Category Archives: Spirituality

Forty Years of Chewing Sand

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St. Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness (Osservanza Master, Siena, c. 1435)

The desert can be tomb and cradle, wasteland and garden, death and resurrection, hell and heaven. Thus in the desert you will find that God is simultaneously present and absent, proximate and remote, visible and invisible, manifest and hidden. He can receive you with great tenderness and then abandon you on the cross of loneliness. He consoles you and torments you at the same time. He heals you only to wound you again. He may speak to you today and ignore you tomorrow.

–– Alessandro Pronzato [i]

 

In American Nomads, my recent reviiew of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, I applied the term “ascetics” to the motorized wanderers who have left behind the oppressive futility of a dysfunctional society to seek a freedom and authenticity seemingly unattainable within the rigged game of economic inequality. Although most of those contemporary nomads might take issue with the religious connotations of the word, I believe that any intentional exodus “away from here” is inevitably a quest for the redemptive space of a Promised Land. Its refusals and renunciations are the necessary first steps toward new being.

In popular usage, asceticism conjures images of bodily self-mortification, like sleeping on a bed of nails, for the sake of a purely spiritual goal. Such a limiting caricature reflects an unfortunate dualism of body and soul. But the term comes from the Greek word for athletic training, and is best understood as a wholistic practice in which everything which comprises the human person—body and soul, heart and mind, inner psyche and outer world—is fully engaged in a committed discipline of patterned living.

Asceticism is not solely a matter of giving old things up; it also involves taking on things that are new. Lenten discipline, for example, involves the addition of deeper spiritual practices and loving actions, and not merely the common subtractions of culinary pleasures and worldly amusements. More prayer and more justice, not just less chocolate.

But even the embrace of positive actions or behaviors involves the renunciation of obstacles, distractions and hindrances which impede or resist the ascetic’s goal. And since we are social beings, both formed and deformed by the worlds we inhabit, it is not always enough to work on ourselves within the confines of the given world. To borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, we sometimes need to “exit the whole Shebang.”

And from the biblical Exodus to the “vandwelling” nomads fleeing the enslaving fleshpots of America, the exit always leads to the desert: the no-where beyond the reach of the social imaginary, the silence beyond the captivity of language, the trackless waste where all our constructions turn to dust. As I wrote in Via Negativa:

The desert is the emptiness where there’s no place to hide. In the desert, you come face to face with yourself, your demons, and your God. Nothing is defined there, nothing known in advance. Your scripts are no good in the desert. Your evasions are futile. Whatever makes you want to turn around and run back to the safety of your old illusions is the very thing that is trying to kill you.

We could all use some time in the desert, whether it’s Jesus’ 40 days or the Israelites’ 40 years. But whenever we step outside the noise of our social and personal fictions, the silence is going to wound us with questions. Who am I really, when my familiar props, costumes and stories are stripped away, leaving me naked and alone on an empty stage? Do I have what Salinger’s Franny Glass called “the courage to be an absolute nobody?”

Even the great desert saints of Late Antiquity trembled on the brink of so much nothingness. As Belden C. Lane writes in his indispensable guide to wilderness spirituality, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:

“What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending.” [ii]

The desert way is threatening and fierce, but it is also a place of transformative clarity, as mystics and artists continue to remind us. Indifferent to the old scripts of alienation and inauthenticity, it can be the birthplace of a new way of being human. Video artist Bill Viola describes the lure of the desert issuing from the spiritual desire for true and undistorted existence:

“I want to go to a place that seems like it’s at the end of the world. A vantage point from which one can stand and peer out into the void – the world beyond… There is nothing to lean on. No references… You finally realize that the void is yourself. It is like some huge mirror for your mind. Clear and uncluttered, it is the opposite of our urban distractive spaces. Out here, the unbound mind can run free. Imagination reigns. Space becomes a projection screen. Inside becomes outside. You can see what you are.” [iii]

Of course, the desert can be anywhere. Alassandro Pronzato, one of my favorite desert teachers, describes it as an essentially inward condition:

“You can find your desert in a corner of your house, on a motorway, in a square, in a crowded street. But you must first renounce the slavery of illusions, refuse the blackmail of pressure, resist the glitter of appearances, repudiate the domination of activity, reject the dictatorship of hypocrisy. Then the desert becomes a place where you do not go out to see the sand blowing in the wind but the Spirit waiting to make his dwelling within you.” [iv]

The desert is no place for the casual tourist. It is a pilgrimage of arduous passage, demanding time, patience, endurance and persistence. “You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land. But it is only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast in the end.” [v]

Chewing sand for forty years—not the best sales pitch for the pilgrimage to God. But all the easy roads just lead back to Egypt. Endure the trials, bless the oases. Persist. Never turn back.

Do not doubt the feast.

 

 

Related posts:

Via Negativa: A Lenten Worship Installation

Solitude (Part 1)

Solitude (Part 2)

 

[i] Alessandro Pronzato, Meditations on the Sand (1982), q. in John Moses, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent (Norwich, UK: The Canterbury Press, 1997, 30-31.

[ii] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 166.

[iii] Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995) 54.

[iv] Moses, 31.

[v] Ibid., 26.

I took the photograph in California’s Alabama Hills, where I have run among wildflowers and slept beneath the stars. The mountain peak on the right is Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states. I climbed it in 1998.

Ash Wednesday Isn’t for Heroes

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Giovanni Bellini, Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (1460)

Yesterday’s come-from-behind Olympic victory by Shaun White in the snowboarding halfpipe was both thrilling drama and breathtaking athleticism. Following a failure to medal in the last Olympics and a serious injury in competition just four months ago, his triumph fit the classic pattern of the hero’s journey: an arduous path “through many dangers, toils and snares” until the prize is won. But the hero’s journey, however inspiring, is not our Lenten theme. We walk a different way, practicing self-compassion in the dust and ashes of our own defeats.

