fictional figures, reimagined into the visible from the empty shapes left behind by the dead. They are, in effect, tangible expressions of nothingness, which might also be said about the hollow and aimless lives of the Joyces. For any viewer, those plaster forms of vanished Pompeiians prompt unsettling meditations on life and death, presence and absence, and our own essential nothingness. I myself contemplated Pompeii’s plaster ghosts almost fifty years ago, and I can still recall the melancholy—and the fascination—those forms evoked in me. As Julian of Norwich put it in the 14th century, without divine love sustaining us in every moment, we would all sink into nonbeing.

Alex and Katherine watch the unearthing of the ancient couple at Pompeii.

What the Joyces behold, as they watch the archaeologists brush away the ash from the plaster forms, is history made visible. Staring into the abyss of time, they are confronted by the smallness and brevity of their own lives. Their own nothingness surfaces into awareness. The falsity of their solipsistic lives, independent of a larger world and ignorant of death, begins to give way.

The image of the ancient lovers is itself a shock, history’s rebuke to their own loveless marriage. Perhaps most terrible of all is the photographic nature of the forms, capturing a single instant of the past and removing it from the flow of time. The Roman lovers are a still image, frozen in a moment with no future. For Katherine and Alex, stuck in a hell of their own making, it displays the horror of an existence which cannot change, a deadness with no exit. They recognize themselves—sans embrace—in the plaster forms.

Katherine recoils and bursts into tears, demanding that they leave the site. As the couple descends a flight of ancient stairs to find their car, Katherine asks her husband, “Is this the way out?” It is another Dantean moment: the way down is the only way up.

Once back in their car, they try to put some distance between themselves and the place which has tried their souls. But the south will not let them go. Passing through the town of Maiori on the Amalfi Coast, they are blocked by a great crowd jamming the central square. It is a procession for San Gennaro, the only Christian festival to claim an annual miracle: the liquefication of the martyred bishop’s dried blood. The persistence of this claim in a skeptical age highlights the archaic strangeness of a region where the past seems so unperturbed by modernity. And in this land of miracles, Journey to Italy reaches its miraculous conclusion.

Unable to drive any further, Katherine and Alex get out their car, the symbol of their isolation from and control over exterior circumstance. Immersed in the teeming crowd, they seem nakedly exposed to the energies all around them. When Katherine is suddenly swept away by a surge of bodies, Alex runs to rescue her. They embrace. Suddenly—miraculously—awakening to a forgotten but genuine bond between them, they confess their folly and profess their love.

The miraculous reconciliation defies expectations.

It’s a Hollywood ending, but one in quotes, because this is a modernist work, where the real and ambiguous world insists on breaking into the neatly scripted story. If the revelations and crisis that preceded this moment only result in a happy ending for the couple, who might then resume their distance from the world if not each other, it is not a true unselving. It would allow the lie of autonomous lives to carry on.

Alex and Katherine embrace as the camera pulls away.

The film’s true miracle is not the “happy ending” of the Joyces’ embrace and the lovely closeup of famous movie stars. Rather, it is their disappearance into the larger world of humanity and history, and through that, into the ultimate mystery of the world, whom we call divine. And this miracle happens when the camera, on a crane, pulls away from the couple to sweep over the crowd. The Joyces are not forgotten, but they are now understood as part of a much larger world. But this world is not anonymous and impersonal. The uniquely personal remains undiminished in this great communion of mortal beings, as the final shot, now at eye level, watches face after face after face pass by, into a collective future that never stops unfolding.

Every age will see a film differently. I’ve watched Journey to Italy many times over the years, but viewing it during the pandemic has touched an existential nerve. Larger realities are breaking into our settled world, and we will never be the same. Our own Vesuvius looms on the horizon.

Film critic Laura Mulvey, in her commentary on the excavation scene, points out that cinema itself, not just particular films, confronts us with our mortality:

“The figures of the excavation are formed by an imprint left by the original. Film too is an imprint.…The presence of the human figure on celluloid is one more layer, one more trace of the past brought to life and preserved.… With the coming of death and the passing of time, Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, as well as the passersby in Naples, are now themselves dead, their images fossilized on celluloid, just as the figures of Pompeii were cast in plaster.” [ix]

“Life is so short,” says Katherine among the ruins. And as today’s pandemic spreads its shadow over the earth, and climate change undermines the stability of the physical world, we too have become more conscious of our vulnerability and our brevity, and less able to maintain the illusion of untouched autonomous lives. We can no longer keep death at a safe distance; we dance every day on the razor’s edge between being and nonbeing. Who knows when we, too, will be “surprised by death?”

But in the long run of time, the question of my fate or your fate must give way to a larger perspective. We are all in this together, and—come what may—I believe we will, in the end, be gathered into the great procession of a redeemed humanity, shouting “Glory!” for all eternity. It will no longer be death that takes us by surprise, but grace.

Love among the ruins. “Life is so short.”

