Sing, Muse, of the poem and the film: How does the Odyssey mean?

Posted on August 18, 2026 by jimfriedrich

A poem! A film! An argument! Sing, Muse, of the wrath of artists, critics, readers and viewers. Tell of the pains they have suffered on the wild seas of culture. It’s only been a month since The Odyssey film came out, but it feels like ten years. Attacks and counterattacks. The clashing of sharpened wits. The endless toll of wounded opinions. As our hero wonders onscreen: Will we ever get off this [friggin’] beach?

Some say a woman started the war. No, not Helen of Troy, but Emily Wilson, a British classics scholar whose popular 2017 translation of The Odyssey inspired Christopher Nolan, the maker of Memento, The Dark Night and Oppenheimer to navigate his own sea of challenges to cinematize one of the founding stories of Western civilization. Wilson’s negative reaction to the film was withering:

“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

“Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.”

“Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours.” [i]

Wilson seems to take considerable pleasure in disliking the movie (echoes of Pauline Kael at her snarkiest), although the review that launched a thousand angry tweets has done no harm to her own book sales. In any case, as it was way back in Homer’s day, so it is for us. Everyone is spoiling for a fight, and the battles over the film and its meanings continue to rage on.

The controversies over a movie version of Homer’s classic text reminds me of the furor over controversial interpretations of the gospels in Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1989) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2006). When the former was released, Jesus made the cover of Time magazine, while picketers carried signs saying, “God doesn’t like this movie!” As far as I know, Zeus hasn’t weighed in on Nolan’s epic, but the fervor over The Odyssey has a kind of religious intensity, as if something vitally important were at stake.

The nature and destiny of human life. Our universal longing for “home”—whatever, however, and wherever that means. The curse of conflict and war. The fragility of civilization. Our fraught relationships with the “other.” Traces of divine presence and action in the visible world. The role of the arts in telling the truth about ourselves. There are many reasons to care about canonical texts and the way they are interpreted—or misinterpreted—by cinema. So much is indeed at stake, as Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky memorably insisted:

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to the good.” [ii]

Nolan’s film didn’t do much of that for me. I was certainly entertained, but little of those three hours on the IMAX screen lingered long in my heart and soul the way the greatest films do. When I exited the theater, the spell broke quickly, and I returned to my familiar world unchanged by the journey.

At this point, another response to the summer’s most talked-about film risks being one too many. But the Odyssey’s enduring themes, however translated or adapted, invite serious thought. Now that I’ve seen the movie and read the excellent new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, here’s what I’m musing about.

THE HERO

Who is Odysseus? Is he an Everyman who speaks to the ages, or a perplexing stranger unique to a vanished time and place? In the Proem (the 10-line prelude), his 12,000-line story is concisely summarized:

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy …” [iii]

As the narrative proceeds, this complicated (polytropos: “many-sided”) man is talked about by the people back home, but he himself has been gone for twenty years. He doesn’t take the stage as a ccollections are not always reliable. Odysseus is a cunning and resourceful trickster, who has survived many a scrape by shading the truth when necessary. As Daniel Mendelsohn explains in the introduction to his own new translation, Odysseus is a “chameleon-like hero, whose adeptness at falsifying his appearances and fictionalizing his life story makes it almost impossible to trust what we think we know about him—and hence, impossible to know who he is.” [iv]

One of the disappointing omissions in Nolan’s film is the moment when the Cyclops asks the man who has intruded into his cave: Who are you? Wishing to stay anonymous, the hero replies, “No-One is my name. No-One is what people call me.” It was a life-saving ruse (“No-One is killing me,” Polyphêmos told his fellow Cyclopes when they offered to come to his aid), but it also conveyed an existential truth about the hero, as Mendelsohn observes:

“When the epic begins, Odysseus is very much a nobody; so long absent from home that his family and friends are convinced that he is dead, constantly in danger of disappearing without a trace during his perilous return journey, repeatedly shipwrecked and cast away on distant shores that are far from the world familiar to him and from anyone who knows him.” [v]

Nolan dropped the crucial dialogue with the Cyclops, but he made up for it when Odysseus arrives back home. Disguised as a beggar, not quite ready to reveal and resume his “true” identity as Penelope’s husband and Ithaka’s king, the hero sits quietly amid the clamor of Penelope’s suitors in the royal banqueting hall. His head is covered with a hood concealing his visage in deep shadow. We strain to see a face, but only a black void looks back at us. It could be anyone—or No-One.

THE JOURNEY

“The Prayer Book has it that ‘in returning and rest we shall be saved,’ yet there is no returning; there is no resting. It is not a matter of some original sin, separating us from authentic being to which we could return. There is a tension built into the very dynamic of being human upon this earth, ever in the world, yet never of it. The problem is not just that we are alienated dwellers, but that we are irreducibly both dwellers and wayfarers.”

— Erazim Kohak [vi]

“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

— St. Augustine [vii]

Odysseus is a man trying to get home: a wayfarer trying to become a dweller. The journey is hard and painful (“Many the toils he suffered”) but it is also a process of learning—about the world and about himself. The journey “away from here” [viii] may be driven by curiosity about the undiscovered parts of world and self; or by the need to escape the confines of whatever is trying to kill you; or by the soul’s restless desire for what is not here and not yet.

The journey back is driven by a profound longing for home, the place of true belonging. That place may be where you started, experienced in a fresh way. It may be some new place that has been expecting you for years. Or it may be a place that always remains somewhere over the rainbow, endlessly luring us onward, deeper and deeper into the Mystery.

In Nolan’s film, the unbearable truth revealed by the Sirens’ song is that the hero’s aching for home is an illusion. It’s a story Odysseus tells himself, but it’s not what he really wants, deep down. The reasons for this are not explicitly developed, but after twenty years of battles and adventures, perhaps the weary war veteran fears that he can never fit himself back into his old life. Or maybe the commonplace experiences of ordinary life would feel thin and pale after the intensity of war, the adrenalin of wild seas and the wonders of magic lands. Such psychologizing wasn’t really Homer’s thing, but the original poem does suggest, at its midway point in Book 11, that Odysseus will never be a dweller who can stay put.

When the hero crosses the boundary between the living and the dead to converse with the ghosts of Hades, the prophet Teiresias previews the sequel to the happy homecoming. Sometime after the Suitors are slain, Odysseus will leave home again, though not by sea. He will carry with him an oar, symbol of his past wanderings, until he meets people who have never seen an oar and “have no knowledge of the sea.” And there he will plant the oar in the ground as a sign, and, presumably, relate his unsettling tales of a restless life on a restless ocean to landlocked farmers accustomed to solid ground.

In Dante’s Commedia, the brilliant Christian spinoff of the Odyssey, Ulysses (the Roman name for Homer’s wanderer) can’t stay home either.