Every Ash Wednesday, my favorite Winter Olympics story comes to mind. Readers may recall it from a 2016 post, but I offer it again here, prefaced by Mary Oliver’s Lenten antiphon:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.[i]

In the 1988 Winter Olympics, American speed skater Dan Jansen, the best in the world, was the consensus pick to win the 500 and 1000 meter events. On the morning of the 500 final, he learned his sister had just died from leukemia. His focus clearly elsewhere, he fell on the first turn of his race and never finished. He would also fall and fail in the 1000 meters. At the 1992 Olympics, he again failed to win the medals expected of him. The 1994 Olympics offered him one last chance, and he came to the line of the 500 meter race as the clear favorite, the only skater ever to break 36 seconds, which he had done four times. But after one slight slip on the ice, he finished out of the medals yet again.

Ash Wednesday came just after that race, and during the liturgy I reflected on Jansen’s story in my homily. Although Jansen would finally win a gold medal a few days later (in the one race where he was an underdog), it was his “failures” that resonated with people. After the liturgy, a therapist in the congregation told me that many of her clients that week had talked with her about Jansen’s story, and how much it moved them. If the world’s greatest skater could fall, then maybe it was all right for them to fall as well. You don’t have to be a hero, only your own flawed and unfinished self, letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In his youth, the poet David Whyte was hiking in the Himalayas when he came to a deep chasm. The only way across was a rickety old rope bridge with many missing slats. Although he was a confident, experienced mountaineer, he suddenly froze at the prospect of traversing the abyss on so treacherous a path. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bridge for hours, unable to proceed. “There are times when the hero has to sit down,” he said later. “At some bridges in life the part of you that always gets it done has to sit down.” Then an old Tibetan woman came along, gathering yak dung for fuel. She walked with a limp. “Namaste,” she said with a smile. Then she turned and limped across the bridge. Immediately, without thinking, he rose up and followed. Sometimes, he realized, it is “the old interior angel,” the unheroic, limping, unequipped part of ourselves, that gets us to the other side.[ii]

Remember that you are dust, and no hero. Whether your Lent will be a time of giving up, going deep, or reaching out, may it always be done with a generous measure of self-compassion.

 

 

[i] Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” in Devotions (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 347.

[ii] Remembered from a David Whyte talk in the 1990s.

What Will You Wish You Had Said?

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Listening to voices from the end of life at Spoken/Unspoken.(Photo by Jim Friedrich)

At the end of your life, what will you wish you had said?

 This question is the premise for “Spoken / Unspoken: Stories of Living and Dying,” a moving audio installation at California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. In a room of warm and cheerful colors, the visitor hears a succession of voices responding to the question. Each speaker is a person near the end of his or her life, recorded at Hospice of Santa Cruz County. Their words are also supplied in written form.

“I wanna say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. . . I want to say everything. Everything I feel. Everything I experienced. . . I’m finding answers all the time and I’m finding more questions too. . . I’m letting it happen, I’m not running after it. If it comes I’ll latch onto it.”

 “I wish I could say I’m sorry to the people who I have offended in my life in different ways.”

 “I don’t understand myself. One of these days I’ll find out what’s going on.”

 “I cannot believe the speed of light that takes place toward your end days. What happened from 50 on was unbelievable. Time goes by so quickly. It’s just unimaginable. You can’t do anything about it.”

 “I’ve often been afraid [to get closer to people]. I don’t know why I’m afraid. There’s times that I think I’ve had answers to a problem a person has told me about and I haven’t shared what I thought the answer was, and I feel like I missed the point. I missed the time of being God’s handyman. They are not so much words of wisdom, but they are feelings that I have. I didn’t tell them that I loved them enough. I didn’t show that love enough.”

“I want to say, may this be a good day for you and that you’re enjoying . . . thinking of the creative things in you that God has given you to do––and go do one of them someday.”

Every voice is accompanied by its own unique musical score, created by composer and sound artist Lanier Sammons. The peaceful ambient music reflects not only the emotional content of the various interviews but also the particular tone, tempo and manner of each individual speaker. The result is a quality of presence which is more than whatever is being said.

I was especially taken by the man who broke into a rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening.” His singing was melodious and full of warmth. You may see a stranger across a crowded room. And somehow you know. It’s all about desire. As the theologians and novelists tell us, every story begins with a lack, and longing is at the heart of who we are.

We all know that words can suggest but never exhaust the complexity of our stories or the mystery of our being. But what is unique about the voices in this installation is their location––at life’s most critical boundary. Whether we think of it as “the end” or understand it to be the door between worlds, death invites retrospective reckonings. What has been the meaning of my story? Did I make a difference? Is there something I wish I had done, or said?

Spoken / Unspoken works at many levels. The attentive acts of listening by the hospice staff, the sound artist, and the museum curators have honored the beauty and value of dying elders, who are too often marginalized by a society uncomfortable with aging and death. The various voices convey both the uniqueness of every individual and the universality of our shared human condition. And it creates a sacred space where we can experience community not only with the specific people who share something of themselves in the recordings, but with every soul on pilgrimage into life’s unknown futures.

The installation also prompts visitors to perform a couple of actions.  Stationery and pencils are provided so we can communicate by letter something that needs to be said to a friend or loved one. A text encourages us: “Don’t wait, say it now.” There is also an adjacent recording booth, where you can make your own response to the question, “What do you wish you had said?” Sammons will then take your story, weave it together with other voices, and set it all to music. A week later you can hear the result on headphones as part of the installation.

What have I myself left unsaid after so many years on this earth? I’ve been wondering about that ever since experiencing the Santa Cruz installation a couple of weeks ago. I’m also dreaming about the adaptation of this sound installation concept for religious communities. I have led church retreats where we practice storytelling and storylistening––beginning with our communal sacred stories and moving into the treasuries of our personal stories. And people are usually surprised to discover how much there is to know about the life stories and spiritual experiences of their companions in faith. Even in communities where we profess the sacredness of every person as God’s beloved, so much is left unsaid between us.

So here’s an idea. What if communities of faith spent some time recording members’ responses to the big questions––about God, humanity, faith, hope, love, transformation, etc.––or provided a sound booth (a technological confessional?), where people can walk in and record what matters most to them? Then let some music and sound artists create an audio mix from the gathered material, and play it back in a church space where drop-ins can linger and listen to a living “cloud of witnesses.”

If any of this sparks your own creativity or exploration, I’d love to hear about it.