 

Journey to Italy (1954) is the third feature in a trilogy of “voyage” films which Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman, who left a successful Hollywood career to make these art films—some of her best work—with the Italian director, with whom she would fall in love. All 3 films involve a transformative journey into an unfamiliar and challenging place—a barren island in Stromboli (1950), the world of the poor in Europe ’51 (1952), and the mysterious south of Italy in Journey. In the U.S., The Criterion Collection has produced a beautifully mastered box set of the Trilogy, with excellent commentaries, to which I am indebted, on the discs and in the booklet. Journey to Italy can be streamed, but (in the U.S. at least), it is available on disc only in the box set, which is definitely worth having if you love film.

 

[i] Cited in James Quandt’s commentary, “Surprised by Death: Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage Trilogy,” on the Criterion disc, 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman (2013). Rivette, along with Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut, would be greatly influenced by this film, and often praised it in their writings.

[ii] Godard is describing his own film, Contempt (1963), which was itself an hommage to Journey to Italy. Cited in Quandt’s commentary.

[iii] This quote from Richard Gilman’s “About Nothing—with Precision,” Theater Arts 46, no. 7 (July 1962), p. 11. Gilman is writing about another Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, who would take the theme of alienation to the limit in films like La Notte (1961), where the alienated couple remains stuck in their private hell, unlike the couple in Journey to Italy. Rossellini regarded Antonioni’s films as too pessimistic, but both filmmakers were dealing with the same modern malady: alienation, drift, and emptiness. Gilman is cited in Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985),

[iv] Cited in Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau & Jonathan Magidoff (New York: Columbia University, 2008), 68. Fuller shot footage for the U.S. Army during the liberation of the camp at Falkenau (you can find it on YouTube), but he never tried to recreate the horror in a fictional way. He did show his actors watching documentary footage in Verboten!(1959). The fictional shots pale when intercut with real images of mass death.

[v] Antoine de Baecque, 45.

[vi] Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 173.

[vii] Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness (1950), cited in Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 231. Macaulay’s character is contemplating the bomb craters and ruined buildings in 1946 London. The remnants of past destruction bear thematic resemblance to Pompeii and evoke similar responses.

[viii] Antoine de Baecque, 65.

[ix] Laura Mulvey is a noted British film theorist. Her richly informative commentary is on the Criterion disc.

Dancing with Death: Mortality in Cinema

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Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing, 1605-06

In the midst of life we are in death.

–– Burial Office, Book of Common Prayer

It is life that is the danger.

–– Pascal Garnier, C’est la Vie

 

Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about mortality on a daily basis. There’s no skull on my desk as I write. But the pandemic has changed a lot of things. A single sneeze or a stranger’s touch is now a memento mori. Death lurks everywhere––the supermarket, the subway, the street. Where can we go to flee from its presence?

While sheltering in place, I took a break from virtual choirs and amusing videos to screen a pair of films where death draws near during a pandemic: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). In each film, death is an embodied figure to whom the protagonist is inseparably bound. However, for Bergman’s medieval knight death’s visage is terrible and stern, while for Visconti’s ailing artist the gaze of death is youthful and alluring.

Death (Bengt Ekerot) in The Seventh Seal

Tadzio (Björn Andresen) in Death in Venice.

The Seventh Seal takes place during the Black Death of the 14th century, when bubonic plague killed as many as 200 million people in just five years. Antonius Block is a knight who has just returned home from the Crusades only to find Death waiting for him there. Whether by war or by plague, the knight’s fate is inescapable. He is doomed no matter what he does. It is not accidental that this film was made in the wake of the Second World War, and in the shadow of nuclear annihilation.

Another medieval knight, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, blames God for the injustice of the human condition:

How is mankind more blessed by you
Than sheep who cower in the field?
For slain is man just like the beasts,
Locked in prison cages, and given sickness
And great adversity, often for no good reason.
What governance is in this prescience,
That thus torments guiltless innocence? [i]

But Bergman’s knight isn’t even sure God exists. Death appears to him, but not the Divine––at least not in any way he recognizes. Although Bergman was an atheist, believers will discern God in the traveling players: Jof, Mia and their baby, a “holy family” who embody the life force carrying on despite every mishap. God may also be seen in the sacrificial act of the knight, who helps the players escape Death even when he himself cannot. And in the sweetest moment of this anguished film, the family share their strawberries and milk with Block, who receives it like a sacrament, a taste of unconquerable life:

“I shall remember this hour of peace: the strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk, Michael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk. And this will be a sign and a great content.”

 

Antonius Block, the knight (Max von Sydow), plays chess with death.

As Block makes his way toward the refuge of his castle stronghold, he sees Death at work everywhere, working furiously through both plague and human cruelty. The knight tries to postpone the inevitable by engaging Death in a chess match. Death is amused, but not outwitted. Always the supreme ironist, he lets the knight get all the way home before finally taking his life. No one gets out of here alive.