‘not fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor Penelope’s claim

to the joys of love, could drive out of my mind
the lust to experience the far-flung world
and the failings and felicities of humankind. [ix]

Taking a small crew, Ulysses sails beyond the edge of the known world, catching a brief glimpse of Purgatory’s holy mountain before his ship is sunk by a fierce whirlwind from “that unknown land.” Then, as his soul in hell would later describe his last moment to Dante, “the sea closed over us and the light was gone.” [x]

Dante identified with Ulysses in that his own daring poem presumed to go “where no one has gone before,”[xi] and he worried about the perils of his own immense journey as well as the risk of excessive pride in his poetic powers. He even warns his readers, who follow “in your little skiffs the wake of my great ship that sails and sings,” to “turn back and make your way to your own coast. Do not commit yourselves to the main deep …” [xii]

*The Barque of Dante*, Eugène Delacroix (1882).

In Dante’s version of the hero’s fate, the crucial difference between the tragic “folly” of Ulysses’ last voyage and his own poetic trespass into divine territory was grace. Not for him the reckless, self-willed hubris of the hero’s quest, but the humility to be guided by the love and wisdom of “Another.” And while both Dante and the Greek wanderer embodied homo viator—the being who journeys—as the human condition, Odysseus’ goal was an Ithaka which, in the Commedia’s universe, could never quite satisfy. Dante, on the other hand, journeyed toward the place where every goal converges, every hunger is satisfied, and history comes home to stay.

XENIA

Xenia, the Greek term for welcoming the stranger, is a recurring theme in the Odyssey. It comes from xenos, which can mean either (or both) stranger and guest. In Nolan’s film, it’s called “Zeus’ Law,” making explicit the hospitality code as a divine command: the way things ought to be if the world is to work as intended. Ignore the way of the universe at your peril.

In the unsettled Homeric world of migration and societal dislocation, life was precarious if you were on the move. Wanderers and beggars were dependent on the kindness of strangers. The hospitality code was a social safety net. And in cultures plagued with tribalism and violence, xenia provided a measure of stability. You could knock on any door without fearing ill treatment, even if you were “other.” At a minimum, the guest could say, “Thank you for not killing me.” In the best case, the host provided a bath, a banquet and a bed. In return, appropriate decorum was required of the guest.

That was the ideal, and it is echoed in biblical tradition as well. “The alien who resides among you shall be treated like the native-born. You shall love the alien as yourself, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). “Do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

However, in Homer’s epics, xenia is frequently violated by both hosts and guests, with disastrous results. Menelaus’ guest steals his beautiful wife Helen, triggering the Trojan War. Polyphêmos the Cyclops eats the guests who have barged into his cave, and is blinded in return. Odysseus’ crew slaughter the sun god’s protected cattle, only to end up swimming with the fishes. Penelope’s Suitors drain her larder with ceaseless feasting, overstaying their welcome. When Odysseus finally gets home, he kills them all. So it goes.

The breakdown of xenia’s courtesies and protections is a key theme of Nolan’s retelling, which can be applauded as an indictment of our present-day fear of strangers, hostility toward migrants, and belligerence toward people and nations who feel alien to us.

Blind Polyphêmos guards the entrance to his cave (1806 engraving for Alexander Pope’s translation of the *Odyssey*, after a painting by Henry Fuseli. Both host and guests suffer from their violation of “Zeus’ Law.”

In the United States, where we like to think of ourselves as innocent and kind, aid to desperate people at home and abroad is being slashed; migrants who manage to survive their arrest are being crammed into concentration camps; empathy and compassion are denounced by the right as weaknesses undermining civilization; and the trust-based norms of the global order, fashioned after World War II, are being shredded by a lawless and murderous tyrant. A chief White House official has boasted about these things out loud:

“We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” [xiii]

Homer’s epics describe a world in many ways incomprehensible to us today. But the disastrous consequences of violating xenia’s divine ordinance translates easily into modern reality. As W. H. Auden warned in a poem written at the start of the Second World War:

We must love one another or die.

WAR AND VIOLENCE

“[A]ny pleasure or solace [the Homeric epics] present is tainted by the horrors they depict. Extricating pure, untainted cultural and aesthetic or ethical value from Homer is an impossible task.”

— James I. Porter [xiv]

“[Nolan’s] film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing.”

— Emily Wilson [xv]

The bloodiness of Homer’s epics has always posed a problem. “Unfortunately,” said classicist C. G. Heyne in 1801, “the main subject of epic poetry is war and murder.” [xvi] The Odyssey text is certainly graphically clear about war being “destructive,” “deadly,” “dreadful,” and “abominable.” Homer is not pro-war. But neither is he anti-war. He simply reports what he sees. And in his world, violence is one of the things that happens. And it happens a lot. Simone Weil’s remarks on the Iliad apply equally to the Odyssey’s violence:

“The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised; neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated … Those comparisons which liken them to beasts or things can inspire neither admiration nor contempt, but only regret that men are capable of being so transformed.” [xvii]

The beauty of Homer’s writing has enabled centuries of readers to help digest the violence. As Nietzsche put it, the poetry “casts a spell over even the most terrifying things before our very eyes.” [xviii] In Nolan’s film, the technological dazzle of big-screen spectacle does the same. But the trauma and regret that violence produces is also reported. In the poem, veterans of the Trojan War weep copiously when they think of it. And the film makes regret a major theme with its depiction of Odysseus’s “anguish” as PTSD.

Arnold Böcklin, *Odysseus and Kalypso* (1882).
With eyes gazing homeward, Odysseus is longing to resume his journey.

The film hero’s long sojourn on Kalypso’s island becomes a therapeutic retreat, a seven-year blank in his story, empty of incident. In this idyllic place somewhere outside the flow of time and story, the goddess encourages him to forget his past, at the risk of forgetting his future as well. But it can’t last. An Odysseus free of trouble and longing is not Odysseus. At the insistence of the gods, his journey will eventually resume.

Meanwhile, what about the audience’s PTSD? What does all the screen violence do to us? Does it strengthen our resolve to live in peace, to resist the gods of war? The relationship between aesthetics and morality is very tricky, but in a warring age like our own, how can we represent the evil of violence without celebrating its energy? How can we refrain from rooting for one side to annihilate the other?

In Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), set in the Pacific theater of World War II, American troops are assaulting a Japanese stronghold. But the camera has no favorites. It watches, if you will, with the unblinking eyes of God as mortals kill one another. And what those eyes see is not victory or defeat, but the terrible sadness of mortal violence. The battle sounds—gunfire, explosions, screams—are suppressed, heard only faintly beneath a flowing melancholy score (Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”) that enables us to reflect on the suffering without cheering for a particular outcome. Divine compassion feels more real than human folly. Amid the swirl of action, the camera pauses to notice the lovely light filtered through palm leaves, or the surprised stare of a dead soldier’s face. And we hear these words in a contemplative voice-over by a soldier who is something of a Christ figure in the film:

This great evil, where does it come from? … How does it still enter the world? … What seed, what root did it grow from? … Who’s doing this, who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known? … Does our ruin benefit the earth? … Is this darkness in you too?” [xix]

THE ENDING

Odysseus on the sea (3rd century Roman mosaic).

Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Homer’s Odyssey ends with the hero arriving home at last. After disposing of the Suitors and reclaiming his throne, he tends to neglected relationships with his wife, son and father, and begins to repair the disarray of his kingdom after twenty years of anarchy and strife. The wanderer is home to stay, exchanging the endless transitory episodes of the wanderer for the long-term commitments of dwelling in one place and living one particular life.

Nolan’s film invents a different ending. Instead of the return home completing the hero’s journey through reintegration into communal life, there is a new departure. Instead of doing the work of dwelling, Odysseus, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, is “away from here” yet again. Although he mutters something about tracking down the bodies of his dead comrades to give them proper burials, that impractical project seems just an excuse to keep wandering. The epic’s ancient pattern is thus betrayed by a romantic Hollywood ending: Odysseus and Penelope sail into the sunset to live happily ever after. Homer would demand his money back.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Joseph Wright of Derby, *Penelope Unraveling Her Web* (1783-84).
Odysseus’ wife deceives her Suitors by unraveling her weaving each night,
while the memory of her absent husband hovers in the shadows.

“And so this work, famous for its exciting narrative of the hero’s adventures in exotic worlds and among strange creatures, is in fact preoccupied above all with the business of being a human being—an identity that turns out to be defined by relationships: between hosts and guests, strangers and intimates, foreigners and countrymen, mortals and immortals; between the idealized past and the troubled present, the dead and the living; between men and women, spouses and lovers, parents and children; relationships, finally, among the myriad and sometimes contradictory elements of our own natures.” (Daniel Mendelsohn) [xx]

After seeing Nolan’s film, I refreshed my palate with Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), a modern reworking of the Odyssey by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, whose movies are suffused with a mythical sensibility and populated by questing wanderers. The story follows a Greek-American director (Harvey Keitel) as he wanders the Balkans in search of three cans of undeveloped film shot by the first Greek filmmakers, the Manakia brothers, in 1895—the year cinema was born. During a century of regional conflicts, the film had passed through various hands, from country to country, and Keitel’s unnamed character (called “A” in the script) is trying to find where it ended up.

“A” (Harvey Keitel) is a modern Odysseus on a difficult journey in Theo Angelopoulis’ *Ulysses’ Gaze.*

For “A”, the undeveloped film mattered because it held light captured in the primal past of cinema’s creation—“a lost gaze,” he calls it, “a lost innocence.” Like starlight traveling through time to reach the human eye, this film had traveled in darkness for a hundred years, waiting to be seen for the very first time. It wasn’t just original cinema inside those three cans. It was something even more precious, like a shard of light from Eden’s first day, not yet muddied by history.

After many Odyssean adventures, “A” locates the cans in a Sarajevo film lab during the Bosnian war. The lab is badly battered from shells and bombs, but “A” manages to get the film developed. As he views the film in the lab’s ruined cinematheque, we ourselves do not see what is being projected. We only see “A” in the act of watching, and when the film runs out, he recites a Homeric speech, as if he has become Odysseus addressing Penelope:

“When I return, it will be with another man’s clothes, another man’s name. My coming will be unexpected. If you look at me unbelieving, and say, You are not he, I will show you signs, and you will believe me … I will tell you about the journey, all night long. And in all the nights to come, between one embrace and the next, between lovers’ calls, the whole human story. The story that never ends.” [xxi]

Angelopoulos originally planned to show us what “A” saw—the developed footage that turned out to be (in this fictional story) the very first cinematic image of Homer’s Odyssey. Using the original motion picture camera constructed by the Lumière brothers in 1895, Angelopoulos filmed a shipwrecked Odysseus staggering out of the sea to walk toward the camera. He stops in front of the lens, staring into it: Odysseus gazing at us from the distant past. The lost gaze, visible at last.

But Angelopoulos then decided not to use this shot in his movie. “For me,” he said, “the purpose of his search is the discovery of himself … It doesn’t matter what is on the film … The journey leading to its discovery in Sarajevo today, this is the important thing.” [xxii] His compelling image of Odysseus did not remain a lost gaze, however; in the same year as Ulysses’ Gaze, it was included in a compilation of one-minute films made by 41 different filmmakers to honor the 100^th anniversary of the first movie. [xxiii]

Odysseus (from the unused shot in Theo Angelopoulis’ *Ulysses’ Gaze*.)

What I see in this wanderer’s gaze, captured by an 1895 camera in 1995, is the same thing I find in the Homeric texts: strange and haunting figures from a vanished past, asking us questions that leap the centuries:

What have you learned from our story?
How fares your own odyssey?
Is it leading you to your heart’s desire?

For further reading on the subject of Homer and war, see my 2022 post, “We must love one another or die”—What Does the Iliad Tell Us about the Invasion of Ukraine?

[i] Emily Wilson, “An Uncomplicated Man,” London Review of Books, August 13, 2026.

[ii] Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, 1987), 43.

[iii] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017): Book 1.1-3.

[iv] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2025), 4.

[v] Ibid., 36.

[vi] Erazim Kohak, “Of Dwelling and Wayfaring: The Quest for Metaphors,” in The Longing for Home, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 36.

[vii] St. Augustine, from his prayer that begins his Confessions.

[viii] Phrase from a Kafka parable about a journey “away from here” which is so immense that one can take enough supplies to survive its length. You must find what you need along the way, or die.

[ix] Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxvi.89-93, trans. John Ciardi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).

[x] Ibid., line 131.

[xi] From the introduction to Star Trek, one of many spinoffs of Homer’s Odyssey.

[xii] Dante, Paradiso ii.2-5, trans. John Ciardi.

[xiii] Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, in a January 2026 interview on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper.

[xiv] James I. Porter, Homer: The Very Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 194.

[xv] Emily Wilson, LRB review of the Odyssey film.

[xvi] C. G. Heyne (1801), quoted in Porter, 178.

[xvii] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force (1939), quoted in Porter, 213.

[xviii] Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Porter, 211.

[xix] Terrence Malick adapted his screenplay from James Jones’ 1962 novel, The Thin Red Line.

[xx] Mendelsohn, 38.

[xxi] Dialogue from Ulysses’ Gaze, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 196.

[xxii] Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews, ed. Dan Fainaru (Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 98.

[xxiii] Lumière and Company (1995).

“The Unpardonable Sin” (Poetic Shame on the “Christian” Right)

Posted on July 12, 2025 by jimfriedrich

A century ago, American poet Vachel LIndsay’s poem put it perfectly:

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: —
To speak of bloody power as right divine,
And call on God to guard each vile chief’s house,
And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:—

To go forth killing in White Mercy’s name,
Making the trenches stink with spattered brains,
Tearing the nerves and arteries apart,
Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains.

In any Church’s name, to sack fair towns,
And turn each home into a screaming sty,
To make the little children fugitive,
And have their mothers for a quick death cry,—

This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:
This is the sin no purging can atone:—
To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:—
To set the face, and make the heart a stone.

Turning Pain into Praise: George Herbert on the Human Condition

Posted on February 26, 2025 by jimfriedrich

Marc Chagall, *Moses at the Burning Bush* (1960-1966): Uniting “incompatible distances.”