“Be known to us in the music we make”

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Ted Mercer leads a song at the California Sacred Harp Convention.

I am the chaplain this weekend for the 30th Annual All-California Sacred Harp Convention, where over a hundred singers have gathered from a dozen states (along with a few enthusiasts from Europe) to sing about 190 shape note songs over the course of two days. It’s an intense immersion in a uniquely American repertoire––loud, raw, and deeply expressive. You can read about it in my post, A Musical Tsunami.

While the song texts mostly reflect images and themes from 18th and 19th century Christianity, a shape note gathering is not a community of religious consensus. Non-Christian people of faith and no faith are in the mix, and there is no discussion of verbal meanings. It’s all about the singing. And yet, there is a sense of “church” about these gatherings. We tap into a power beyond the self, form bonds of communion with one another, and are transported by a shared experience that can verge on the ecstatic.

By long tradition, each day of a singing convention opens and closes with prayer, composed or selected at the discretion of the chaplain. The following prayers are mostly my own. While seeking to honor and express the sacred dimension of a shape note singing, I tried to be inclusive, avoiding explicit sectarian language. But you may notice some Anglican phrasing––and theology––seeping through.

Saturday (Jan. 20)

Opening prayer

O divine Beloved, Maker of all things and Lover of souls, we are gathered here by your grace to sing the life that conquers death, the joy that dries all tears, the peace that passes understanding, the love that resists every evil.

Be known to us in the music we make and the songs we share.
To spend one day with Thee on earth exceeds a thousand days of mirth.

We are truly thankful for the generations of composers and singers who have entrusted us with the Sacred Harp, and we pray that our singing in this place will gladden the whole company of heaven with an awesome and holy sound.

Draw us together with the cords of friendship.
Let no one be a stranger here.
Lift up our hearts and make us one.

Now sanctify this hollow and hallowed square, that it may be for us not just a refuge from the storms of the world, but a tangible experience of our truest humanity, reflecting your glory in the harmonious beauty of our shared communion.

We ask this in your holy Name. Amen.

 

Grace for the mid-day meal

Blessed are you, O God, giver of breath and bread,
from whom all blessings flow.
We give you thanks for the abundance of this hour,
for the food and drink prepared from your bounty by human labor
and spread before us by generous hands.
Give us such an awareness of the sacredness of every feast,
that the sharing of this meal may manifest the connections between us,
and deepen our gratitude for life.
Blessed be your Name forever. Amen.

 

Closing prayer (by Brian Wren*)

May the Sending One sing in us,
may the Seeking One walk with us,
may the Greeting One stand by us,
in our gladness and in our grieving.

May the Gifted One relieve us,
may the Given One retrieve us,
may the Giving One receive us,
in our falling and our restoring.

May the Binding One unite us,
may the One Beloved invite us,
may the Loving One delight us,
in bliss both human and divine.

Now let us go forth in peace,
rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Amen.

* Brian Wren is an Anglican hymn writer in the UK.
The “in bliss” line is my own, while the final lines are
a eucharistic dismissal from the Book of Common Prayer.

 

Sunday (Jan. 21)

Opening prayer

Grace of melody be upon us
Grace of harmony be upon us
Grace of shapes be upon us
This day and evermore.

Grace of lyric be upon us
Grace of meter be upon us
Grace of fugues be upon us
This day and evermore.

Grace of praise be upon us
Grace of union be upon us
Grace of joy be upon us
This day and evermore. Amen.

 

Grace at the mid-day meal*

Holy God, giver of breath and bread,
it is with gratitude and joy that we receive the gift of this meal.
Into ourselves we take these changing forms of matter and light
through which we shall be changed:
other bodies becoming our bodies,
other lives becoming our life.

That there is but one body,
one life shared by all,
we vow to remember.

Now bless this food to our use, and us to your service,
and make us ever mindful of the needs and rights of others.
Let all the people say: Amen.

* Adapted from various sources. The first line is from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the last lines are at traditional grace, and the middle part I learned from a priest at a campfire on a kayaking retreat for clergy. I don’t know the source.

 

Closing prayer

Holy and gracious God, you are a mystery beyond all telling,
yet have we not heard your voice sounding in our midst this day?
You are beyond all seeing,
yet did we not glimpse your glory in the faces of one another?
You are beyond all knowing,
yet has not each of us heard a word spoken today––
a word of love or consolation,
a word of encouragement or mercy?

It has been such a blessing to join our voices with one another,
in union with the countless singers who have gone before us.
Our hearts are full, and we are deeply grateful.
Now send us forth in peace, guide us safely home,
and help us to carry the grace of these precious hours
into the rest of our lives,
that the world may resound
with the melody of compassion
and the harmony of justice,
and your blessing be known
through every land by every tongue.

Glory to you for ever and ever. Amen.

Related post: A Musical Tsunami

Epiphanies in the Temples of Wonder

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Grand Teton National Park, Winter 1979 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

We have seen the Creator as Light and the Spirit as Light,
guiding with light the whole creation.

–– Byzantine matins, Feast of the Transfiguration

One senses something more than the natural…What these paintings seem to depict is not so much discrete things – trees, fields, figures, buildings – shown in particular configurations – but something that subsumes or, in potentiality, contains them.

 ––Museum label for a George Inness survey at the San Diego Museum of Art (2004)

 

I took my photograph of wintry pines forty years ago while cross-country skiing in Grand Teton National Park. I had stopped to contemplate the grove with its sense of mysterious depth, all those vertical lines receding into an infinity my eye could not penetrate. I felt the pull of whatever lies behind the components of the visible: the “something that subsumes or contains them.” It seemed an intimation of whatever lies beyond the self and its constructions.

The photograph became my Christmas card that year, with these words written on the back:

Shhh!
it comes
it goes
put yourself in its path
and wait

In this season of Epiphany (“manifestation”), we are invited to consider the possibility that the Transcendent desires to be seen. And when we are receptively attentive––and unhurriedly patient––we may discover the world to be a theater of divine showings and human awakenings.