And yet, in the famous dance of death at the film’s end, six of the film’s characters are missing. The “holy family” still wander the earth, untroubled by death because they belong to grace. And three who died (a woman executed for witchcraft, Jof’s wife, and an enigmatic maid) are also absent from Death’s chorus line, perhaps because they had chosen acceptance over fear when their end came.

The Dance of Death in The Seventh Seal.

Death in Venice, adapted from Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, follows a German artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, to Venice, where he hopes to restore his health and sooth his nerves. In the book he is a writer, but Visconti makes him a composer, modeled after Gustav Mahler, whose Third and Fifth symphonies amplify the film’s luscious imagery and deep feeling.

While enjoying the Belle Epoque luxury of the Grand Hotel des Bains, Aschenbach becomes obsessed with the beauty of Tadzio, an adolescent boy on holiday from Poland with his family. Mann aestheticizes the composer’s forbidden desire into a metaphor for immortal beauty and perfection, comparing the boy to the finest Greek sculpture. But in the cinematic version, the explicitness of a visible gaze is hard to defuse with metaphorical rationalizations, and the film was indeed controversial when it came out fifty years ago.

But as I watched through quarantined eyes, I could not escape the idea of the comely boy as the angel of Death, drawing Aschenbach out of himself toward a kind of oblivion. For the artist, mortality means incompleteness. There is never enough time to reach perfection, to say everything that wants to be said. So Tadzio’s evanescent, unattainable beauty mocks the artist’s failure to find a lasting container for the longings of his heart.

The story’s title and content support this interpretation. Death––the sense of an ending––is everywhere in Venice. A plague of cholera is approaching from the east, and despite official assurances that everything is fine, tourists have begun to flee, leaving a kind of ghost city behind. Aschenbach’s heart is beginning to fail. And Venice itself, ever threatened by rising seas, suffers the melancholy of a diminishing future.

In the film’s final scene, Aschenbach is sitting in a beach chair, watching Tadzio wade into the bright sea beneath a declining sun. From a distance, the boy looks back at him, then points off toward a formless blur of light, as though only the infinite can receive the fullness of our longing. As Mann put it, “To rest in what is perfect (ideal, complete in itself) is the longing of those who strive for what is excellent, and is not nothingness itself a form of perfection?”[ii] If the angel of death mocks our incompleteness, does it not also invite us into an ultimate wholeness beyond our imagining, what Mann calls “an immensity full of promise?”[iii]

Tadzio points to “an immensity full of promise.”

We see Aschenbach struggle to stand up, reaching a desperate hand toward the sea, Tadzio, infinity, God. Then his heart fails; he falls back lifeless into the chair. Visconti then cuts to a long shot of the beach. Aschenbach is now barely noticeable on the wide expanse of sand. Hotel attendants carry his body away. What happens to him after that, God only knows.

When a monk composed the chant, Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life we are in death), it was on a New Year’s Eve early in the 14th century. Little did he know that a few decades later, a third to a half of Europe would perish in the Black Death. But I doubt he would have changed a word to sound more comforting. Whatever our fate––calamity or blessing––Death keeps us company every step of the way. Can we learn to live with that?

My friend Bill Coats, theologian and priest, recently wrote:

“It is hard for us not to put life first. We live longer, we are healthier, our medical system assumes and acts as if we can live forever. But a pandemic, even with a plethora of scientific and medical information is, in the last analysis, about death. Of course, in a pandemic not all will die, indeed the vast majority will live even if and when the virus strikes them. Yet the environment in the meantime is open to fear and is predicated on the nearness of death. Our generally optimistic culture is hardly prepared for this.”[iv]

 

Bengt Ekerot and Ingmar Bergman on the set of The Seventh Seal.

Death is near. It has always been so for mortals. We can’t change that fact, but perhaps it is time to rethink our relationship. I like this photo of Bergman talking with Death on the set of The Seventh Seal. They seem so companionable. No one is threatening, no one is afraid. They look like friends. Maybe it will be like that, in the end.

 

 

Related post: The Weight of These Sad Times

 

[i] Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” 440-451, Canterbury Tales.

[ii] Thomas Mann, quoted in Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 174.

[iii] Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Clayton Koelb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 63.

[iv] The Rev. William Coats, personal correspondence, March 2020.

The Weight of These Sad Times

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The weight of these sad times we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

–– King Lear

 

When Queen Elizabeth I died in March, 1603, a plague was beginning to ravage London. By July a thousand were dying every week. A month later, the number was three thousand. By the end of the year, 15% of the city’s 200,000 inhabitants were dead. The epidemic would continue to ebb and flow in the city for the next few years.

The authorities did their best to enforce social distancing. Plays could only be performed when the death toll dropped below forty per week. Bear-baiting and other sports were banned. The infected were quarantined at home with guards sometimes posted at their doors. Caregivers who treated the sick had to carry red sticks in the streets so people could give them wide berth. Penalties for breaking quarantine were harsh: a whipping if you weren’t symptomatic, possible execution if you were. When people tried to wash away the red crosses marking the lintels of their infected houses, the Lord Mayor ordered the crosses to be painted with more indelible oil-based paints.

Dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker described the ordeal of being locked up in a house full of the dead and dying: “What an unmatchable torment were it for a man to be barred up every night in a vast silent charnel-house. . . Were not this an infernal prison?”[i] But such an eyewitness is rare. We have little firsthand reporting of what it was like to live with so much death.

Many plays were being written at this time, even with all the theater closings, but the plague was never their subject. Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro asks, “Was this because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into the theaters of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatized culture simply couldn’t deal with it?”[ii]

However, it seems no accident that Shakespeare wrote King Lear, his bleakest play, during the height of the epidemic, when the parish bells tolling across the street from his study were daily––sometimes hourly–– reminders of perpetual loss. The “weight of these sad times” was crushingly apparent in the play’s premiere before the royal court on St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, 1606.

In the original story adapted by Shakespeare, Lear is restored to his throne and Cordelia lives. But when Shakespeare made it a tragedy, he went beyond the conventions of the genre, which tried to leave the audience with some sense of hope, as survivors made their exit into an implied future. But the very first version of King Lear concludes in utter negation. There is no exeunt into whatever comes next. “The play ends instead with the frozen tableau of the dead king holding his murdered daughter.”[iii]

The King James Version of the Bible, written around the same time as King Lear, begins with the making of the world ex nihilo, out of “nothing.” Shakespeare’s play supplies a grim counter thesis: the unmaking of the world. It begins with “Nothing can come out of nothing,” and ends with “Never. Never. Never. Never.” The word “no” is spoken over 120 times; “not” occurs twice that number. And around 60 of its words begin with “un-” (unfriended, unfortunate, unnatural, unmerciful, etc.). “Call it what you will––resistance, refusal, denial, rejection, repudiation––this insistent and almost apocalyptic negativity becomes a recurring drumbeat, the bass line of the play.”[iv]

The courtly audience, still reeling not only from the plague but also from the recent failed attempt to dynamite the royal family­­––and political stability––into oblivion, must have been deeply shaken by the play’s despair. A day earlier, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes had preached to the same court a Christmas homily on Christ’s light shining in the darkness (“Ever in dark times, who therefore most needed the light of comfort”[v]). But there were no such comfortable words in the royal theater on St. Stephen’s Day.

It did not take long for posterity to shape a happier text. Lear was granted the merciful delusion that Cordelia was still breathing when he himself died. The survivors were given their exeunt into some happy future, having learned useful lessons from Lear’s mistakes. And from 1631 until 1838, audiences were treated to a happy ending, with Lear surviving and a married Cordelia inheriting his throne.

The play’s darker themes were rediscovered by modernity. As critic Maynard Mack wrote in 1965, “After two world wars and Auschwitz, our sensibility is significantly more in touch than our grandparents’ was with the play’s jagged violence, its sadism, madness, and processional of deaths, its wild blends of levity and horror, selfishness and selflessness.”[vi]

In our own time of deadly contagion, how do we engage with the miasma of fear while the media death watch invades our awareness as incessantly as the tolling bells of Shakespeare’s London? Do we keep our eyes, like Lancelot Andrewes, fixed on the divine light flickering in the darkness, or do we plunge, like the author of King Lear, toward a cathartic immersion in the unmaking of the old “normal,” hoping to emerge on the other side purged and renewed?

Boccaccio, in response to history’s deadliest plague, the Black Death of the fourteenth century, proposed a third way: avoidance. His Decameron is a fictional tale of ten young people who flee plague-ridden Florence for the Tuscan countryside, where they wait out the epidemic with “a certain amount of exercise before the two daily meals, usually in the form of walks; music, songs, and dancing after meals; and of course a great deal of congenial conversation throughout,”[vii] Only good news was allowed to be shared, and competitive games that might provoke anxiety were forbidden (perhaps like giving up March Madness).

According to medieval scholar Glending Olson, Boccaccio’s fictional regimen echoed medical tracts from the plague period urging people to “keep your humors well-disposed by embracing ‘cheerfulness,’ by not occupying ‘your mind with death, passion, or anything likely to sadden or grieve you, but give your mind over to delightful and pleasing things’ and spend ‘your leisure in gardens with fragrant plants, vines, and willows, when they are flowering.’”[viii] Such pleasure, then, was not so much escapist as therapeutic, reducing stress and––hopefully––thereby boosting immunity.

Given the inescapable presence posed by this current pandemic in our mobile and wired world, the dream of a tranquil refuge seems remote and perhaps unjust. Though some may claim exemption by virtue of wealth or privilege, we’re all in this together. The heroic dedication of health care workers, the kindness and generosity of neighbors and loved ones, the creative responses by churches and communities to unprecedented challenges inspire us daily with countless examples of love, courage, resilience and sacrifice.