I have written repeatedly about major moments of the year such as Christmas, Easter and New Year’s Eve, but the only individual person (other than Jesus) to make repeated appearances on this site is the seventeenth-century Anglican poet-priest, George Herbert (1593-1633). I enjoy many poets, but Herbert’s psalmic verse is a regular part of my prayer life, and I am particularly partial to priests for whom art is a spiritual practice.https://jimfriedrich.com/2015/02/27/heart-work-and-heaven-work/

After overviews of his life and work (Heart Work and Heaven Work and “Flie with Angels, Fall with Dust”), I have looked at particular poems (“Denial,” “Virtue,” “Time” and “Life”) in subsequent posts on his feast day (February 27). Having established something of a tradition, let us honor “the holy Mr. Herbert” by considering another of his poems.

In “Mans medley,” the poet tests the tension between the earthly and heavenly elements in humanity’s hybrid nature. Just as a musical medley is composed of contrasting parts, so are we a unique blend of animal and angel. When Herbert was seven years old, playgoers first heard Hamlet pondering this paradox of human existence: “how like an angel in apprehension” is this “quintessence of dust”. Ten years after Herbert’s poems were published, Sir Thomas Browne wrote that “we are only that amphibious piece between a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that links these two together” and “unites incompatible distances.” [i]

Mans medley

Hark, how the birds do sing,
And woods do ring.
All creatures have their joy: and man hath his.|
Yet if we rightly measure,
Mans joy and pleasure
Rather hereafter, then in present, is.

To this life things of sense
Make their pretence:
In th’ other Angels have a right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With th’ one hand touching heav’n, with th’ other earth.

In soul he mounts and flies,
In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuffe whose thread is course and round,
But trimm’d with curious lace,
And should take place
After the trimming, not the stuffe and ground.

Not that he may not here
Taste of the cheer,
But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head,
So he must sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to, after he is dead.

But as his joyes are double;
So is his trouble.
He hath two winters, other things but one:
Bothe frosts and thoughts do nip,
And bite his lip;
And he of all things fears two deaths alone.

Yet ev’n the greatest griefs
May be reliefs,
Could he but take them right, and in their wayes.
Happie is he, whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise.

The poem begins with a cheerful celebration of creation: Birds sing, forests ring, and all creatures, humans included, “have their joy.” But difference soon declares itself: below and above, material and spiritual, this life and the next. Only humans partake in each of the oppositions, with “th’ one hand touching heav’n, with th’ other earth.” This is a great privilege. The human alone “ties them both” and “makes them one,” but as the next verse reminds us, our mixed nature is also a problem. We may “flie with angels” as Herbert says in another poem, but we also “fall with dust.”[ii] In soul we mount and fly, but in flesh we die.

“Medley” is related to “motley,” and the image in verse 3 of being clothed in an awkward mixture of fine and coarse materials illustrates our chronic discomfort with humanity’s hybrid nature. To resolve the clashing colors of our mortal outfit, some have sought to suppress, downgrade, or disregard either the earthly or the heavenly. But Herbert seeks to harmonize them in the human medley. Let our joys be “double,” that we may “taste of the cheer” in our sensory existence while continuing to cultivate our taste for the “better drink” of spiritual reality.

The verse about the sipping birds is my favorite part of the poem. Unlike the generalized trope of singing birds in the poem’s first line, the birds in verse 4 are keenly observed in a way that was rare until the Romantics and naturalists of later centuries. The birds don’t keep their beaks in the water until they’re done, but follow each sip with a lifting of the head. Here Herbert takes a homely image from the visible world and makes it a lively spiritual metaphor. Like the birds, we should not gulp down reality without giving it our proper attention. We must learn to “sip and think,” alternating our experience with thoughtful reflection.

And from there the meanings multiply. The “better drink” evokes the sacred wine of the Eucharist, while also recalling the water Jesus changed into wine at the Cana wedding feast. Sip and think. Sip and think. Could that be the essence of spiritual practice?

Our mortality is touched upon in verse 3 (“In flesh he dies”) and verse 4 (“after he is dead”), but verse 5 stops to face our fate directly. As both physical and spiritual creatures, we alone fear “two deaths”—the death of the body and the death of the soul. As dwellers in a secular age, some no longer worry about the fate of body and soul in the afterlife, but is anxiety over a failing body, a shriveled soul or an emotionally dead heart any improvement on the medieval fear of hell? There are many kinds of death, but the inward ones may be the worst.

Marc Chagall, *The Prophet Jeremiah* (1968).

Herbert doesn’t leave us there. As he warns in his manual of advice for country parsons, “nature will not bear everlasting droopings.” We need to stand on the rock of hope, and remember joy. “Yet ev’n the greatest griefs,” he says, “May be reliefs, / Could he but take them right … / Happy is he whose heart / Hath found the art / To turn his double pains to double praise.”

We may wonder what it means specifically to “take them right.” We could all use some detailed instruction in the art of turning pain into praise, given the rapid escalation of pain in our collective life by a heartless coterie of dead souls. Herbert doesn’t spell it out in this poem, but turning pain into praise is a major theme in his work.

In both our personal spiritual journeys and our collective project of repairing the world, we must practice many virtues: patience, persistence, resistance, constancy, solidarity, compassion, humility—and, crucially, faith, hope and love—if we are to keep moving toward the light. And it is my firm conviction that the antidote to despair is trust in what I would call divine intention: the abiding and faithful Mystery whose desire is the flourishing of creation. That doesn’t mean everything goes perfectly. The Cross is planted deep in human history. But God will not leave us comfortless. The divine Yes has more future in it than a billion Nevers. Here’s how Herbert says it:

I knew that thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a scepter of the rod:

Hadst thou not had thy part,
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart. [iii]

*Virgin and St. John at the Cross*, Flanders or Northern France (early 16th century).

[i] Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici xxxiv (1643).

[ii] George Herbert, “The Temper (I).”

[iii] Ibid., “Affliction (III).”

“We are America!” — Poetic Voices of an Immigrant Nation

Posted on September 24, 2024 by jimfriedrich

Illustration by Shepard Fairey from a photograph by Delphine Diallo.

Last night, at a campaign rally in Pennsyvlania, Donald Trump told the crowd that immigrants are “changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever. They will never be the same … And I’ll say it now: You have to get ’em the hell out! You have to get ’em out … Can’t have it! They’ve destroyed us.” The MAGA mob responded with a chant that would make Hitler smile: SEND THEM BACK! SEND THEM BACK!

At the beginning of this century, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago asked me to compile texts of the immigrant experience for a public reading in celebration of America’s rich diversity. I first posted these here in 2018. May these eloquent American voices remind us of our common origins as strangers and sojourners. In a country beset with what Canadian scholar Henry A. Giroux has called the “violence of organized forgetting,” remembering is a crucial act of resistance.

Sing to me, call me home in languages I do not yet
understand, to childhoods I have not yet experienced,
to loves that have not yet touched me.
Fill me with the details of our lives.
Filling up, emptying out
and diving in.
It is the holy spirit of existence, the flesh, the blood,
the naked truth that will not be covered.
Tell me everything, all the details – flesh, blood, bone.

– Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

From Asia, you crossed a bridge of land,
now called the Bering Strait, now swallowed
in water. No human steps to follow,
you slowly found your way on pathless grounds…
Travelers lost in time – walking, chanting, dancing –
tracks on mapless earth, no man-made lines,
no borders. Arriving not in ships, with no supplies,
waving no flags, claiming nothing, naming
no piece of dirt for wealthy lords of earth.
You did not come to own; you came to live.

– Benjamin Alire Sáenz

America is also the nameless foreigner,
the homeless refugee,
the hungry boy begging for a job,
the illiterate immigrant…
All of us, from the first Adams
to the last Filipino,
native born or alien,
educated or illiterate –
We are America!

– Carlos Bulosan

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
in east Chicago…
She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of
herself…She sees other
women hanging from many-floored windows
counting their lives in the palms of their hands
and in the palms of their children’s hands.

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
on the Indian side of town…
crying for the lost beauty of her own life.

– Joy Harjo

I am not any of the faces
you have put on me america

every mask has slipped
i am not any of the names

or sounds you have called me
the tones have nearly

made me deaf
this dark skin, both of us have tried to bleach…

– Safiya Henderson-Holmes

I know now that I once longed to be white.
How? you ask.
Let me tell you the ways.

when I was growing up, people told me
I was dark and I believed my own darkness
in the mirror, in my soul, my own narrow vision.

when I was growing up, my sisters
with fair skin got praised
for their beauty and I fell
further, crushed between high walls.

when I was growing up, I read magazines
and saw blonde movie stars, white skin, sensuous lips,
and to be elevated, to become
a woman, a desirable woman, I began to wear
imaginary pale skin.

when I was growing up, I was proud
of my English, my grammar, my spelling,
fitting into the group of smart children,
smart Chinese children, fitting in,
belonging, getting in line.

– Nellie Wong

These men died with the wrong names,
Na’aim Jazeeny, from the beautiful valley
of Jezzine, died as Nephew Sam,
Sine Hussin died without relatives and
because they cut away his last name
at Ellis Island, there was no way to trace
him back even to Lebanon, and Im’a Brahim
had no other name than mother of Brahim
even my own father lost his, went from
Hussein Hamode Subh’ to Sam Hamod.
There is something lost in the blood,
something lost down to the bone
in these small changes. A man in a
dark blue suit at Ellis Island says, with
tiredness and authority, “You only need two
names in America” and suddenly – as cleanly
as the air, you’ve lost
your name. At first, it’s hardly
even noticeable – and it’s easier, you move
about as an American – but looking back
the loss of your name
cuts away some other part,
something unspeakable is lost.

– Sam Hamod

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin…
Of course, the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paper son
in the late 1950’s
obsessed with some bombshell blonde
transliterated “Mei Ling” to Marilyn…
and there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic
white woman, swollen with gin and Nembutal.

– Marilyn Chin

“This is my country,” we sang,
And a few years ago there would have been
A scent of figs in the air, mangoes,
And someone playing the oud along a clear stream.

But now it was “My country ’tis of thee”
And I sang it out with all my heart…
“Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed,
And it was not too hard to imagine
A host of my great uncles and -grandfathers
Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior
And finding themselves suddenly
On a rock among maize and poultry
And Squanto shaking their hands.

– Gregory Djanikian

If I am a newcomer to your country, why teach me about my ancestors? I need to know about seventeenth-century Puritans in order to make sense of the rebellion I notice everywhere in the American city. Teach me about mad British kings so I will understand the American penchant for iconoclasm. Teach me about cowboys and Indians; I should know that tragedies created the country that will create me.

– Richard Rodriguez

Names will change
faces will change
but not much else
the President will still be white
and male
and wasp
still speak with forked tongue…
still uphold the laws of dead white men
still dream about big white monuments
and big white memorials
ain’t nothin’ changed
ain’t nothin’ changed at all.

– Lamont B. Steptoe

My dream of America
is like dà bính lòuh
with people of all persuasions and tastes
sitting down around a common pot
chopsticks and basket scoops here and there
some cooking squid and others beef
some tofu and watercress
all in one broth
like a stew that really isn’t
as each one chooses what she wishes to eat
only that the pot and fire are shared
along with the good company
and the sweet soup
spooned out at the end of the meal.

– Wing Tek Lum

today
we will not be invisible nor silent
as the pilgrims of yesterday continue their war of attrition
forever trying, but never succeeding
in their battle to rid the americas of us
convincing others and ourselves
that we have been assimilated and eliminated,

but we remember who we are

we are the spirit of endurance that lives
in the cities and reservations of north america
and in the barrios and countryside of Nicaragua, Chile
Guatemala, El Salvador

and in all the earth and rivers of the americas.

– Victoria Lena Manyarrows

We are a beautiful people
with African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
brothers and sisters. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new
correspondence with ourselves
and our black family.
We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be
the sacred words?

– Amiri Baraka

Living on borders, and in margins,
keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity,
is like trying to swim in a new element…
There is an exhilaration in being a participant
in the further evolution of humankind.

– Gloria E. Anzaldúa

We are connected to one another in time and by blood. Each of us is so related, we’re practically the same person living infinite versions of the great human adventure.

– Maxine Hong Kingston

When both of us look backward…we see and are devoted to telling about the lines of people that we see stretching back, breaking, surviving, somehow, somehow, and incredibly, culminating in someone who can tell a story.

— Louise Erdrich

I am a woman who wants to go home but never figured out where it is or why to go there…I have lost the words to chant my bloodline.

— Lisa Harris

We are the sum of all our ancestors. Some speak louder than others but they all remain present, alive in our very blood and bone.

— Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93, and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for ‘wherabouts unknown.’

— Etheridge Knight

When the census taker, a woman of African descent…came to my door, I looked into the face of my sister….She did not ask me my racial background but checked off the box next to Black American/African American/Afro-Cuban American/Black African….

I met her eyes and said, “I’m not Black; I’m Other, Mixed, Black and White.” …She did not smile, smirk, or frown, but checked the box marked “Other,” and lifted her eyes quickly to mine again. I wanted to see her erase “Black.” She did not do so in my presence….

I had been focused on my personal freedom, on my right to define who I am, on my responsibility to my sense of self. The dignity of the census taker was not a part of my mental equation…

She thanked me. But the price of my self-definition had been the wall I felt I’d built between us before I ever closed the door.

— Sarah Willie

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return…I am not european. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me….I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.

— Sarah Willie

Auntie Raylene, an accomplished chanter and dancer, told us about the necessity of remembering and honoring where we come from….During the question-and-answer session, a worried West African immigrant brother asked her, “But…what if our parents and grandparents refuse to tell us anything? They don’t want to talk about the old days. They are afraid. Or they don’t remember.”

She looked at him with great love and said, “Then you go back further, to the source,” and her hand swept back with assurance to the beginning of time, to the birth of life.

– Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth….

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe
and that this universe is you.

Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

– Joy Harjo

We the People art images are available here as free downloads. Shepard Fairey’s image of 12-year-old Menelik is from a photograph by French and Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo. The texts are drawn from several wonderful collections: UA:Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry , ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan & Jennifer Gillan (Penguin,1994)… N: Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, eds. Becky Thompson, Sangeeta Tyagi (Routledge, 1995) … and another anthology which has vanished from my library and my memory, though I have traced original sources for most of its selections. In order: Hall (N 241), Sáenz (Calendar of Dust), Bulosan (http://bulosan.org/in-his-words), Harjo (UA 29-30), Henderson-Holmes (UA 60), Wong (UA 55), Hamod (UA130), Chin (UA 134), Djanikian (UA 215), Rodriguez (source unknown), Steptoe (UA 250), Lum (UA 322-23), Manyarrows (UA 330), Baraka (UA 155), Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), Kingston & Erdrich (third anthology), Harris (N xv), Hall (N 241ff.), Knight (The Essential Etheridge Knight), Willie (N 276, 278), Hall (241ff.), Harjo (She Had Some Horses)

Time’s Gentle Admonition: George Herbert Faces Death

Posted on February 27, 2024 by jimfriedrich

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 20^th-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 16^th-century Reformation debates about real Presence haunted the religious poetry of the 17^th 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 17^th-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 17^th-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.

Time to Take a Cup of Kindness (Happy New Year!)

Posted on December 31, 2023 by jimfriedrich

Peering into the unknown in Jónsi’s FLÓÐ, a multi-sensory installation in Seattle’s Nordic Museum.

I have been writings this blog since 2014, and the turning of time at the New Year has always provoked an annual reflection on our temporal existence. If, as 2023 slips away, you’re in the mood for one of those essays, here are some links:

The Angel of Possibility (2014)
Tick-Tock: Thoughts for New Year’s Eve (2015)
Foolishness and Hope on the Eve of 2017 (2016)
On New Year’s Eve, My Inner Clown is Full of Hope (2018)
The Music of What Happens (2022)

Hope has been my recurring theme at year’s end. On the eve of 2024, it’s a precious commodity. Two years ago, I wrote Tending Hope’s Flame on an Anxious New Year’s Eve. With the flag of hope tattered and torn by endless battles, I drew inspiration from Thoreau, who continued his quiet work of studying the natural world even as the Civil War ravaged the American consciousness. We must, he argued, refuse the hypnotic spell of the chaos which seeks to seduce our gaze. The refusal to take our eye from the transcendent goodness and beauty at the heart of things is “the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil.”

As midnight fast approaches, I don’t have much to add, except a few lines from W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter (January 1940). Written in search of a foundation for living amid amid the chaos of war and the collapse of the known order nearly a century ago, some of it speaks directly to our own present moment:

The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime …

We find ourselves in Purgatory,
Back on the same old mountain side
With only guessing for a guide …

The New Year brings an earth afraid …

But then Auden addresses a particular friend who has been for him a shelter from the storm:

We fall down in the dance, we make
The old ridiculous mistake,
But always there are such as you,
Forgiving, helping what we do …

Tonight let’s raise a glass to the ones who forgive, and the ones who help. And that brings me to the photograph I took last summer while immersed in FLÓÐ (Flood), a multi-sensory simulation of oceanic depths by Icelandic artist Jónsi. The two figures gazing into the mist remind me of old illustrations of Dante and Virgil in the Inferno. No matter how unsettling the sights along the way, the companions of the Divine Comedy are usually seen side by side, slightly apart from the next horror, retaining enough detachment from the chaos and pain to analyze and learn from it, without getting sucked into it themselves. And whenever the pilgrim Dante misunderstands what he sees, or succumbs to fear, his guide is there to help.

Virgil leads Dante out of Hell (14c MS).

One of my favorite Divine Comedy illustrations is in a 14th-century manuscript of Dante’s poem. Having traversed the dark way to stand once more beneath the stars, Virgil reaches back to pull Dante out of the pit as well. It’s like that beautiful line in “Auld Lang Syne”:

And here’s a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie’s a hand o’ thine.

As we make our own way through the peril and promise of the coming year, may the helpers be there when we need them. And God willing, may we all “take a cup o’ kindness yet.”

Happy New Year, dear Reader. May peace and wisdom abound in the days to come! Thank you for your thoughtful attention in 2023. I’ll see you again on the other side.

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

Posted on February 27, 2023 by jimfriedrich

“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.

The Increase of Existence: The Poetry of Marilyn Robertson

Posted on April 30, 2021 by jimfriedrich

Deschutes River, Oregon, April 2121 (Jim Friedrich)

Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.

— Jane Hirshfield^[i]

Spirituality and poetry share a common task: “the increase of existence.” This is holy work, and much of it involves coming to terms with time. Whether we waste it, use it, lose it or save it, it is never ours to keep. It is a gift that comes and goes. Whatever is meant by the increase of existence, it cannot be a matter of longevity. That would deny the fullness of time to those who die too soon, and I believe the universe to be kinder than that. No, the increase of existence is not in its length, but in its depth, what T. S. Eliot called “a lifetime burning in every moment.” ^[ii]

Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov described this depth as a relationship with the eternal:

“For [the human person], eternity is not a specially qualified time that will arrive after temporal life, as an event in time itself; rather, it is the depth of [our] own being, a depth known in time and ceaselessly revealing itself. Eternity is [our] rootedness in God, and this eternal life both begins and is accomplished in temporal life.”^[iii]

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a small boy tells his bemused parents, “You’re just lucky you don’t have your whole life looming in front of you.” I wonder if that becomes funnier, the older you get. Certainly the nature of time feels different when it starts to run out. Some of us would not mind a little more looming in our later years.

Marilyn Robertson, Santa Cruz, California, January 2018 (Jim Friedrich)

My oldest sibling, Marilyn Robertson, is a poet. In her latest collection, “Small Birds Passing,” time is on her mind. “I like the moreness of time at low tide,” she writes. “Time for a stretch, a sigh. / Time for nothing perfect.^[iv] But the stillness of the unhurried moment, the sense of “moreness,” is not inherent to time itself. It is rather the product of our own attentive awareness.

Days won’t wait for us.
Hours drift away.
Time never got the hang of lingering.

Yet what if we dropped everything,
Stood still.
Looked around.

That red leaf.
Those cloud-sheep.
All the small birds passing.^[v]

In the first hour and the last, and all the moments in between, pay attention. Sink into the depth of things. Increase existence. Such temporal depth does not come naturally to a society obsessed with speed and surface. We need teachers.

Animals keep trying to tell me
how to live:

cat, sunning herself
on the grape arbor,

dog, bouncing along the path,
in love with everything,

and rabbit,
the ardent listener,

her soft antenna ears
always tuned to the present.^[vi]

In “One Thing,” Moon joins Rabbit in modeling a spiritual practice:

One thing about a rabbit, or the moon,
is that they don’t waste time fretting about
what to do with the rest of their days.

They are living them, one after another,
those tidy packages of hours with their beginnings,
their middles and their ends.

