Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Before He Makes Each One: a day of politics and poetry

The poet Ranier Maria Rilke has given me and generations of others the gift of his wisdom throughout our lives. He speaks anew to me in successive stages of my own life, as I return to the same lines, old and still mysterious friends, again and again. The shock of rediscovery is as profound as the shock of first dawn. I rediscover what I had not known. Images and feelings appear, leave lingering traces, reappear freshly in new light, mingle gracefully with other gifts.

I thought today was going to be a political day of renewed hope. It was that for a few hours, and the impact lingers. But I found a midday turning in response to the Rilke poem below, and I was intensely moved.

So here is a paragraph about my political morning, before a related but more poetic and spiritually focused afternoon and evening:

After early morning at my writing table I went to breakfast having plucked from the internet and eagerly read the text of the president's speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas. Barack Obama found again the voice that the mongrel wolves of Washington had muted but not destroyed. I suspect we'll discover that his canniness in these past three years has served us better than his critics on left and right have known. His words were clear, passionate, eloquent, and at least bear some measure of kinship to those of Theodore Roosevelt, his predecessor in Osawatomie a century ago. (President Obama may be seen and heard here. Timothy Egan offers a valuable and more critical perspective on Roosevelt and Obama here.)

What impact Obama's words will have we can't know. The times are still very dark, inequality continues to grow, plutocracy and war still reign, winter comes and the Occupy movement is at an unpredictable turning point, and the clarion call of a campaign for re-election has been heard.

_________________________________

Now to Rilke.

I'm not going to write about the poem that follows or Rilke's other work. Or the craft of Stephen Mitchell's translations, or the connections between politics and poetry. All in good time.

You will know or love or not, as you will, and may well know Rilke's gifts longer and better than I. The translation below is not Mitchell's but is nonetheless beautiful.

If you like, linger with the poem. You may then ease into its depths. Or it may carry you as if you stepped into a river.

I'll only note that some readers will need to draw upon their gift for metaphor, while others will see and hear, think and feel more immediately as strong a response as I felt and continue to feel. Those two alternatives are not mutually exclusive.

Before He Makes Each One

Before he makes each one
of us, God speaks.

Then, without speaking,
he takes each one 
out of the darkness.

And these are the cloudy
words God speaks
before each of us begins:

"You have been sent out
by your senses. Go
to the farthest edge
of desire, and give me
clothing: burn like a great
fire so that the stretched-out
shadows of the things
of the world cover
me completely.
Let everything happen
to you: beauty and terror.
You must just go--
no feeling is the farthest
you can go. Don't let
yourself be separated
from me. The country
called life is close.
By its seriousness,
you will know it.
Give me your hand."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke  ~

(Translated by Annie Boutelle, Metamorphoses Fall 2001)

The prodigal son - a thanksgiving toast

Thanksgiving evokes the theme of homecoming, return of the prodigal son. Rejoice, for he and she who were lost are found.

Rembrandt's vision is, for me, the most moving and profound of interpretations.

Look at the father's arms and hands, as expressive as his face. And the son's sandals worn to almost nothing, his head cradled upon his father's chest. Finally, the light upon them both. Jesus's parable — the last in a sequence of three stories about redemption in the Gospel of Luke — is a story of forgiveness, following an archytypal journey of a father's extravagent misjudgment, his younger son's longing, quest, loss, return and in this moment redemption. It is the father's prodigality that starts the ball rolling, the son's that carries it along, and their reunion, transformed, that brings it to conclusion.

This is meant to be a Thanksgiving toast. To offer such without mention of those who are genuinely without adequate shelter, food, health care and educational opportunity — the symbolic 99% —  would be uncharitable and cruel. The poor in these United States and elsewhere are invisible enough. We need not compound that absence of vision by ignoring them at Thanksgiving. As today's lead editorial in the New York Times says, "One in three Americans — 100 million people —  is either poor or perilously close to it." Nearly 50 million people are below the poverty line. Seventeen million of them are children.

As the Times concludes, "There is a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem....The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out." A dour but realistic note on which to end this Thanksgiving toast to all. Remember, it isn't the 1% who will inherit the earth. 

Facing change - a very short and circular story about a cow and a chicken

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us was good for the world. 

We have been wrong.

We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us.

And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

Wendell Berry

 

A wise friend of mine, who farms and keeps company with honeybees in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, reminded me of poet Wendell Berry's words. My friend also wrote and sent along a little story as companion to Berry's compelling thought. "When driving to the sanctuary," he wrote,

we pass a poultry farm, and every day we saw one single cow grazing on the hill. We could not avoid feeling pity for her being alone; cows are herd animals.

One day, to our surprise, we saw a chicken with her, and for the next weeks we kept seeing this same scene every day: cow grazing––chicken picking; cow walking––chicken walking behind; cow lying––chicken lying. It filled us with joy: the cow was not alone anymore.

