Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

“Heavenly hurt it sends us”

Leave a reply

Richard Rohr argues that there is “an incurable wound at the heart everything” and that in the second half of one’s life maturity comes when we recognize and accept this. He states in a recent blog that “your holding and ‘suffering’ of this tragic wound, your persistent but failed attempts to heal it, your final surrender to it, will ironically make you into a wise and holy person.”

Now, I would qualify this and note that this “incurable wound” comes to us in varying degrees. For many, those who are merely the “walking wounded” it presents itself as plain vanilla depression and anxiety. But even that “plain vanilla” version of pain must be confronted, just as others must confront their “incurable wound.” It makes me wonder if this is what Paul meant by his “thorn in the flesh.”

And note here what a “difference” Emily Dickinson’s “heavenly hurt” brought her:

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the heft
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

SEX!

Leave a reply

Well, I thought that would get your attention!

Actually, all I have to offer is a bunch of random quotes about sexuality that have stuck in my mind over the years.

One of my favorites is from Woody Allen, “Of course sex is dirty. If you do it right.” Recently I read a line from Mary Karr when she was describing her failing marriage, “Any sex that took place was of the calf-roping kind.” And I love H. L. Mencken’s pithy observation, “The trouble with abstinence is its over emphasis of sex.” Shakespeare in Othello described a copulating couple as “making the beast with two backs.” And then there is the beautifully worded phrase from the Old Testament, “the way of a man with a maiden.”

Anne Frank and courage

2 Replies

In spite of everything, I still believe
That people are really good at heart.
I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation
Consisting of confusion, misery and death.
I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness,
I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too,
I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet,
If I look up into the heavens
I think that it will all come right,
That this cruelty will end,
And that peace and tranquility will return again.
In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals,
For perhaps, the time will come
When I shall be able to carry them out.
— Anne Frank

It is marvelous that she could have such an optimistic viewpoint of life, given the circumstances in which she was living and even more so given how she would die. In my clinical work I have come across many teen-agers with similar courage and faith even in difficult circumstances. For courage and faith are not merely a function of maturity and education but often of some intrinsic hope in the human race, and more importantly in God.

“Teach us to pray”

Leave a reply

T.S. Eliot declared that, “Prayer is more than an order of words, or the sounds of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind.” He recognized that prayer is not a perfunctory performance “because it is what Christians do”. You know, “Wind me up and watch me pray and therefore I’m a Christian.”

Prayer is a mystery and I’m not for sure how to define it. I think it always starts as a “perfunctory performance” but at some point in one’s life it needs to go beyond, to become more of a meditative enterprise.

I love what Shakespeare had to say about prayer in Hamlet. Hamlet’s step father, Claudius, is on his knees praying and lamented, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Shakespeare recognized that when we merely throw words around, when we trot out the usual “prayer” verbiage, when we are consciously choosing our words so that we “pray right”, then our prayers “never to heaven go.”

I recently started reading Thomas R. Kelley’s book, A Testament of Devotion, and he noted the following re prayer: We pray, and yet it is not we who pray, but a Greater who prays in us. Something of our punctiform selfhood is weakened, but never lost. All we can say is, ‘Prayer is taking place, and I am given to be in the orbit.’

This is an overwhelming notion that I am presenting here. And I don’t have it figured out. And I don’t think the right thing to do is to wait until I have it figured out. The right thing to do is to pray and always remember what the Apostles asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” (See Luke ch. 11))

Beauty is always present!

4 Replies

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby.  To suffer is not enough.  We must also be in touch with the wonders of life.  They are within us and all around us, everywhere, anytime.  Thich  Nhat Hanh (Being Peace).

Do you ever get caught up in your sorrows and disappointments so that you lose perspective?  I sure do.  But it helps me when I catch myself doing this to stop for a moment, to pause, to exercise “mindfulness”, and appreciate the beauty that is around me.  And, if this beauty is not immediately present, I can recall the beauty that I have seen and will see again.

I have here just one glimpse of beauty that was caught by my mother-in-law’s eye several years ago.  It is stunning.  And deer, and birds, and squirrels, and the rest of god’s critters are just marvelous.  And I didn’t even mention dachshund puppies who just totally slay me, especially the two that I own.

Image

Damn those human limitations!

Leave a reply

I really love e e cummings. He was just so damned contrary and here I am stuck in my plain-vanilla, humdrum life! It ain’t fair!  He didn’t even obey punctuation! How in the hell did he get by with that? His teachers must have wanted to beat his butt.

Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

WHEN GOD DECIDED TO INVENT

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

I really do not understand this poem. But it grabs me. The key to the poem is the limitation of the cause-and-effect world that we live in, a relic of that damned time-space continuum. And, I don’t understand that “continuum” either! Not consciously, anyway. But, I know that cummings realized the limitations that we live in and I know he must have found them very frustrating.