However, unlike most natural disasters or economic downturns, COVID-19 does not feel like a temporary setback in our accustomed pursuit of happiness. It seems more like the unmaking of a world which may never return. And in a global society of obscene inequality, spiritual poverty, and suicidal pollution, that may not be a bad thing. They say the birds are singing again in Wuhan.

As Christian philosopher Cristóbal Serrán-Pagán y Fuentes wonders, “Is this global virus another wake-up call for humans to work together and collaborate in shared common projects for the survival of our specie as a whole? . . . This is the kairos moment for spiritual rebirth and for choosing a new transformed way of life. Otherwise we make harmful choices, we fall back and continue to do more of the same absurd things that we have been doing. . .”[ix]

The pursuit of a more just and nourishing world would be a blessed and laudable outcome of this strange and apocalyptic journey we are engaged in. But is there an even deeper theological dimension to this crisis as well, returning us to face the “ground zero” where all endings and beginnings converge: the place of unmaking and making anew, the place where Lear and Cordelia die, and hope is impossibly born? The place where “Never. Never. Never. Never” is answered by the divine “Ever”?

We are creatures who die, sometimes in great numbers. The terms and limits of mortal life, where death is always near, are usually suppressed or forgotten in the dailiness of life. Earthly existence always seems so convincing, right up until the moment it vanishes. But now, as the death toll rises and systems careen toward collapse, nearly everything begins to feel fragile and evanescent.

How do we ground our radically unsettling new situation in a deep and fearless spirituality of faith, hope and love? My friend Bill Coats––priest, prophet and theologian––recently wrote, “our implied consent in Baptism was our willingness to live in the midst of the random freedom of Creation. Which is to say that death is everywhere and yet in its midst we live.”

We’ll follow this thread next time. Meanwhile, stay safe, and maybe stick with Boccaccio for now. Walk in a garden. Sing. Dance. Practice congenial conversation.

 

 

 

[i] Quoted in James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 23-24.

[ii] Ibid., 277.

[iii] Ibid., 303.

[iv] Ibid., 52. The statistics are from Shapiro as well.

[v] Lancelot Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majesty, at Whitehall, on Wednesday, the Twenty-fifth of December, A.D. MDCVI. Being Christmas Day,” in Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity (reprint of original, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia: Triest Publishing, 2017), 20.

[vi] Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Times (1965), quoted in Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 268.

[vii] From Pampinea’s instructions to her friends in the Decameron, quoted in Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 180.

[viii] Olson, 175.

[ix] Passed along by peacemaking writer Jim Forest and cited in a March 13, 2020 blog post by Ryan Hall: https://paceebene.org/blog/2020/3/13/time-for-a-wake-up-call-in-response-to-the-coronavirus

 

O Sing to Me of Heaven: Requiem for a Friend

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Stephen D. O’Leary at Point Reyes National Seashore, June 13, 2011 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

My friend Stephen D. O’Leary departed this life on January 24, 2020, just days after we sang together at the California Shape Note Singing Convention. Although he had recently been diagnosed with cancer and had just begun chemo, he was feeling pretty good that weekend. He said afterward, “I plan to keep singing until I die (which I hope will not be anytime soon), and even after.” Two days later, way too soon, he was gone. Today I preached this homily at his requiem, where many of his shape note friends gathered to sing his spirit home. 

In early January, on Twelfth Night, Stephen shared on Facebook an article which had caught his attention, about the possibility of robot priests––speaking machines which could offer blessings, prayers and comfortable words on demand. And of course Stephen had questions: Would a robot priest, he asked, require that God be “unable to distinguish between the bot’s prayer and the prayer of an actual human person, or . . . only that the person being prayed for by the bot must believe that the bot is an actual conscious being…?” Thankfully, no such questions are at issue in this liturgy!  Fr. Gagan and I are not battery-operated.

But such questions were so Stephen. His passionate and curious mind was always wondering about things in the most interesting and unique way. How we will miss his questions––and so much besides.

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a line expressing in nine words the uniqueness we all possess: What I do is me: for that I came. Stephen did Stephen as well as he could, and each of us has our own stories about why he came, and what difference he made in our lives.

A few hours before he died, he posted a poem by George Eliot about the “choir invisible / whose music is the gladness of the world.” The “choir invisible” is the poet’s name for those departed souls whose lingering influence has made us better, and even now may still “Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, / Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, / Be the sweet presence of a good diffus’d, / And in diffusion ever more intense!”

“To make [such] undying music in the world” was the holy work to which Stephen aspired, even when his road was rough and steep.  We mourn his absence, lament the sudden withdrawal from the visible world of such a remarkable and dear companion. As we sing at the end of every shape note convention, just before we go our separate ways:

Your comp’ny’s sweet, your union dear
Your words delightful to my ear
Yet when I see that we must part
You draw like cords around my heart

But the absence of a loved one in bodily and temporal form is succeeded by new forms of presence. Although death changes the relationship, it does not end it. The dead continue to occupy our thoughts. They remain present to us in stories, memories, emotions, DNA (in some cases), and whatever else they left us with.

