Tag Archives: T.S. Eliot

A Poetic Paean to Burgeoning Spring

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“The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth forth his handiwork.”  And this is the time of the year when this glory is so manifest as the earth begins again to blossom, a magnificent delight I’ve been part of for sixty one years.  And it gets more delightful each year as I am more attentive to this unfolding and conscious that a parallel unfolding is present in my heart and life.

We can worship God, find attunement with Him, in so many ways.  We can worship him formally with other people in organized religion, we can worship Him in work and play, we can worship him in psalm and hymn, and we can worship him in careful attention to the beauty of his natural world.  And “attention” is a critical word for I think early in our life we learn to put blinders on and live with only cursory awareness of our world, including even our own body, by the way.  So, when the beauty of Spring graces us each year, we see it and note, “How pretty” but do so in that cursory fashion without any real attention.  The Buddhists would use the term “mindful” to describe this careful attention.  And this is not to stare at a flower or bird like some zombie and zone out into some alienated bliss.  It is simply to be “aware” from time to time each day.

I would like to share with you a couple of poems by a soon-to-be friend of mine who has this “mindful” awareness.  She is Sue Coppernoll who is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister living in Northwest Arkansas.  My wife has known her for a couple of years and I’ve become familiar with her poetry through her.  And later in this month I will get to meet her.  But she has allowed me to share these two beautiful poems with you, poems in which she echoes the observation of T. S. Eliot that “April is the Cruelist Month” in reference to natures vicissitudes.

The Very First Day, Again

Sunlight streams through slats
In blinds on the window
Birdsong blends with gentle breeze
No Fool she,
April has come to the mountain.

Wild pear, hyacinth, tulips and forsythia
Wreath hills and hollows in glorious array.

Mocking Bird atop the tallest tree
(a redbud about to burst)
Presents her eclectic performance as a gift
To all who would hear – and welcome –
The magic of her songs.

“Get up,” her command issues forth.
“Walk in the grass.
Inscribe your dreams
Upon the cathedral of the sky
With the fingertips of your heart.”

April, who has come to the mountain
Awaits you there
In the splendor of rebirth and renewal
Her hand outreached in welcome
She beckons you to join the dance of life.

Susan Starburst Coppernoll
1 April 2013

Dialogue with April Second

Where’d you go?

Has April left the mountain?

Cloud cover obliterates visions of spring,

Tulips and daffodils bend their heads to the ground,

Battered youngsters in a sea of mud.

How so perfidious, lovely one?

Have you no constancy, no shame?

Birdsong falls silent in the dark of noon,

Yearling rabbits do not parade across the garden,

Squirrel chatter disturbs not our ears.

Whither your promise, April?

Are you gone from us, or hiding?

Lungs eager for respite gasp in the cold air,

Arms prickly with chill reach for a comforting cape,

Feet return to shelter of rain boots.

Do you hear our lament, cruel month?

Shall we cling to anticipation of your return?

Warmed by a glorious glimpse of Earth’s ripening,

We bow in supplication, we nurture in the caverns of our hearts

Dreams of yesterday’s joy, tomorrow’s delight.

The “Shame-hole” of Self Awareness

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Last week Rachel Maddow used a line that grabbed me, referring to the “shame-hole of critical self assessment.” She was discoursing about the difficulty that people have in “self” assessing, in employing meta-cognition and becoming “self” aware. This ability to become self aware is the gift of our forebrain, a gift which we all have but one which is often not utilized. I have heard political commentators note in the recent election that most people do not use this forebrain and vote on the basis of reason but on the basis of emotion which means that astute politicians will always appeal first to emotion.

But I want to focus on that “shame-hole.” Wow! What a notion that is. And from my own personal experience it is so powerful to suddenly be made “self” aware, to be confronted with reality, and forced to realize that how one perceived the world was not how the world actually is. In other words, in involves accepting the notion, “I was wrong or in error. I screwed up.” This is the famous Rick Perry “Oops” moment. (And by the way, I admire him for having the temerity to offer that honest assessment, which will inevitably end up on his tombstone!)