Even in a world of “dull” and “prosaic” facts, said Emerson in an 1838 lecture, “the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts, then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds, that a fact is an epiphany of God, that on every fact of his life he should rear a temple of wonder and joy.”[i]

Every year, every day, every hour of our lives offers its epiphanies. Leafing through old journals for some memorable examples of my own, I came across some passages from a European grand tour in the 1970s, a few years before I photographed the snowy Teton pines. My older self might want to tame some of the exuberant excess in the writing, but I still recognize, and do not regret, the intensity of that young man’s wonder.

An epiphany has been called “a moment when . .. consciousness finds itself flooded, or breathed into, or simply filled by a force . . . that comes from outside the self and is incorporated into the soul of the recipient.”[ii] My first direct encounter with the collection of J. M. W. Turner paintings in London’s Tate Gallery felt like that. This is how I wrote it down at the time:

Having seen most Turners only in reproduction, or in the vivid descriptions of [19th century critic] John Ruskin, I was not fully prepared for the ecstasy, the overwhelming somatic experience, of viewing the actual paintings. The three large Turner galleries were a temple of light, each framed canvas a window into a universe of radiant splendor. The early paintings showed his classical lineage, the formal narratives, but it was not long before his clear shapes began to waver and blur in the universal solvent of a liquid light. It was not a failure of drawing but the birth of new vision.

 Some of his sunsets and storms engulf recognizable forms, almost to the point of abstraction, yet they remain anchored in real perception, aspects of the created world which registered in the artist’s here and now. In “Interior at Petworth,” golden light, turbulent and thick, pours through the windows like water from a burst dam, tearing through the staid Victorian inner space to submerge everything in its radiance. How did Turner come to see a world so alive with animating energies? Was this light within his mind, leaving the room essentially untouched, or did he see something inherent in the physical world, a subversive brilliance operating outside the range of mortal sight?[iii]

J.M.W. Turner, “Interior at Petworth” (1837)

A week later, I walked through the doors of la belle cathédrale de Chartres into another epiphany:

The moment of entrance flooded me with intense emotion. I knew it would be beautiful, but I was unprepared for the way the soaring interior would catch me up in a such a physical way, and ravish my virgin eyes with the vivid, fantastic hues of medieval glass, floating islands of magic color in a sea of smoky shadows.

My eyes filled with tears. Never before had a building made me weep. It was that sense of perfection I have found more often in nature, the homecoming when one arrives at the perfect moment, the perfect place, where the lack that drives our stories is satisfied, every desire met.

I drifted around the cathedral as in a dream. There were no lights on at first, and the upward-thrusting shafts and vaults disappeared, like prayer, into a realm beyond our sight. The eloquent profusion of Gothic lines, the underlying mind that held vast forces in balance, subduing the play of gravity and architecture into a state of arrested serenity, was everywhere implied, but the complexity outran the mind’s descriptive grasp. Chartres invites not analysis, but worship. In every direction, the space receded into vague twilights. The effect was neither disorienting nor alarming, but enfolding, a mothering womb rather than annihilating tomb. Theotokos, the Divine Mother, was not only at the heart of the north rose window. She was the very space in which we moved.

The kaleidescopic windows seemed suspended, weightless, free floating in the darkness, jeweled messengers uttering angelic phrases directly to the soul, unclothed by human words. The north rose window, like Dante’s vision of the heavenly dance, held me rapt for the longest time. What kind of imagination had spread such rich fare before us? And if we feasted on such visions, how would we be changed?[iv]

North rose window, Chartres cathedral

 

 

[i] From “School,” a lecture given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Boston on Dec. 19, 1838.

[ii] Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 14.

[iii] Personal journal (April 29, 1976).

[iv] Ibid. (May 4, 1976)

At the Mercy of the Future

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Greek funerary sculpture, 4th-3rd century B.C. (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)

So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future.

––Didier Maleuvre

 

When we say goodbye to the Old Year tonight, it will be with considerable relief. Whatever our private griefs and losses may have been (I lost 5 beloved elders as well as my best friend), the long-term public damage to people and planet is almost beyond measure. Will the New Year be any better? We can only hope, and that leaves us, as Maleuvre says, at the mercy of the future.

Maleuvre’s resonant phrase comes from his analysis of the human face in ancient sculpture:

“The head that tops Egyptian statuary is really a death mask. Expectation, longing, hope… are absent from the Egyptian physiognomy. What they carved in rock is the hard stare of compulsive serenity, of a mind set in foregone conclusions. Longing tends to stretch the boundaries of reality; it opens up prospects, possibilities, contingencies. So long as one hopes, one puts oneself at the mercy of the future… But this expecting mode is absent in Egyptian statuary, the faces and forms of which feature none of the muscular readiness of Greek figures. The latter wade in the stream of time, on the watch for the unforeseen, ready to contend. Whereas the Egyptian statue expects nothing from the world: its blank equanimity is not even the quiescence of stoic wisdom, but of a mind dead set against wonder.”[i]

If any of us were really capable of the “compulsive serenity” or “blank equanimity” of an existence without surprise, possibility or risk, would we really choose it––“a mind dead set against wonder,” expecting nothing, hoping for nothing?

It is not in our nature to do so. We are creatures of longing and hope, and it is our fate to wade into the stream of time, come what may. But as the biblical God tells us at the beginning of every quest, “Do not be afraid. I will go with you.”

So let us go bravely into the New Year, to do the work and be the change.
And twelve months hence, may all our songs be glad.

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Dear reader –– Thank you for honoring this writer with your attentive reading and thoughtful feedback in 2017. I am also very grateful for those times you have shared a post with your own friends and communities. It is encouraging to know that these reflections mean something to you, and that you find them meaningful for others as well. So I thank you for your support of my writing ministry. I will do my best never to waste your time. Happy New Year!

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Some of my favorite posts from 2017:

The arts

And whether art is a mirror of the human condition, a window into beauty both immanent and transcendent, or a hammer to shatter our complacencies, it shares many of the tasks and effects of religion.