Ultimately, the only thing we have is “why” and that brings us face to face with the profound mystery of life. I’m made to think of Einstein’s observation that he had found that at the heart of everything was an “impenetrable mystery”, noting that this experience is what brought to his heart “religious sentiment.” I choose the term “God” but “my god”, how that term is abused.

Republicans in a delimma

2 Replies

The report today is that the unemployment rate has improved, dropping to a 2.5 year low. Recently there are several indications that the economy is improving. And that is not even counting the huge boost in the stock market a couple of days ago and the one that is expected today. This news puts the Republicans in an awkward position. Their leading “candidate” in the election of 2012 is a poor economy. And they went out of their way early in the O’Bama administration to emphasize that they “hope he fails.” I know that as they see the economy stirring a little, they must be privately saying to themselves and to each other, “Oh shit!” This attitude they have demonstrated is really embarrassing. In addition to announcing, “I hope he fails” they have opposed any effort along the way to get the economy going.

Now, O’Bama is still in deep trouble. A Republican victory in November 2012 is quite feasible. It would be so funny if the GOP does win if Democrat leaders would come out and smarmily announce, with pronounced irony and facetiousness, “We hope he fails!” I personally cannot imagine “I hope he fails” coming to my mind should the Republicans win though I will surely announce it to tease my Republican friends. That attitude is absolutely deplorable. And, I don’t think the Democrats are currently exploiting that Republican mind set enough.

Pretending

Leave a reply

If you can’t pretend, life is going to be difficult. For even the most basic social functioning requires “pretending” at times, not acting on impulse but acting according to the expectations of the social group. The problem with serious psychopathology is the inability to subscribe to and conform to these social expectations.

But even for the garden variety neurotic this pretense can be a struggle. W. H. Auden noted:

I wish you first a sense of theater.
Those who know illusion and love it
Will go far.
Otherwise you spend your life in confusion
Over what to do and say with who you really are.

For, if you don’t develop that “sense of theater” you are apt to find yourself “wondering” too much about “who and what you really are”.  That navel gazing can pose real problems for your life

There is an old oriental aphorism that illustrates this point:

A centipede was happy quite
Until a toad in fun, said
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali again

1 Reply

The following posting is in reference to material from the blog posting of 11/3/1, “Paean to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”

When Ali was five, her grandmother orchestrated a “female circumcision” on her, seizing the opportunity provided by Ali’s father’s imprisonment.  Her father had opposed the procedure.  First, it is interesting to note that her father opposed this procedure and was able to prevent it when in the household even though it was a cultural/religious mandate.  I’m curious how he could have done that but am pleased that he did.    Second, can you imagine the balls of that grandmother????   Wow!  In some perverted fashion, she was a version of a “women’s libber” in that she acted contrary to the specific wishes of Ali’s father, a man. (And, this compliment is intended to be wry.  I’m not approving of anything that beastly woman ever did.)   But, of course, she did this in subservience to a “higher truth” which was the unequivocal mandate of the Koran.  It must have been an interesting moral dilemma for her but “moral dilemmas” are more easily resolved if you have a command from On High that you are obeying.

BUT, can you imagine having swallowed any cultural mandate or decree of Holy Writ to the point that you would brutalize a five year old girl, your own granddaughter?   And the brutality was not only physical, but sexual!  What a warped sense of personal and sexual identity it would give any girl.  No wonder that women in cultures of that sort are so subservient.   I would hope that if “God” should ever weigh on me to commit any deed so offensive to basic common sense and contrary to any basic human decency, I would readily tell him to “Fuck off.”  But, or course we routinely read/hear/see in our media gross examples of human stupidity in blind obedience to “God” speaking to them.

I think that it would behoove each of us to just take a time-out anytime “The Spirit is upon me” or “God is speaking to me.”  If we have any thoughts of this sort, we should be given pause for in these communications often lies the portal to gross stupidity and even brutality.  But in that moment, the “old brain”, that reptilian brain…..dare I say “Sataaaan”….is clamouring in our brain and we have a tendency to “know” that we are receiving the truth.  But, even if so, what harm would it do to pause and perhaps get feedback.

And I do think that each of us can say on occasion that “God is speaking to me” or “The Spirit of God is upon me”—I don’t doubt this in the least.  BUT, does it do any harm to give pause and consider the message?  I wish God would impose an early-warning system in our neurological depths and that anytime He was about to speak to us, we would hear…and perhaps see….a “WARNING” message like we see on our car’s dashboard when the engine is overheating.The issue here is meta-cognition.  So often it is lacking.  So often it is turned off when cultural mandates, i.e. the Word of God, is involved.  And I think God is then insulted, that we feel we have to turn off our brain when he is “speaking” to us or even when he is speaking to us.  God is not stupid.  But we often are.

I close with Goethe who in Faust noted, “They call is Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”