Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

Difficulties

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Everyday wisdom carries a lot of truth. For example, “a stitch in time saves nine” or “too little too late” or “a rolling stone gathers no moss”. These pithy little quips are rich, even though they become so banalized by common usage that they lose some of their meaning. One of the most banal, most hackneyed is, “If life gives you lemons, you gotta make lemonade.” Here is conveyed the truth that life’s difficulties give us an opportunity to grow. The human spirit seems to thrive…often…with adversity. John Masefield in one of his sonnets describes this adversity as “the spirit’s straitened possibility.” A “strait” is a tight place, as in the “Straits of Gibralter”. These “tight places”, though painful, can produce spiritual strength. Here is the whole of that Masefield sonnet in which he beautifully elaborates on this wisdom:

Man has his unseen friend, his unseen twin,
His straitened spirit’s possibility,
The palace unexplored he thinks an inn,
The glorious garden which he wanders by.
It is beside us while we clutch at clay
To daub ourselves that we may never see.
Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay
We chase the shade but let the real be.
Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress,
We thrust on that unseen, get stature from it,
Cast to the devil’s challenge the man’s yes,
And stream our fiery hour like a comet,
And know for that fierce hour a friend behind

personal demons

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W. H. Auden noted, “We wage the war we are.” He recognized and fought his own personal demons and recognized that fighting these subjective battles is an essential part of the human experience.

In days of yesteryear, our only weapons in these battles were the passing of time and perhaps an occasional “casting out of demons.” Today we have various forms of therapy and, of course, psychotropic medications. But ultimately we are left alone to battle our haunts.

Shakespeare, the greatest therapist and spiritual teacher in the history of mankind, put it this way:

Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

spiritual technocrats

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A college history professor, teaching a class on American religion, once noted that in the frontier days the men who often got the “call to preach” were those who couldn’t do anything else.  They were the wastrels, the ne’er-do-wells, those who were floundering with their life when they suddenly realized, “Hey, I could start preaching and immediately I will have a job, and respect, and a place in the community.”  (I suspect that a neurological conflagration also played a part in many of those “calls”, especially those that appeared to be of the “got a wild hair up their backside” variety)

I think that so many of our clergy today are assembly-line, mass produced, machine-produced men and women.  They are spiritual technocrats, adept at trotting out a good sermon, propping up the congregation’s pretenses, flashing that Christian (or otherwise) ivory here and there, and going their merry way.  They are, as a friend of mine once wrote, “heroes of spiritual contraception who have long since despaired of rebirth.” (Charles “Chuck” Dewitt)

They have been enculturated into Christianity and thus are professional ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, or what have you.  But they have nothing to offer from beyond the pale for they’ve never been there themselves.   These “spiritual technocrats” reflect our culture which also has long-since “despaired of rebirth.”  Our culture’s only frame of reference is itself and that, as noted earlier last week, is mental illness.  These “technocrats” have never experienced the “Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross) or “The Cloud of Unknowing” which would then empower them to offer a prophetic word.  They have never done their “time in the desert” like Jesus did.

Conrad Aiken once noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”  The clergy that I’m upbraiding here have never been outside of that “small bright circle”.  To do so would entail an encounter with intense anxiety and despair.  It is easier for them to stay within the cozy confines of this “circle,” thus mirroring the culture at large which has done the same, which has “made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)   This phenomena has been addressed in history and sociology as the church in “cultural captivity.”

“Wind me up and watch me be…”

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Last week I posted re this Shakespearean note:  With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.  I then paraphrased this wisdom into, “Wind me up and watch me be pious.”  I’m going to elaborate a bit.

This “wind me up…” concept can be applied to the whole of our life.  We are all “wound up” with a core identity and the verbal/ideological template that goes with it.  For example, I am again today saying with my thought and behavior, “Wind me up and watch me be…for want of a better term…a liberal.”  Many will be similarly wound-up today.  Then there are the conservatives.  “Wind me up and watch me be conservative”.  There are many of them too.

For, we are all “wound up” with some core identity, some template that we impose on the world and this template is usually not given any attention because asking someone to pay attention to his/her “template” is like asking fish to see water.  And then we have the human tendency to affiliate ourselves with other groups who subscribe to some similar template, thus shoring up our otherwise tenuous identity.

This problem is so apparent in our government.  Our leaders seem to be very smug, very rigid, very sure that the other side is wrong.  There is limited, if any, capacity to realize that the perspective of the other side deserves respect.  And corresponding with this arrogance is the all-too-human tendency to demonize those that view the world differently than ourself.  So, today go watch the news and watch the dog-and-pony show continue—-people saying, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat” or “wind me up and watch me be Republican” or “wind me up and watch me be a Tea Partier.”