Rabbit, hopping along a path through woods,
into briars and out again without so much
as a scratch on its soft jumpy body,

and Moon, sailing across the infinite ocean of sky,
spilling her poetry of light
into every window she can find.

And yet, no matter how adept at sounding the depths of the given moment, poets and pilgrims of a certain age cannot help glancing toward life’s horizon. There are too many goodbyes in our latter days, too many deaths, to let us forget the “tears of things.”^[vii]

All the farewells in a lifetime.
All the ships that sail away, becoming pinpoints.
Becoming specks.

“You just missed her.”
“He said to say goodbye.”

All the clicks of latches, shutting of lids.
“Stand back. The doors are closing.”

There are roads. We have feet.
What we leave behind will soon forget our names.

All the losses. All the last words.
The telephone ringing, ringing in the night.^[viii]

The last line could signify the news of death, received by phone at an untimely hour, but I hear it as a call to someone who is no longer there to pick up. The unanswered phone is a heartbreaking image of disconnection—the permanent loss of a precious voice. And then what? Is everything, in the end, gone for good? Or does the eternity we experience in the “depth known in time” persist for us beyond the grave? In “After,” the poet admits our essential unknowing in this matter.

After the fire,
what will I be?

A thing with feathers?
Or that little pile of ashes

just there, where
the water heater used to be.

And though the poet in her reticence prefers to let the “Thick pages of theology fly / out the window,”^[ix] she nevertheless intimates the possibility of resurrection. The title of the collection’s last poem, “The Story So Far,” locates the octogenarian poet in the middle, not the end, of her divine comedy:

old flowers
tossed on the compost

doorway of loss
blown open by a sudden wind

water jar broken three times
still beautiful

in the heart of the mother
one hundred poems

we are not dying
we are just waking up

For more of Marilyn Robertson’s poetry, see my 2017 post, Running on Fast Forward.

^[i] Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), vii.

^[ii] T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” in Four Quartets. The poet goes on to say, “We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion …” In other words, deeper and deeper into God.

^[iii] Sergei Bulgakov (1877-1944), The Lamb of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2008), 135. This classic in Christology was originally published in 1933.

^[iv] Marilyn Robertson, “Low Tide,” in Small Birds Passing (2020). All her poems and excerpts are from this chap-book.

^[v] “Taking Time.”

^[vi] “How to Live.”

^[vii] This poignant phrase is from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I.462. The Latin, lacrimae rerum, lacks the preposition which English requires, creating the ambiguity in translation of “tears for things” vs. “tears of things.” Seamus Heaney’s rendering speaks to the immensity of our grief in this time of pandemic: “There are tears at the heart of things.”

^[viii] “Endings.”

^[ix] “You Say”

“No longer at ease here”

Posted on January 7, 2021 by jimfriedrich

Three days before the 2016 election, I posted The Top Ten Reasons To Stop Trump Now. All of them, sadly, turned out to be valid forecasts, but three of them remain especially worrying over the next two weeks:

Nuclear threat Giving control of the world’s most powerful military, not to mention the nuclear codes, to an emotional toddler is clearly insane.

Fascism Believe me. I alone can make America great. Everyone else is stupid. Trump is part of a worldwide erosion of democracy by a resurgent authoritarianism. Fear and hate have made many sell their souls to naked power. When fascism spread in 1930’s Europe, Americans were confident that “it can’t happen here.” Now we aren’t so sure.

Hatred Racism, bigotry, misogyny, bullying, scapegoating and political violence have been making a shocking comeback, with Trump as their enthusiastic cheerleader. He has endorsed and normalized the most vile sins of the American shadow. God help us should he and his alt-right thugs and cronies ever come to power.

I wrote my warning on November 3, 2016. I wish I’d been wrong.

After yesterday’s insurrection, many are calling for the immediate removal of the President from power, and I add my voice to theirs. His seditious incitement of a coup may have been ridiculously futile, but it cannot be indulged as another childish tantrum. It was both physically dangerous and symbolically toxic. It will take our country a long time to live it down.

Breaking the law and shaming his country should be reason enough for immediate removal. But we should also be genuinely worried about the dangerous unpredictability of a cornered rat. He still controls the nuclear codes. He is still an unstable sociopath, a clear and present danger to America. As a Republican congressman put it today in calling for Trump’s removal, we need “to ensure the next few weeks are safe for the American people, and that we have a sane captain on the ship.”

One way or another, Trump will exit, but the venom that produced him will remain in our system for a long time to come. The alternative universes of social media continue to erode the very notion of a Union. It’s now all too easy to secede from consensual reality. Millions upon millions are joining delusional confederacies of bitterness and hate. And unprincipled, power-hungry cynics like Senators Josh Hawley (educated at Stanford and Yale) and Ted Cruz ( Princeton and Harvard) will continue to harvest money and votes from the killing fields of ignorance and bigotry.

For Christians, the defilement of the Capitol also tainted the Feast of the Epiphany, when we celebrate the manifestation, or revealing, of Christ’s light to the whole wide world. The Episcopal Collect for the Epiphany prays for the Beatific Vision: “Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face.” Sadly, what the world beheld on Epiphany was not the Light of the world, but an eruption of darkness from the vilest murk of the American id.

As with any healing, you can’t begin treatment until you get a diagnosis. Could yesterday’s “epiphany,” revealing the seriousness of our affliction, be the beginning of a cure? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, herself a Catholic who knows the sacred feasts, expressed this hope. “Let us pray,” she said, “that this instigation to violence will provide an epiphany for our country to heal.”

The bizarre coincidence of the insurrection with the culminating celebration of the Nativity calls to mind the famous ending of William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming:”

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

All of us who were transfixed by the slouching horror on our screens yesterday feel the resonance of Yeats’ disturbing image. But my preferred poem for the day would be T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” a first-person account of the original Bethlehem Epiphany. Like every pilgrim, the speaker has tales to tell about the hardships of the quest. However, about the moment of revelation—beholding the Incarnate God face to face—he is curiously reticent, as though it would diminish the experience to put it into words.

Once he returns home, with time to reflect, the Magus finds himself “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods.” Having looked divine Love in the face, he finds a world without that love to be less than “satisfactory.” No longer able to settle for anything less than what he glimpsed in the Bethlehem stable, he finds himself “no longer at ease.” The journey to the Divine birth becomes for him a kind of death, a perishing of his old world and his old self.

In the light of the Epiphany—the revealing of ultimate truth—the Magus is transformed. He will never be the same. Dare we say the same about yesterday’s terrible “epiphany”? Has seeing our own darkness face to face shaken us to the core? Has it shocked us into renouncing its terrible sway? If we suddenly find ourselves “no longer at ease here,” thanks be to God! Our journey toward the Dawn can begin at last.

Words and Memories: Recollections on My Birthday

Posted on July 16, 2020 by jimfriedrich

Kenneth Patchen, “Moon, Sun, Sleep, Birds, Live.”

Live long enough, and a single word can acquire a multitude of associations. Pick any word in Kenneth Patchen’s poem, for example. What images and narratives does it summon from your memory? What feelings does it unlock? I’ll get us started with the five large words.