To Plough and Harrow the Soul: The Shared Work of Art and Faith

Kieslowski’s Decalogue: A Masterpiece of Religious Cinema

Temporary Resurrection Zones

Culture

We may have lost our innocence about the world––and about the traces of darkness in our own hearts––but we are still prisoners of hope. Our formative glimpses of a new heaven and a new earth may have come and gone, but their influence still lingers. However chastened or weary we may be, a sense of expectation remains. What Jesus called the Kingdom of Godis a future of human flourishing and divine blessing that still pulls on us with gravitational force. Its current absence doesn’t dim our faith. It only intensifies our longing.

Everything Changed, Nothing Changed (Summer of Love, Part 3)

Mortality

None of us will be shouting “Hey, look, it’s me!” in heaven.
We won’t even be shouting “Hallelujah!”
We will have become Hallelujah!

“You say goodbye, I say hello”: A Requiem Sermon

In Paradisum: On the Death of a Friend

Falling Leaves and the Fate of Mortals

Wonder

When [the eclipse] was over, what lingered was the overwhelming sense that I had experienced both immanence and transcendence in a single image, its roundness like a sacramental Host lifted above the altar of the world. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem too much to claim that within the visionary interval of totality my deepest longing was met by an answering Presence.

A Deep but Dazzling Darkness

 

 

 

[i] Didier Maleuvre, The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (, Berkeley: UC Press, 2011), 16.

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens in Bethlehem Doesn’t Stay in Bethlehem

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Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna of the Small Trees (1487)

If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the road, pregnant with the holy, and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart.
My time is so close.”

 Then, under the roof of your soul,
you will witness the sublime intimacy,
the divine, the Christ,
taking birth forever.

 –– St. John of the Cross

 

The story we celebrate on Christmas Eve isn’t just about a long-ago wonder. It describes something that is still going on, as the divine “takes birth forever” in mortal flesh and human stories. The infinite God, the Creator of time and space and matter, the Source and Sustainer of all existence, yearns to be born in us, to express the life-giving Word in the vocabulary of human flesh. Your life, my life, our common life as the body of Christ––these are God’s Bethlehem tonight.

In other words, the Nativity isn’t just something we remember. It’s something we do, something we become.  As St. Paul said, “all of us . . . are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory.” In other words, we are destined to become God-like.

But what does that mean––“God-like?” It doesn’t mean having superpowers or being invulnerable. Look at Jesus. His life tells you what God-like means. He was born in poverty and weakness, in a stable not a palace, and he lived a life of utter self-emptying and self-offering, giving himself away for the life of the world.

To let the divine be born in us, then, means simply this: to let our humanity achieve its true fullness by allowing divine Love to have its way with us. A 13th-century mystic, Mechtild of Magdeberg, put it like this:

“When are we like God? I will tell you.
Insofar as we love compassion and practice it steadfastly,
to that extent do we resemble the heavenly Creator
who practices these things ceaselessly.”

O come, let us adore Christ. But not only that. O come, let us imitate Christ. Let God’s life be born in us. And when the divine is born in us, when the divine takes place in us, we will not be the only ones changed by it. Everyone we meet will be changed. And perhaps one day, the whole world will be changed––into “brighter and brighter glory.”

I think it all comes down to this: What happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem.
It goes out into all the world, to all people, all places, now and forever.
And nothing will ever be the same again.

+

 

Dear reader, thank you for taking the time to consider these posts. You are a writer’s best gift. I wish you a most happy and luminous Christmastide. May your own encounter with the embodied God––whatever form it may take––bless and empower you in the days to come.

One Year Later: 7 Spiritual Practices for the Time of Trial

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Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513)

And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us;
we will not fear, for God hath willed
his truth to triumph through us;
the prince of darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
his rage we can endure,
for lo! his doom is sure,
one little word shall fell him.

— Martin Luther

Save us from the time of trial . . .

— The Lord’s Prayer

 

One year ago today, the United States did the unthinkable. The ugliest impulses of the American psyche, abetted by Russian meddling, delusional propaganda and a broken electoral process, handed the presidency to a seething cauldron of vanity and malice. This is not just a national embarrassment; it is inflicting enormous and lasting harm on our people, our natural resources, our democracy and our planet. Everything I wrote in a pre-election post, Ten Reasons to Stop Trump Now, is proving depressingly accurate.

After picking myself up off the floor last November, I composed a list of Seven Spiritual Practices for this dark and threatening time. It is not so much a guide to personal survival as it is a call to action, with due attention to the self-care necessary to sustain our collective Resistance without burning out, or succumbing to anger and despair.

So I am posting it again, in the hope that it may still prove relevant and helpful. And I would welcome your own feedback about the practices which have sustained and empowered you over the last year.

In thinking about what images to select for this re-posting, two came immediately to mind. The first is Dürer’s Knight (above), riding steadfastly through a “world with devils filled.” It seems a perfect image for today’s resister, and may well have been inspired by Erasmus’ advice to the faithful soul, written nine years before Dürer’s engraving:

“In order that you may not be deterred from the path of virtue because it seems rough and dreary … and because you must constantly fight three unfair enemies—the flesh, the devil, and the world—this third rule shall be proposed to you: all of those spooks and phantoms which come upon you as if you were in the very gorges of Hades must be deemed for naught after the example of Virgil’s Aeneas … Look not behind thee.”

My second image for our “time of trial” is Theodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa,” depicting the aftermath of a shipwreck in 1816, when 147 sailors were set adrift on a makeshift raft with little hope for rescue. Only 15 survived the ordeal. When I look at this painting, I see the Trumpian future, unless we can find the resolve––and the means––to end this nightmare.

Theodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819)

So here again is my post from November 18, 2016, offered in a spirit of hope:

Last week’s question was, What happened? This week, we are beginning to ask, What now? After the tears and the shock, the heartache and the nausea, how do we pull ourselves together and begin to resist the downward spiral of hate, fear, and planetary suicide?

As I was refilling the birdfeeders in our backyard on 11/9, choruses of chickadees and juncos signaled their pleasure. The beauty of the natural world provided welcome solace on a grim morning, and for a moment I imagined myself an insular neutral in a remote Swiss valley during World War II, or a cloistered monk during the Dark Ages, quietly tending my little Eden while chaos raged somewhere far away.