This is a deadly trap and this is a spiritual problem psychologically/emotionally.  And ultimately this is a Spiritual problem.  This reflects a fundamental problem with our culture.  We are all “wound up” and cannot, or will not, consider the possibility that all we have to trot out each day of our life is a mere perspective, it is not the ultimate grasp of reality.  Those people that we heap into the category “them” deserve a modicum of respect at least.

I conclude with the relevant wisdom of two of my favorite poets.    Conrad Aiken noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  Our challenge, individually and collectively, is to venture “into the darkness” and offer respect to someone else today.  And W. H. Auden accused us of dwelling safely “on the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collective lie.”

prayer

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I think it is important to pay attention to how we pray.  Often when we pray we are merely chattering, tossing words around, praying to some kindly old gentleman “up there”, possibly one who sits on a golden throne with a baby sheep under one arm and a thunderbolt under the other.  Our prayer is often of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” genre, reflecting a vision of God as sitting “up there” with a huge duffel bag full of goodies to toss our way.  But an essential dimension of prayer is to clear our minds, to rein them in, to focus—that is, to meditate.  Meditative prayer can help us find our center and from that center we can make better decisions about our day to day life.   We could even, then, say “The Spirit of God leads us in making better decisions.”

Our words speak volumes about us, including the words we use in prayer.   Our word selection and the nuances of our speech reveals where we are existentially and spiritually.   For example, our word selection in prayer can reveal the perception that He is “afar off”, that He is “out there” and that we are fundamentally estranged from Him.  It is this perception of estrangement that leads to the belief that our tone of voice, our volume, and our ardor will help influence Him in his responses.  We forget that though God is transcendent he is also immanent.  In the words of Jesus, “The kingdom is within.”

Unaccomodated man/woman

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When President Clinton was being impeached, he became famous for his splitting of one hair in particular.   In answer to a particular question, he responded with great deliberation, “Well, it depends on what the meaning of is, is.”  I intend to continue this vein of hair-splitting here regarding the same infinitive, “to be”.

I feel that the best we ever get from our various spiritual perambulations is “to be.”  We get our “is-ness”.   Now, I have always had a spiritual streak about me.  It was my endowment from my community and family.  The role I was to play was, anthropologically speaking, “a holy man”, some conservative Arkansas variation of a shaman.  However, in this particular little corner of the world, my title was “preacher”.   Writing now five decades later, I recognize that I wanted a whole lot more than mere “is-ness”.  I wanted an identity, I wanted a place in that little back-water village, I wanted respect, and I wanted a career.  And what this meant was that my brief ministry was, in the words of an evangelical preacher of the day, “a platform on which to display my carnal abilities.”  It was a “work of the flesh”, to borrow a concept from the New Testament.  It was all about me.

So there I illustrated a basic problem with spiritual aspirations—the ego. The ego is not satisfied with merely “be-ing”, it prefers to shine, to “strut and fret” its hour on the stage and have people admire its holiness, its piety—“Wind my up and watch me be pious!”  And though my spiritual ego has today a degree of subtlety about it….I want to say…I still find myself from time to time really proud of how pious I am, something akin to the Pharisee’s pride in how broad their phylactery was.  (See Matthew 23:5)

AND, that is ok.  For, at that moment, sometimes the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh comes to the fore and I practice his “half smile” and prayerfully breathe the word, “mindfulness.”  I then go on with my day to day life.  There is no need to beat myself up, no need to bemoan my spiritual immaturity, no need to flagellate myself with, “Oh what a rotten sinner I am.”  There is only the need to be “mindful” and to then continue to “chop wood, carry water.”  For, no matter how spiritually “refined” we might become…or think we have become…we are going to find a hefty dollop of ego always ready to manifest itself.  And that is always going to be present.  I have a suspicion that this is some part of what the Buddha had in mind when he attested that “mara” was always with him.  And Jesus was always beset by Satan and I’m sure that ego was one of the seductions that Satan had even then in his repertoire.

The goal is to glory in our mere be-ing, in our “is-ness”, in the fact that we exist, that we “are”.  To recognize and experience that we have been “thrown into being” by some force or presence (and I like to say Presence) far beyond the grasp of our feeble minds.  It is to recognize as did Einstein that at the depths of our existence we find merely a mystery, and incomprehensible mystery, that some of us choose to term “God”.