Shame is such a powerful experience and our fear of it keeps us from dealing with reality. We prefer to keep our head buried in the sand, to remain in the comfort of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken). As T.S. Eliot noted, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

One other thought, shame “hole” brings to my mind “black hole” and I think the two notions are related. The black hole evokes terror with all of us but no more that raw, unmitigated experience of shame. I think that is what Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” was about.

 

“…Through a Glass Darkly.”

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Spiritual life involves a mystery. It is a mystery. This is because it is about the very heart of our existence and our existence is a mystery. Modern science is bearing this out. The Bible and other holy writ have long said as much.

This mystery can be apprehended…and I use the term loosely…by faith. For, “Faith is the evidence of things unseen and the …..” We lay hold to eternal truth only by faith and as we “lay hold” on this truth we are deeply aware of the flimsy nature of this grasp, intensely aware that the object of our faith always eludes our cognitive grasp which serves the purpose of keeping us humble. “We see through a glass darkly” and “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

When we are teased with the notion, “Oh, I have arrived” a discerning spirit will let us know, “Oh, no. You are just en route!” To borrow from the astute judgment of Karl Barthes (I think!), “We are in love with the object which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

T. S. Eliot put it this way in The Four Quartets:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

And then I’d like to share from wisdom attributed (falsely) to Oscar Romero, the actual author being Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, Michigan:

A Future Not Our Own
It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.
This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

(This quotation from the Bishop comes from a blog by Blue Eyed Ennis on wordpress.com. This blog is always a treasure trove of spiritual wisdom.)

The Ephemeral Nature of Words

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The beauty of words stems largely from their ephemeral nature. Conrad Aiken described words as “these squeaks of ours”. Poets spend their life contriving meaning out of these “squeaks”, a process which T. S. Eliot described as, “wrestling with words and meanings.

The poet is very aware of this ephemerality of language. They know firsthand how flimsy the conjunction between a simple mere sound…a “word”…and subjective experience can be; and always is when any particular word is first formed. Carl Sandburg described this as “the moment of doom when the word is formed.” (See full poem in posting of 10/28/12 ) And listen to Eliot describe his experience:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(Four Quartets)

And I love Archibald MacLeish likening this poetic moment to “the flight of birds flung from the branches where they sleep”:

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.

 

Words must be vibrant, alive, dynamic!

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A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules… Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. ~ Wade Davies

This is why language is so rich and so worthy of exploring. Words can “open up” and reveal hidden meanings and can do so endlessly; and, as noted yesterday, this is the task of poets. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote that words have meaning because they can “burgeon forth into regions beyond themselves.” But one has to be willing to let them open up, to “burgeon forth.”

Unfortunately, words can be (and often are) taken literally. No effort is taken to parse words and individuals who take this route are left with the “letter of the law.” And of course we remember what 2 Corinthians teaches: the letter killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.

Let me share from the profound wisdom of T. S. Eliot on the dynamic nature of language:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(The Four Quartets

 

Family Dysfunction and Sin

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A wit noted years ago, when systems theory was in the vanguard in clinical culture, that “families are to be from.” He was addressing the need of “cutting the cord” from the family of origin which has been an issue from eons past in our history. And I don’t think we ever do it perfectly but most of us accomplish the task to some degree. In my clinical work, however, I often came across gross examples of family dysfunction where the “cutting” of that cord was difficult to impossible and the problem was often multi-generational.

T. S. Eliot wrote a very interesting play that is relevant to this issue, “The Family Reunion.” Eliot’s lead character, Harry, is deeply enmeshed with his family of origin, especially his mother…of course…and the play is about his emotional anguish as he sought to free himself from familial bondage. He also used the concept of sin to describe the emotional baggage that families breed and perpetuate, identifying it as “instinctual energy.”