But retreat isn’t really an option. It’s not just love of country that makes me unwilling to concede our future to “the power of the dog” (Psalm 22:19). The fate of the entire world is at stake. This country has enormous influence and impact. If the American heart gets painted black, the suffering will be universal.

A friend in Virginia sent me a Mexican proverb after the election: “They thought they’d buried us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Exactly! We carry the power of springtime within us, to outlast the darkest winter and “restore earth’s own true loveliness once more.”[i]

Thinking about where to begin, I have reflected on seven verbs of spiritual practice. It’s a small offering to our ongoing collective conversation, and comments, arguments, and shares are welcome.

Pray

When evil threatens and courage fails, prayer remembers a greater power, the life-giving Source enabling us to endure and flourish. Both privately and in community, let us make daily intercession for our country, its leaders, and all who work to make it better. Let us also ask for the strength, patience, wisdom and courage to navigate the next four years. Our fiercest energies, anxieties, longings and passions are cries that will pierce the heavens. God support and save us!

But the prayerful life is not just a matter of words and devotional practices. It is a way of being, an all-consuming relationship of deep trust in the infinite and unconquerable Love who loves us. Even in times of suffering and doubt, the prayerful ones speak as if they are being heard. “Thy will be done,” cry the prisoners of hope. And, as Scripture promises, God provides.

If we are seeds, faith makes the best soil. We are not alone. It’s not entirely up to us. God will outwit our worst failings. Resurrection has the last word.

Fast

I have had to fast from the news since the election. The awfulness of the presidential appointments, the childish tweets, the widespread outbreaks of bigotry and bullying, the sneering of the haters and the fears of the vulnerable—it is all so ugly and maddening. Many of the discussions on social media are equally distressing. So many trolls, so much ignorance and bitterness. If I drink too much of the stuff, I’m soon spinning down the rabbit hole into a dystopian Wonderland. Curiouser and curiouser, to say the least.

But the peace of my soul is not the only reason for a news fast. Evil is like Medusa’s face. Gaze too long and you turn to stone, transfixed by horror. How do we hate hate without becoming hateful ourselves? The rage provoked by repugnant beliefs, bad behavior and delusional assertions can become addictive. It feels good to denounce the rascals and villains. It’s even entertaining to watch others do it. We think we are resisting evil, only to discover we are actually increasing its power as we succumb to its mesmerizing grammar.

Of course we need stay informed if we are to resist effectively. But bad news, whether fact or fiction, is like a plague. We should be mindful of its infectious toxicity. Remember to fast from evil and feast on goodness.

Repent

Every day ought to include honest self-examination: Where and how have I impeded or ignored the divine project of transforming lives and sanctifying the universe? How can I change my life to cooperate more fully with Love’s unfolding future?

Righteous indignation is natural right now, but it is also dangerous, because it may fail to “include itself in the problem against which it reacts. It judges in a divisive way, pitting ‘me’ against the rest . . .”[ii]

It is very tempting to point fingers and call people names, but that is not a constructive path to addressing the pain and anger festering in the American psyche. I’m not sure exactly how to pursue that path in a divided nation, but believe that the repentance of the “righteous” is an important step. Whatever injustices, slights, resentments or pathologies may underlie this election, we all have all played some part, even if only by passivity and default. However noble our intentions or wishes may be, we are all participants in a society where suffering is unequally distributed and great damage to people and planet is done every day in our name.

As Simon Tugwell writes in his book on the Beatitudes, even the “innocent” and the “good” are implicated in “the whole situation of wrongness, in which we and everybody else are caught up from the very moment of our birth.”

The saving image that comes to mind for me is the scene in The Brothers Karamazov when that dysfunctional K family is arguing and posturing in the monastic cell of Father Zossima. Their loud bickering, as bullying and shameless as a Trump rally, is especially shocking in the presence of such a holy and gentle man. The elder remains silent, making no attempt to intervene. Then, suddenly, he stands up, steps forward to one of the brothers—the one he intuits to be suffering the most—and kneels before him. Bowing his forehead to touch the ground, he says, “Forgive me! Forgive me, all of you!”[iii]

Prophesy

The practice of forgiveness and compassion does not mean we remain silent about what is wrong, unjust, or destructive in our common life. And we must never allow Trump’s behavior or crazy talk to be normalized. His promised actions, from mass deportations to torture to environmental destruction, are not the customary swing of the pendulum. And his proto-fascist attack on democracy has no precedent in our history. Such things are evil-minded folly, “leading us straight to tragedy.”[iv]

Like the biblical prophets and their American successors like Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and the Berrigans, we must denounce evil, confront the powers, envision the good, and exhort the better angels of our nature. Over the next four years, the unemployment rate among prophets should reach an all-time low.

That a majority of white Christians voted for Trump does raise troubling questions about the efficacy of religious teaching. As Clarence Jordan said fifty years ago, the biggest lie told in America today is, “Jesus is Lord.” But God is surprisingly resourceful, and the Trump years may be a refiner’s fire, forging a more faithful witnessing Church out of the flames. In any case, Jesus’ friends do not have the luxury of an uninvolved, privatized religion. We are being called most urgently to raise our voices, practice our faith, and minister to the vulnerable in the public square, whatever the cost.

As Thomas Merton wrote when the national conscience was being seriously tested in the 1960s, Christians must either “face the anguish of being a true prophet” or “enjoy the carrion comfort of acceptance in the society of the deluded by becoming a false prophet and participating in their delusions.”[v]

Love

In times of great calamity or loss, the need to connect intensifies and conversations multiply. In recent days, many of us have engaged with friends and strangers over coffee, on social media, at worship and in the streets, seeking comfort, encouragement, shared concern and collective wisdom. As labor activist Joe Hill told his supporters just before he was murdered by the state of Utah, “Don’t mourn. Organize!”