Full moon rising on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch (July 16, 2019).

Moon: Since the day of my birth, 912 full moons have risen into the evening sky. Whenever I am able and the sky is clear, I find an open view to the east and wait for its appearing. The moon’s predictability has never dulled the thrilling instant when its bright curved edge breaks the horizon. Over the four weeks of waning and waxing that follow, its slow dance of vanishing and renewal attunes us ever so gently to the temporal flow. The diurnal sequence of sunrise and sunset seems rushed in comparison.

I’ve had my eye on the moon since I was old enough to notice the sky. I remember specific moons the way one remembers luminous conversations: the Wyoming moon sparkling the fresh powder in a midnight ski run down Teton Pass; the Minnesota moon rising beyond the Mississippi River as we warm ourselves by a driftwood fire; the Florida moon shining down on the circus tent where 400 Episcopal collegians celebrate Epiphany all night till dawn; the Los Angeles moon traversing the sky behind a 7-hour performance of Indonesian shadow puppets; the glowing tip of a rising crescent climaxing a night of falling stars in the High Sierra; the lunar eclipse stunning three priests with wonder on a Northwest beach; the many moons lighting the way on mountain trails and desert dunes; and last year’s spectacular birthday moon, rising on the 50th anniversary of humanity’s first trip to the lunar surface.

The most recent full moon rises over Puget Sound on the Fourth of July.

When the full moon first appears, silence is best. It resembles the host of the Blessed Sacrament, a white disc lifted up before our contemplative eyes. The only words I can specifically recall from a moonrise were spoken by an American woman on the Scottish isle of Iona. “You know,” she said, “I’m 55 years old, and I’ve never seen the moonrise before.”

The sun sets over “the edge of the world” at Finisterre, the western terminus of the Camino de Santiago.

Sun: The sun is a perennial symbol of life-giving energy and joyful radiance. And while climate change has certainly complicated both its literal and metaphorical meanings, we still welcome its warmth and light after a freezing night or a long winter, we still feel uplifted by its brilliance after a dreary stretch of sunless days. Even as we address the growing imbalance in our weather and our seasons, we remember to treasure in every moment the blessings we struggle to preserve.

A benevolent sun still has the power to cheer us, and the rhythms of night and day remain foundational for an embodied and temporal spirituality. Embrace each morning as the gift of creation’s new-made world, make each evening a vesper song of thanks. And in between, let us live as children of the light. Love whatever is good and beautiful and true, and work to transform whatever is not.

Sunlight, like our own breath, is easy to take for granted. Without it, life would be impossible. Even when night comes and goes, the transitions are gradual enough to ease the shock of the sun’s disappearance. We never experience the sun being abruptly switched off, except during a total eclipse. Watching the sun become a black disc, which can be viewed with the naked eye, is pure wonder, one of this world’s most unforgettable experiences. But the sudden disappearance of light from earth and sky is eerie and unsettling—so sudden, so absolute, like an apocalypse. Its return is equally swift, like the first moment of creation: Let there be light.

I shot this video clip of an Oregon landscape during the 2017 solar eclipse. I was gazing directly at the sun, of course, but the camera recorded what was happening on the earth. The shot is in real time. It only takes about 30 seconds for the darkness to vanish.

Sleep: In 1979, after several days of sleep deprivation, I grabbed a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York to visit my brilliant friend Bob Sealy, a critical mentor to me in cinema, theater, the art of conversation, and all things New York. I arrived in Manhattan around 8 a.m., utterly exhausted. Bob was busy with revisions of his new play at Café La MaMa, and had arranged a place for me to nap while he worked––a windowless storage room in a seedy building reminiscent of Forties film noir. I stretched out on a dingy couch. When Bob closed the door I was left in total darkness, and soon fell into a dreamless sleep.

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)

Hours later, the door swung open, awakening me from the depths of slumber into a confused state of mental fog. The room was still so dark. A faceless silhouette loomed in the doorway. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was, who he was, or what I was doing there. It was a nightmarish scene straight out of Fritz Lang. Then Bob switched on the light and my stupor began to fade. He led me out to the daylight world, the realism of city streets. But I had not entirely quit the darkness. The noirish image of that moment lingers to this day.

“Don’t watch the story,” Bob once told me about the movies. “Watch the image.” The story will go on its way toward a conclusion, but a vivid and suggestive image can detach itself from the plot to call up something deep and enduring in the psyche. Where is that dark room inside me? Who is at the door?

A goldfinch in our peach tree. They arrive at Easter and depart in the fall.

Birds: As we shelter in place until the pandemic passes, our only regular visitors are the birds––robins, goldfinches, juncos, pine siskins, red-winged blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, spotted towhees, red-breasted nuthatches, golden-crowned kinglets, house and purple finches, varied thrushes, cedar waxwings, sparrows, wrens, ring-necked pheasants, and a pair of mallards. More rarely, a bald eagle may perch atop a Douglas-fir, or a blue heron land on the grass.

A blue heron drops in for a visit.

But the specific bird that came to mind when I first looked at Patchen’s poem was a mountain chickadee in the summer of 1973. While backpacking in California’s Desolation Valley near Lake Tahoe, I had paused to stretch out in a green meadow, leaning back on my elbows with my knees sticking up. I was in no hurry, and had settled into the stillness of reverie when the little bird landed on my right knee. It perched there calmly for some time. I like to think it was being sociable, signaling across the gulf between species the underlying kinship of all created beings. Perhaps it just mistook me for a log. But I have never forgotten our brief communion.

The author at the family plot in Red Wing, Minnesota (June 2006).

Live: My great-grandfather, John Michael Friedrich, immigrated to Red Wing, Minnesota, in the 1860s. He died young, only 47, and for his male descendants, longevity has been in limited supply. John Michael had two sons, Charles Edward (died at 67) and John Harry (34). Charles Edward had four sons: John (72), Edward (20), my father James (62) and his twin brother Louis (8 months). John had two sons, Jack (50) and Brad (75). I am currently the oldest living male of the line, and today I become the first to reach 76. It is a humbling milestone, and I feel my ancestors cheering me on.

In these latter days, to borrow a line from Blade Runner, I want “the same answers as everybody else: Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” But meanwhile, more moons! More suns! More birds! More sleeping and waking! As long as God gives me breath.

And then? For the pilgrim, the road goes ever on and on, in this life and the next.

The road goes ever on and on … (Camino de Santiago, Galicia, 2014)

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The religious imagineer

Where the fire and the rose are one

Category Archives: Poetry

Sing, Muse, of the poem and the film: How does the Odyssey mean?

“The Unpardonable Sin” (Poetic Shame on the “Christian” Right)

Turning Pain into Praise: George Herbert on the Human Condition

“We are America!” — Poetic Voices of an Immigrant Nation

Time’s Gentle Admonition: George Herbert Faces Death

Time to Take a Cup of Kindness (Happy New Year!)

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

The Increase of Existence: The Poetry of Marilyn Robertson

“No longer at ease here”

Words and Memories: Recollections on My Birthday

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