Stephen is no longer in one particular place. He is now in every place or occasion where we remember him. He is present whenever we think of him, or speak of him, or tell the stories that bring him back. I’m pretty sure I’m always going to hear his unmistakable voice whenever we hit those high notes in shape note hymns like Stratfield or Villulia.

At the tomb of Jesus, the angel of resurrection told the sorrowing women, “The one you seek is not where you laid him. From now on, you need to be looking elsewhere.” Wendell Berry has said something similar about all the departed, who now are “hidden among all that is, / And cannot be lost.”

Resurrection faith tells us that a person’s continuing presence is not purely the product of our own subjectivity. Though we see Stephen no longer, he continues to exist as more than just memory or feeling or imagination. As he was when he was created, so he remains: a beloved child of God, but now embraced and glorified within a larger wholeness from which none of us will ever be separated. This wholeness, which has many names, is the Love Supreme which binds us all together. This interconnection, this communion, cannot be broken, even by death.

The Lakota people have the expression “all my relatives” to describe the continuing bond between the living and the dead. Martin Brokenleg, a Lakota Episcopal priest, puts it this way: “Our experience shows us that death does not break our kinship bond. We turn to one another for help and support regardless of which side of death our relatives are on.”

But knowing that death is not the end does not make the burden of loss any lighter. Even Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” This is the only time Jesus is criticized by his friends, so bitter is their grief. Lord, if you had only come sooner, you could have delayed his fate, his mortality, for a little while longer. You could have cured him. Why did he have to die now?

Well, Jesus doesn’t like death any more than Mary and Martha do. When he approaches the tomb of his friend, he is, the gospel tells us, “greatly disturbed.” In Greek these words carry a connotation of anger, so we might say that Jesus was just as mad at death as everyone else was that day.

And so, we are told, the One who would be revealed as the Lord of life rebukes death in the most dramatic way. He peers into the darkness of the cave tomb and cries, “Lazarus! Come forth!” And Lazarus does come forth, into the light, a living man, inhaling the freshness of a spring morning.

But his resuscitation is only a temporary stay. Lazarus will die again, sooner or later. And shortly after this miracle, Jesus himself will die, sharing the fate of every mortal so that God might transform that fate into something glorious. As we sing in The Sacred Harp (#163 on the bottom): Thence he arose, ascended high, to show our feet the way.

The raising of Lazarus may not have been a true resurrection into life eternal, but it was a vivid foretaste of the human future, when everyone who has fallen asleep in death will hear the voice of the divine Friend who knows us by heart, calling us each by name on that “great rising day.”

Some of us were at Angels Gate in San Pedro for the California Shape Note Convention, when Stephen, only a few days before his death, led us in singing “Farewell Anthem.”

My friends, I am going on a long and tedious journey,
Never to return, never to return. . .
Fare you well,
Fare you well, my friends,
And God grant we may meet together in that world above. . .

Stephen was not being literal––he did not expect to leave us so soon––but I imagine him smiling now to know he was bound for  glory with a song on his lips, and that so many who love him have gathered here today to join in that song with sweet accord.

I once heard a shape note singer tell about her mother’s death out in Sand Mountain, Alabama. A lot of singers were standing round her bed, keeping vigil with the old songs. But there came a moment when her mother began to sing a tune that none of them recognized. They couldn’t quite place it. And then they realized she wasn’t singing the melody. She was singing the treble part. She was singing harmony with voices from the other side, which only she could hear. The choir invisible.

Oh, sing to me of heav’n,
When I am called to die,
Sing songs of holy ecstasy
To waft my soul on high. . .

 

Then to my ravished ear
Let one sweet song begin,
Let music charm me last on earth,
And greet me first in heav’n.

 

Stephen O’Leary (right) and David Olson lead “Farewell Anthem” at the 2020 California Shape Note Convention.

“Trailing clouds of glory”–– Requiem for my Niece

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Anise Stevens, 1969-2019 (Photo by Emilie Zeug)

Almost 50 years ago, the baptism of my niece, Anise Mouette Stevens, was one of my first sacramental acts. For the past seven years, she fought a brave battle against cancer. Today, with a heavy heart, I presided at her Requiem. 

Some of you were there when Anise entered this world.
Some of you were there when she left it.
Some of you grew up with her, or worked and played with her,
or were taught and mentored by her.
Some of you have known the intimacy of family with her,
or the close bonds of friendship.
Some of you have shared the journey of motherhood with her.
Some have shared her fierce struggle for wellness.
All of us have been touched by her, inspired by her.
All of us have felt, in our own special way, “the Anise effect.”

I can’t begin to describe my niece’s rich and amazing life in the few minutes I have here. There will be time for stories and memories later, but for now, let me offer a sampling of the many voices of love and gratitude posted by her “tribe” online at The Anise Effect Facebook page.