He declared that “sin may strain and struggle in its dark instinctual birth to come to consciousness and find expurgation.” He noted that one basic prerequisite for this expurgation to take place is for the struggle to be made conscious, to find the light of day. He suggested that often a particular individual in a family will be the “consciousness of your unhappy family” and described it as a “bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire.”

Just as with individuals, no family is perfect. Families are always flawed as they are comprised of flawed individuals. And, as system theory teaches us, the family usually appears quite devoted to perpetuating the “flaw.” It is our task as adults to wrestle with the “demons” that have been dealt us, to seek “expurgation”, and try to not pass our particular allotment of poison on to those around us.

Why I blog

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When I started blogging 6-7 months ago I posted about why I was doing so. I explained that I was following the Shakespearean advice to “unpack my heart with words” and also noted a verse from Job where a character reported, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wine-skin, about to burst.” Since then I have continued to find this process very cathartic and a very important element in my spiritual life. T. S. Eliot advised us to “offer our deeds to oblivion” and I think of this daily posting as one little deed that I toss out into that black hole each day, not having any idea where it is going and if it will be heard and even if it is heard whether it will matter. That is very freeing.

I want to share similar ruminations from another blogger that I recently met. Though his name and his picture mean that our back grounds are dissimilar…he did not grow up as an Arkansas honky redneck…his experiences are similar. And he has found blogging to be meaningful in ways that I have. (Now, I can only “copy-and-paste” his blog as I’m not smart enough to import a link to his blog.)

 

 

The following is from: http://santuonline.wordpress.com/
The question is quite old. It has been asked and answered by millions. Mostly the answers are quite same. But flavors are different. After all everyone is unique. Here is mine..
I was an introvert. Most of the time I used to swim in my own mind. I always felt like people were always out there to get me, humiliate me in public. I was a hell of shy kid. Apart from that I am very curious person. I like to to try out everything at least once. So, when I heard about the bloggers meet in my college, I thought of giving it a try. Watching my best friend Indrajit going around flaunting a new “BCET Bloggers” badge, I decided to have a blog of my own.
I first started one on blogger.com . It was a complete disaster. Then I came to WordPress. Another two disasters were born. I don’t even remember their names. Then came SantuOnline at last. It never had any visits or likes, because I didn’t know then about the resource called “tag“. It was September last year, that I discovered tags and my number of visits and likes grew. I got a handsome number of followers too.
I still didn’t know why I was into blogging? It was like beer. Bitter to taste, but drinking feels good. (just an example, I don’t drink ) At first, I used to search for different tags and related posts. I used to like all the pages I visited. I just knew the more I “like”-d the more visits I would get. It was a sort of race against time. I didn’t have much time everyday, but tried to do as many as possible “likes”.
Slowly, I began to slow down. Strange to hear, but that is exactly how it happened. Now, I didn’t just visit at random, and put in likes. I took my time to read each blog I visited, put in some comments and thoughts. It became a healthy outlet for my mind. My perspective changed. I met many like minded people on wordpress. Swimming in my own mind, I had accumulated tons of doubts and junk. They got cleaned. There is still a lot more to do, but it feels better now.
Needless to say, blogging has now become more than just an obsession. It is source of daily inspiration. I am not as shy as I used to be. I have opened up a lot. I am more confident. Now I don’t feel like people are always out there to humiliate me. Here, I can speak my mind without fear. I can ask any type of foolish question without being branded as immature. There are so many people here. One is bound to find at least another one just like self. It is so easy to relate on blogosphere.
Having found some exact matches of mine, I wonder “aren’t we all unique?!! then where did these people come from? ”

Christian Wiman and Faith

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Bill Moyers interviewed poet Christian Wiman on his PBS show last month, Moyers Reports.  Wiman is a 45 year old poet who is battling a terminal blood cancer and shares how this experience has reinvigorated his Christian faith. He openly and intelligently shares re his fear and doubt as he wrestles with his mortality.