But it requires joining King Lear out on the heath, “unaccomodated”, naked, pelted by the same “pitiless storm”, bereft of our kingdom and family, shorn of the trappings of our egoic consciousness.  It is to experience our emptiness which came to us in the New Testament in the doctrine of “kenosis”, merely meaning, “the emptying of ourselves.”  It is to experience our solitude, our “Dark Night of the Soul”. (St. John of the Cross).

Now the nice thing about this is that it does not have to leave us so “unaccomodated.”  This spiritual process merely loosens the attachment to our “stuff”.  No longer does our “stuff” have us.  We have seen and experienced our true self and that will be the core of our identity, not the piling up of earthly treasures, or the acheivement of success, and certainly not the acheivement of “spiritual” success.  We know that essentially we have only our “is-ness”, we have it only for this brief sojourn in this parenthesis of time before we return to our Source.  And in the mean time, we can have and enjoy our “stuff” but hopefully with less obsession and with an increased proclivity to share some of it with others.

Several weeks ago I quoted Shakespeare’s 146th sonnet and I conclude with an excerpt:

Oh soul, the center of my sinful earth

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array;

Why doeth thy pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay.

(And he goes on to conclude with:)

Within be fed, without be rich no more.

Ravished by God

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One of my favorite sonnets is by John Donne:

 Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

This is a beautiful portrayal of God’s persistent but gracious intervention in our lives.  It recognizes our bondage to reason, noting how that reason is “captiv’d” by subterranean forces, forces that I would describe as the ego.  As long as that bondage continues we will live a life “betroth’d unto your enemy” which I would also describe as the forces of the unconscious.  We will be what Colin Wilson described as a “sleep walker.”

And do note the sexual imagery there!

the Ultimate

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In fundamentalist Christianity there is the oft-used phrase, “in the word” as in “I’m in the word a lot now-a-days.”  I’ve been there, done that, and it has its place.  I now am “in the word” daily though my “word” has broadened to include non-Christian holy writ, spiritual teachings (contemporary and historical), and literature (past and present), philosophy, and religious tomes.

I’m aware of how much brain-washing is involved here.  It is a way of indoctrinating ourselves, filling the void that we are with something we deem important to keep that void from sucking us up.  It is part of maintaining the identity that we formulated a long time ago, that identity being “a veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman O. Brown).

So, what’s the point?  Is brainwashing all there is?  Am I merely espousing nihilism here?

I think the answer is to realize that the “stuff” that we have filled our minds and heart with must have meaning beyond itself.  This “stuff”   (words, images, ideas, etc) is important but it has no meaning unless we have an ultimate reference point outside the realm of time and space.  I think it was Gabriel Marcel who once noted that “words have meaning only when they burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.”  So, when it comes to spirituality…at least…does our ideology, our words, our dogma “burgeon-forth into a region beyond themselves” or is it merely so much flotsam-and-jetsam that we have glommed onto to stave-off the existential abyss that we live in.

As a culture…and I could broaden that to “world culture”…I fear that we do not have an ultimate reference point.   Or to put it more correctly, an “Ultimate Reference Point.”  Therefore we “glom on” to “stuff”.  We are materialistic.

more re “awful grace”

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Now, Emily Dickinson got it “awfully” and apparently several times.  But, from this trauma a lot of beautiful, thoughtful poetry ensued.  Let me illustrate:

 He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by degrees —
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals — One — imperial — Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked Soul —

When Winds take Forests in the Paws —
The Universe — is still –

Now most of us do not get it so “awfully.” Neurologically we’re are wired so that at worst we deal with garden variety anxiety and depression. But there are those who get their “naked soul” scalped. In modern times, there is Eckhart Tolle. And, even Byron Katie. And then there is the Apostle Paul in biblical times.

A tale of grace spoken of in an earlier blog about the contemporary poetry and memoirs of Mary Karr. Particularly in Lit, she eloquently and passionately describes her difficult childhood, her abuse, her abuse of alcohol and drugs, and a difficult marriage.  Substance abuse was the arena in which she wrestled with God most intensely, fighting tooth-and-toenail to resist God’s grace.  And prayer was the most difficult phase of this “wrestling” with God.

Now I can’t describe this as an example of someone having “their naked soul scalped”.  But it was not the aforementioned garden-variety neurosis and depression.

god’s awful grace

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Marianne Williamson quotes Aeschylus, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

Now why would anyone describe God’s grace as “awful”?  The answer is that grace can come to us only when our ego has been penetrated and that is an excruciatingly painful process.   Mercifully, most of us get this grace piecemeal.