Brave, stylish, radiant, beautiful, kind, warm, caring, daring, sharp-witted, accessible, erudite, literary, Anise is one of a kind.

She had a way of being there without trying to fix you, minimizing your problems, judging you, or expecting any­thing back from you. She just was there.

She made excellence itself a norm in her classes, and that made us all want to work hard to be our best, not to please her, but because that was the standard she had created.

She gave me advice about life that I will follow for the rest of my life

She was the only LA art writer to walk into The California African American museum when I called for diverse coverage of the art scene—back when it wasn’t the hip place to be. 

I hope you know how much I have always looked up to you and your intelligence, grace, beauty, coolness, decisiveness, creativity, boldness, kindness, charm, energy, forward motion, vision, vulnerability, strength. You inspire me.

You truly were instrumental in showing me a new way to live.

Anise never once felt sorry for herself, but in her pain gave comfort to others.

You carried a million pounds on your shoulders, yet still kept a loving and generous nature.

She’s intelligent, caring, creative, loving, strong, and hilariously, bitingly (at times) witty. Those are all important characteristics, and Anise simply wouldn’t be Anise without them. Beyond all of that, however, Anise has a rare talent for bringing out the best in all who know her.

She listens to understand. 

Anise walks on water.

Such beautiful tributes. Blessed is she who has touched so many people.

I’ve been reading over her writings about the L.A. art scene.[i] She had an engaged, humane voice as a critic, always seeking connections between the artworks and the questions of who we are and how to live. And certain sentences jumped out at me as if they might be telling me not just about a particular artist, but about Anise herself, about her own sense and sensibility in the art of shaping a life. Listen to these three sentences, taken from three different reviews:

She not only sheds the unnecessary, but she articulates the primary essence of her materials. [ii] 

Accidents and mistakes aren’t simply recognized as failures, but instead as original, one-of-a-kind works. [iii]

Considering all that could go wrong when working with such unpredictable materials, [her] efforts glisten with an air of mystique.[iv]

Well, Anise certainly had an air of mystique, and so much more. But now, each of us feels the wound of her departure. Even though we know a lot about mortality, and the battle she fought, her absence still feels like a surprise. And so untimely. So unjust. How could someone so precious, so dear, so full of life, not live forever?

To live in this world, says Mary Oliver,
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. [v]

At Church of the Angels in Pasadena, California, everyone came forward to lay a flower on the altar with Anise’s ashes.

There’s an Irish song called “The Parting Glass.” They sing it in pubs at closing time. Its minor key and wistful words express the melancholy of ending the evening’s camaraderie as people go their separate ways into the night––a sorrow which feels like a rehearsal for the end of life itself:

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had,
Are sorry for my going away.
And all the loved ones that e’er I had
Would wish me one more day to stay.
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not,
I’ll gently rise and softly call,
“Goodnight, and joy be with you all.

I love that last line. The singer doesn’t just say farewell and disappear. She pronounces a blessing upon those who remain: “Joy be with you all.” Yes, we honor our dead by the tears we shed. We honor them even more by embracing the joy they wish for us.

If I should die before the rest of you, said British comedienne Joyce Grenfell,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor when I’m gone speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well. [vi]

Such a recovery of joy is not a matter of forgetting or leaving behind. The connection continues, but in a new way. When C.S. Lewis wrote about the grief process after the death of his wife, he said that as the acute sense of loss began to fade, he wondered whether he was starting to forget her by being happy again, or whether he might betray the rich complexity of her being by reducing her to a fixed set of memories.

But once he just stopped worrying about it, he found that, as he put it, he “began to meet her everywhere.” It wasn’t a voice or an apparition, or even a big emotional experience. It was, he said, “a sort of unobstrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.” [vii]

The absence of a loved one in a bodily and temporal form is succeeded by new forms of presence. I once asked a group of high school students to write their own epitaph, and one seventeen-year-old girl proposed this for her imaginary tombstone:

You say goodbye,
I say hello.

The people who matter have a way of sticking around. Although death changes the relationship, it doesn’t end it. The dead continue to occupy our thoughts. They remain present to us in stories, memories, emotions, DNA (in some cases), and whatever else they left us with.

Our beloved Anise is no longer in one particular place. She is now in every place we remember her. She is present when her voice echoes in our ears, or in those places where we shared special times together. She is present whenever we think of her, or speak of her, or tell the stories that embody her time among us.

The great east window in this church makes the same point. The angel of resurrection is telling the sorrowing women, “The one you seek is not where you laid him. From now on, you need to be looking elsewhere.” Or as we heard earlier in Wendell Berry’s poem, “She is hidden among all that is, / And cannot be lost.” [viii]

As a person of faith, I believe that this continuing presence is not merely memory or imagination. Whether we live or die, we all belong to a larger wholeness, from which we can never be separated. This wholeness, for which there are many names, is the Love that binds us all together. This interconnection, this communion, cannot be broken, even by death.