Wiman noted that faith is not merely an accoutrement to one’s life, a mere adornment, something you wear like a fashionable suit of clothing. It is nothing you have to be “proud” of, it is just something that is, an essential part of your humanity . He also argued that we need a new language for belief to articulate this urge that is within us.  This made me think of something T. S. Eliot said in his Four Quartets:

Last years words belong to last year’s language
And next years words await another voice.

Eliot later noted the reason this linquistic revision was needed:

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

I guess Wiman’s story would count as a “death-bed conversion”; or, in this case, a “death bed reinvigoration” But that does not diminish his experience in the least for me. Perhaps faith is for the weak and infirm, those who are fearful of their mortality, who want an escape from the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” If so, count me in. Guilty as charged! Those who know me and my life-story could certainly make that argument. I just don’t know. I know that my faith is not any “virtue.” It just is. I can’t explain it and no longer attempt to. I just gain strength from it in my day to day life. And when I come to the end, I think…or at least hope…it will give me strength then too. And I think Wiman would say something similar.

Richard Rohr on Humility

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I quote Richard Rohr more than any contemporary spiritual leader. Once again I strongly recommend that you subscribe to his free daily blog as it is always very insightful and very encouraging. He says everything I could ever say and says it much better and much more succinctly.

In his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he noted, “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”

Rohr is very attuned to the pernicious presence of the ego in all spiritually-inclined people and is forthright about wrestling with his own ego daily. I think that his daily prayer for “one good humiliation a day” is his way of asking for his eyes to be opened daily to his own frailty and egotism. For, it is often very humiliating when this happens to someone, especially one who holds himself/herself forth as a “spiritual person.”

I do not think he is calling for us to deliberately go out and humiliate ourselves each day. He is merely asking us to pay attention, to be honest with ourselves, to practice “mindfulness” and be prepared to embrace the subjective experience of a sudden illumination about our own “flesh” being hard at work in our spiritual practice. This might be merely being taken aback, or given pause, or embarrassed, or yes it might be occasionally humiliating. It might even be as simple as a “Rick Perry moment” when we have to say “oops” to some obviously self-serving spiritual enterprise.

T. S. Eliot noted in The Four Quartets:

Oh the shame of motives late revealed,
And the awareness of things ill done
And done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Jacque Ellul critique of the church

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Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a French philosopher and law professor who wrote also extensively in the areas of religion and sociology. His most important book was The Technological Society in which he argued that the rise of industry had created a “technological society” which had more or less destroyed the soul of man. His thesis was that as mankind adjusted to machine age he did so with such success that he was basically nothing more than “The Hollow Men” noted by T. S. Eliot.

But my favorite of his books is an exegesis of the book of Jonah, entitled, The Judgment of Jonah. The preface to this book, by Geoffrey Bromiley, describes the book as a “Christological commentary.” I would describe it also as a hard-hitting indictment of Christianity and the church. He argues that faith has succumbed to the pressures of the age and has become merely a sociological phenomenon, that faith is basically the function of indoctrination. He argues that the truth of the Bible is for the needy, the spiritually needy, who do not have comfort from the accoutrements of civilization. For example, he notes, “God always takes seriously the cry of a man in distress, of suffering man, of man face to face with death. What, perhaps, he does not take so seriously is the cold, calculated, rational decision of the man who weighs the odds and condescendingly accepts the hypothesis of God.” He writes that mankind “has the pretension that he can solve his own problems” and consequently has invented technology, the state, society, money, and the state. And I would add “religion” to the list.

God responds not to our better feelings, but to the desperate cry of the man who has no other help but God. God responds just because man is in trouble and has nowhere to turn.

…when man has somewhere to turn he does not pray to God and God does not come to him. As long as man can invent hopes and methods, he naturally suffers from the pretension that he can solve his own problems.