But Love won’t let us stay huddled in circles of the like-minded. In a 1969 BBC production of the gospel story, many are bewildered when Jesus commands them to love their enemies. They start to grumble at such a hard teaching. “It is easy to love only those who love you,” Jesus tells them. “Would I come to tell you easy things? Do you want me to tell you easy things?”[vi]

How do I love my enemies even as I reject and resist the harm they inflict? As hard as it may be to cross the divide between ourselves and those who offend or outrage us, God will not let us do otherwise. There is no “us” and “them” in the Kingdom. Simon Tugwell puts this as well as any:

“It is theologically and philosophically disastrous to envisage heaven and hell sitting side by side forever, each bearing witness to the failure of the other . . . According to the classic Christian ascetic tradition, it is always futile to squander our anger on one another. That is a waste of anger. Anger is made to be directed against the demonic, not against our fellow men and women.”[vii]

Let it begin with our crazy relative at Thanksgiving dinner, but eventually, like it or not, we’ll have to work our way up to loving Steve Bannon and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as well. Unimaginable? Jesus never said it would be easy.

Serve

In the Book of Common Prayer, the newly baptized commit to a lifetime of service, to “persevere in resisting evil … to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself . . . to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”[viii]

In all my post-election conversations, my friends have expressed a fresh resolve to be changemakers, to take on some new commitment that will make a difference. Episcopal priest Bill Teska, a friend in Minneapolis, offered a longtime activist’s suggestions on Facebook:

“It is time to get busy. Go to meetings. Go to demonstrations. Give whatever you can to organized non-violence resistance. I would say that qualifies as almsgiving, because the end is the defense of the poor and helpless.”

And another priest-friend, Gary Hall, posted this on his blog:

“We must, like the earliest Christians, be prepared to present ourselves as a counter-force and counter-culture to imperial values and norms… As alienated as we may now feel, we will find our antidote to depression in civic engagement on behalf of the gospel, confident that a new day is coming to be born.”[ix]

There are countless ways to light candles in this darkness. Find yours.

Hope

 Last weekend many of us were wondering how the first post-election Saturday Night Live would find anything funny in what America had just done. But instead of the expected opening comedy skit, the brilliant Kate McKinnon simply sang Leonard Cohen’s aching lament:

… And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Thanks be to God, history’s outcome is not up to us. Whatever follies we commit in sin or ignorance, God’s kindnesses are never exhausted. Should heaven and earth pass away, the Love who loves us remains. Kill the Author of life and she will rise again. This is our radical, wild hope. It is why we sing Hallelujah even at the grave. Even in the deepest hell.

Practice this hope every day, every hour. And pass it on.

 

 

 

[i] From an Advent hymn, “On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry”, words by Charles Coffin, tr. Charles Winfred Douglas after John Chandler. The Episcopal Hymnal 1982, #76

[ii] Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes: Soundings in Christian Traditions (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1985), 87

[iii] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991), 74-5

[iv] Marty Kaplan,” Taking Our Country Back,” Moyers and Company website, Nov. 15, 2016: http://billmoyers.com/story/taking-country-back/

[v] Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence (68), q. in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 374

[vi] Son of Man (BBC Television, 1969) With an interesting script by Dennis Potter, this can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9atVsTh4C-0

[vii] Tugwell, 87-9

[viii] Rite of Holy Baptism, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (New York: (Oxford University Press, 1979), 304-5

[ix] Gary Hall, “Responding to the Election” (Nov. 15, 2016): http://figbag.blogspot.com/2016/11/responding-to-election-paper-for-madres.html

Falling Leaves and the Fate of Mortals

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New Hampshire, October 2016 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things,
but to love things heavenly; and even now,
while we are placed among things that are passing away,
to hold fast to those that shall endure. . .

–– Collect for the Sunday closest to the Autumnal Equinox

 

The Book of Common Prayer has a collect, or gathering prayer, for each Sunday of the year. Many of the collects reflect the themes of their liturgical season, but only one of them seems to make an explicit connection with one of the four natural seasons. At the beginning of Autumn, when leaves will fall, flowers wither, and birds depart, the Church prays that we who “are placed among things that are passing away” may not be “anxious.”

The origins of the prayer are, in fact, not seasonal, but political. It was composed when the stability of the late Roman Empire was under threat by barbarian invaders. Inspired by the text of Colossians 3:2 (Set your mind on things that are above, not on things of earth), it reflects the sense of the world as we know it coming to an end. When all that defines us is being swept away, what is the enduring rock to which we can cling?

With perfect brevity, the prayer sums up the spirituality of Autumn, the season of loss and letting go. In a year when my best friend, my father-in-law, and two nonagenarian mentors have all passed away, the season’s metaphorical message seems acutely personal. No matter how dearly we cherish the colors of fall, they are the prelude to decay––“the hectic beauty of death.”[i] Outside my window, the katsura’s golden cloak and the maple’s scarlet finery will soon lie on the earth beneath naked branches. It feels like loss.

Katsura and maple trees, Bainbridge Island, October 2017 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

In January of 1842, Henry David Thoreau suffered two bitter deaths, both terribly premature. His older brother John cut himself shaving on New Year’s Day and died ten days later of tetanus. He was 27. Two weeks later, Waldo Emerson, the endearing five-year-old son of Thoreau’s great friend and mentor, came down with scarlet fever. In three days he was gone.

In her revisionist study of America’s iconic naturalist––Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau–– Branka Arsić sees his life’s work grounded in deeply personal experiences of loss. His private grief led him to contemplate the “perpetual grief” in nature, as matter continuously mutates from one form to another, and find in it, as Arsić argues, “an “endless/formless mourning that recreates as it grieves.”[ii] Through his close observations of natural processes, Thoreau came to understand death and loss as the means of life, and not its annulment. Decay and decline are not deviations from a normally healthy state, but an integral, inevitable part of the performance of mortal existence. As he wrote in his final essay, October, or Autumnal Tints:

“Will not the land be in good heart
because the crops die down from year to year?
The herbage cheerfully consents to bloom, and wither,
and give place to the new.”[iii]

The growth and decay of New England leaves became a presiding image for Thoreau’s reflections on a world where passing away is a necessary part of an enduring cycle of renewal. Published six months after his death, his concluding work celebrated the autumnal cycle as a mirror of the human condition:

“It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!––painted of a thousand hues. . . . They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”[iv]

Vermont, October 2016 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

In Autumn: A Season of Change, Peter J. Marchand similarly concludes that there is “as much life as there is death in the browning of meadows and the drying of leaves. . . .” 14