The Lakota people have the expression “all my relatives” to describe the continuing bond between the living and the dead. Martin Brokenleg, a Lakota Episcopal priest has said that “Our experience shows us that death does not break our kinship bond. We turn to one another for help and support regardless of which side of death our relatives are on.”

Christian tradition calls this the communion of saints, described in the Bible as a great cloud of witnesses encouraging us from above. I especially love novelist George Eliot’s term for this fellowship of heaven: “the choir invisible whose music is the gladness of the world.” And I think that Anise’s tribe, all who have experienced her supportive and encouraging nature, would agree that her music was, and will continue to be, the gladness of the world.

T.S. Eliot said, “In my end is my beginning.” Anise died at 5:28 a.m. on New Year’s Day. That was the exact beginning of astronomical twilight, the very first minute of dawn on the first day of the year of her 50th birthday. Outside on the street, the Rose Parade was in its final stages of preparation.

Anise’s stepmother has posted a description of that morning:

We’re with Anise’s body that we washed and anointed as the Rose Parade unfurls just outside the window. Her apartment is on Orange Grove at the start of the parade. Bands are playing and the front lawn is filled with bleachers of cheering people. Anise has flowers tattooed on both shoulders. She painted flowers. We dressed her in a favorite dress with embroidered flowers. And now the entire street for miles around is filled with flower-strewn floats.

Life and death, singing in harmony.

Painting by Anise Stevens.

In her last weeks, Anise wondered about what lay ahead. That is the question. My sister Martha said to me the other day that her daughter is “on her way,” and then she cited Wordworth’s evocative image of the next life as our native home to which we shall return:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar; / Not in entire forgetfulness, /And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: [ix]

We have no maps for our homeward journey. Still, we wonder.

When Henry David Thoreau lay dying at age 45, a family friend said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” And Thoreau, who had spent his life carefully observing and describing what he saw in the fields and woods around Walden Pond, replied simply, “One world at a time.” [x]

However curious we may be about what it’s like across that dark river between the worlds, we can’t see it from here. But I would venture to say that heaven is not so much a place as it is a relationship. We live in God and God lives in us. And that is true on both sides of the river.

When the 14th-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, was only 30 years old, she fell ill and came very close to death. As she lay on her sickbed, she had a vision of divine Love, who told spoke to her, telling her everything she needed to know about her ultimate future:

All shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well.

 What else do we need to know?

Jane Kenyon was a poet who died at 49, the same age as Anise. She envisioned the process of dying to be “like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in.” No more “running wide loops,” nor even “the tight circles.” But the body’s decline is not the only thing going on, according to the poet. Surrender is prelude to transformation, and Kenyon’s poem[xi] turns into a prayer:

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.

And in Kenyon’s “Notes from the Other Side,” she reports that “God, as promised, / proves to be mercy clothed in light.”[xii] Amen to that.

 And we do know one thing for a fact: at the end, Anise was smiling.

Anise Stevens, mid-1970s (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

Some of you may have seen on The Anise Effect a photograph I took over 40 years ago, capturing Anise as a little girl, running joyfully through a field on her Aunt Marilyn’s farm. She is kicking up the dust beneath her feet. The late afternoon sun is behind her, a radiant backlight, and the dust too is suffused with radiance, as if Anise were trailing clouds of glory. It may only be dust, but it is transformed by the sun into a glorious substance. And so shall we all be transformed.

We began the liturgy by singing an early American lyric:

My friends, I bid you all adieu;
I leave you in God’s care;
And if I here no more see you,
Go on––I’ll meet you there.

I believe that Anise is wishing us all well this very moment, so let me close with another lyric, from a song by Jane Voss, “To All My Friends in Far-Flung Places”:

To all of you who took me in
Who shared the thick and stretched the thin
Who gave me comfort on the run
Who saved my life, who made it fun
Wherever you may be tonight
I hope this finds your burdens light
Your purpose high, your spirit strong
I hope that you have got along
My song was lost and gone, if not for you

 

 

[i] You can find links to her critical writings here: http://www.anisestevens.com/clips.html

[ii] “Miya Ando,” Artillery Magazine, Nov. 8, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/miya-ando/)

[iii] “The Analog Revolution: Shock of the Old,” Artillery Magazine, May 3, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/the-analog-revolution/)

[iv] “Farrah Karapatian,” Artillery Magazine, Feb. 3, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/farrah-karapetian-2/)

[v] Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 178.

[vi] Quoted in All in the End is Harvest: An Anthology for Those Who Grieve (UK: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989).

[vii] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, q. in All in the End is Harvest, 105.

[viii] Wendell Berry, “Three Elegiac Poems.”

[ix] William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Chiidhood.”

[x] Malcolm Clemens Young, The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 8.

[xi] Jane Kenyon, “In the Nursing Home,” Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. 2005), 282.

[xii] “Notes from the Other Side,” in Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 267