For the apparent disappearance of many plants and animals, autumn is often seen as an end. But the seasons are part of a continuum, a revolving process of birth, death, and renewal—and if such could be said to have any beginning or end, then fall could just as well be viewed as a beginning. . . . The seeds of another season have already been planted—sown on the wind and the wings of birds and the coats of animals to find new life in new places. Another generation is already awakening in the wombs of the great mammals. And in all the hidden sanctuaries of autumn—in the crevices of dormant trees, in the cold safety of piled leaves and decaying logs, in the sediments of stream and pond bottom—myriads of insect larvae are beginning their incredible metamorphic journey into spring and adulthood. Energy is flowing and nutrients are circulating. These are the processes by which nature’s bounty is reinvested in a burst of new growth, reproduction, and dispersal, to arrive at yet another autumn and another season of change.[v]

 

New Hampshire, October 2016 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

But if this cycle of perpetual renewal frees us from the burden of mourning the fall of every leaf, what about the “falling-sickness” of our own mortality? What will become of me when I fall into the arms of Mother Earth? Do I simply decompose into primordial materials for the making of some entirely new form of future life? Is my unique consciousness swallowed into eternal anonymity, like a raindrop in the sea? Or is there an “I”––with identity, memory, personhood––who survives the transit into whatever’s next?

Arsić understands Thoreau’s “I” as dying to any sense of persisting identity, so that there is no essentialist, interior self to maintain its distinctive subjectivity in an afterlife. Rather, the whole universe is alive with thoughts and relations which re-occur in new ways and inhabit new forms. What survives are the thoughts and experiences, the presences, which are not the possession of separate, autonomous individuals. The universe as a whole is doing the thinking and being, not any of us in particular. Or as Arsić puts it in her twist on Descartes, “where there are thoughts there is no ‘I’.” The sovereign self surrenders to the greater flow of consciousness whose source is beyond the self.[vi]

We tend to think of ourselves as an “I” who surveys the world from a protected tower. But what if we are not so insulated from the things and presences in which we live and move and have our being? What if, like Walter Benjamin’s flâneur[vii], “I” am spellbound and possessed by external objects, no longer a private isolated self but a receptive convergence of the multiple sensations of a world saturated with communicative presence? When Thoreau, in taking a walk, felt himself “grandly related” to everything he experienced, he became what he saw, in a world where every object is alive and returns our gaze.

“Hence,” writes Arsić, “Thoreau can not only say that he is interested in thoughts that the body thinks but he can also risk a more startling claim: ‘All matter, indeed, is capable of entertaining thought’ (Journal: c. Fall 1845). Contemplation, then, is not something brought to matter by the mind; rather, in Thoreau’s account, all matter is treated as contemplative, alive, and thoughtful.”[viii]

This takes us pretty far into the philosophical weeds, but have we also wandered away from Christian orthodoxy? The “resurrection of the body” implies that the unique particularity of every human being will be re-membered by God on the Last Day. Personal identity will not utterly vanish into the All. Heaven will not be a congregation of amnesiacs. Something of our embodied being––our stories, our relationships––will have a future in the economy of God.

However, Christian theology also admits a radical discontinuity between this life and the next. We do not share the ancient Greek conception of immortal souls who simply shed their physical bodies to carry on in eternity without interruption. For there to be resurrection, there must first be annihilation. “So death will soon disrobe us all of what we here possess.”[ix] As St. Augustine said, to climb up “through my mind towards you who are constant above me. . . I will pass beyond even that power of mind which is called memory.”[x] If memory means “the story by which I define myself,” that’s a lot to let go of. How many of us are really prepared for such radical surrender?

If we are truly made in the image of the self-emptying God, then our insistence on maintaining the self as we know it only exacerbates the distance between human and divine. To overcome that distance requires a complete letting go, like the last autumn leaf, and falling into the no-thingness from which all are created.

Resurrection is then, in effect, a reprise of creation ex nihilo by the Love which “breaks, creates, and re-makes all meaning out of nothing.”[xi] Whatever it turns out to mean that God will be “all in all,” does it really matter how much of our individual construct of self survives the transition to the “other side?” When we are truly lost in wonder, love and praise, will self-consciousness matter, or even exist? Will it be important that “I” know that “I” am the one who is immersed in divine Being? Or will my former, earthly identity be rather beside the point in the interdependent, intertwined dance of God where we belong so completely to one another?

None of us will be shouting “Hey, look, it’s me!” in heaven.
We won’t even be shouting “Hallelujah!”
We will have become Hallelujah!

Vine maple, Washington Cascades, October 2017 (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

To enter the abyss of God, says Catholic theologian Caitlin Smith Gilson, is “no longer to be the self that knows itself and its God by separateness, for there would be no separation and thus no knowledge of difference or identity in God.” Her argument resolves into a prayer of surrender:

You are the source of my most genuine wants,
and I wanted to be nearer than difference
and therefore I surrender to You
who desire my genuine desires
emphatically and inexhaustibly
more than I can ever want.
You desired me and I desired You
and we desired a union
closer than philosophy and reason
and even faith
could give.[xii]

 

 

 

Related posts:

Leaves

A Tender Doom

 

[i] Martha McCulloch Williams, “What Saith September?” (1892), in Peter J. Marchand, Autumn: A Season of Change (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 14.

[ii] Branka Arsić, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 379.

[iii] Henry David Thoreau, October, or Autumnal Tints (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016), 37.

[iv] October, 89.

[v] Marchand, 135-6.

[vi] Arsić, 316.

[vii] Walter Benjamin adopted the 19th-century literary image of the flâneur (“stroller,” “saunterer”) as an image for the modern urban wanderer who loses himself in, or is possessed by, the impressions his world offers to him. In The Arcades Project (1999, p. 449), Benjamin cites an example of self-dissolved-into-world from Flaubert: “Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”

[viii] Arsić, 310.

[ix] “Evening Shade,” a shape-note hymn, text by John Leland (1792), The Sacred Harp, #209 (Bremen, Georgia: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991).

[x] Confessions X, xvii, q. in Caitlin Smith Gilson, The Philosophical Question of Christ (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 209.

[xi] Gilson, 211

[xii] Ibid., 207, 213.