What is going on, a chicken leaving her flock to hang around with a cow? Sure, she found plenty of delicious things to pick, but it was more than that. It is clear to us: in addition to our earthly climate, the human soul and nature in totality are changing.

 

Frederico Fellini's "La Strada"

Frederico Fellini's magnificent "La Strada" (The Road, 1954) was the first ever to receive the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in 1956. Its impact upon American audiences persuaded members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, normally focused on the produce of Hollywood, to recognize that fine films had long been made elsewhere in the world.

"La Strada" deeply moved me. Filmed in stark black and white, its rural Italian landscapes are spare and hard, suggesting poverty, age, ravage of war. The story and characters are simple and manifold, comedic and tragic, like those of a fairy tale.

Indeed, the word "fey" has been used to describe the brilliance of "La Strada's" central presence, Gelsomina. She is played by the Italian actress Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and muse. "Fey" means magical, fairy-like, strange, more literally and deeply, "fated to die." Gelsomina, a truly magical woman, does die, as do the film's two other principal characters, Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) and The Fool, touchingly portrayed by Richard Besehart. 

The story is simple and profound. A girl is sold by her impoverished mother to a crude traveling "strong man," entertainer and illusionist Zampanò. Gelsomina becomes Zampanò's assistant and companion, and as they travel by wonderful contraption — half wagon, half ancient motorcycle — from town to town, fair to fair, season to season, Gelsomina offers Zampanò a gift of true magic and love. She is a mythic presence of eros, a gift he is incapable of recognizing or reciprocating. 

The Fool, in this instance an aerialist, classical embodiment of humor, cleverness, tenderness and wisdom, recognizes Gelsomina as Zampanò cannot. But The Fool can only show the way. He himself, unlike those he serves, is powerless to effect transformation. He knows that gifts die if not recognized and passed on.

An Italian film critic wrote of this film, "how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always evident." 

"La Strada" is a beautiful embodiment of human frailty, longing, resilience and aching loss. Like the enduring stories of old, it may be viewed and understood on many levels, at once manifest and elusive.

 

A Levertov poem for friends on my 72nd birthday, with thanks to Joe Riley

WITNESS

 

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

 

~ Denise Levertov ~

 

(Selected Poems)

 

W.S. Merwin's "To the New Year"

Read at the conclusion of a memorial service in Tucson; posted here on Martin Luther King Day 2011

 

To the New Year

 

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

 

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberries and granite, photo by John R. Boettiger

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, economic, environmental.

Attention to such themes is typically expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckoning is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos than chronos. They are linear only in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said they are circular. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others -- ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly, john@reckonings.net. Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (I trust needless to say, your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

A Shabat walk through the image of Noah's raven

Sometimes I write back and forth to my son who is a rabbi. He knows I love the poetry of W.S. Merwin, and a few days ago he sent me Merwin's poem called "Noah's Raven." I awoke very early this Shabat morning, and thought of Raven.

Raven, you remember, is a scavenger. He collects and hides what is precious, as well as a lot of junk. There are many stories of Raven in native American traditions, but I decided to stick, in my walk through Google, to the associations to Noah's raven. Here is the circle of my Raven-like going and coming home (back to the ark):

Dear Joshua,

My early morning Shabat studies...

Noah's Raven
 
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.

 

                       - W.S. Merwin

I confess I forgot long ago the presence of Noah's raven, and I'm very happy that you introduce him to me through Merwin. Yes, ravens endure an ominous legacy, black carrion birds, Hitchcock creatures. The Biblical passage is one inviting commentary, isn't it. From a medieval Islamic scholar quoted in Wikipedia: "Noah spent five or six months aboard the Ark, at the end of which he sent out a raven. But the raven stopped to feast on carrion, and so Noah cursed it and sent out the dove, which has been known ever since as the friend of mankind." 

So the dove, white and pure as a bride waiting for her groom, gets all the credit. No sense that the raven has paved the way. He never made promises; his knowledge would not fit into theirs. There are no easy lessons; it is, if not always, still usually beyond them/us. 

From Genesis: ""And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the waters from upon the earth. And he sent out the dove from him to see whether the water had subsided from the face of the ground." (Genesis 8:6-8).  The key passage, "He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the land. 

"The Rashi, the preeminent Torah commentator, explains that initially, Noah was intent on sending the raven to search for dry land. However, the raven was hovering around the ark instead. Why did it refuse to go on the expedition? According to the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 108b), the raven refused to go because it was concerned for the preservation of its species. It challenged Noah along these lines: "I am hated because seven of the clean species were taken in the ark, while only two of the unclean (of which the raven is considered; see Leviticus 11:15.) were granted refuge. Yet you choose to send me out!" It reasoned that were harm to come to it during a reconnaissance flight, there would only be the female left of its kind.  from upon the earth." 

Midrash passages are wonderfully contradictory, but seem to settle on the raven as among the unclean and mostly cruel:  He "was prepared for another mission, during the days of Elijah the prophet. To reproach the people and their wicked King Ahab, Elijah decreed a drought upon the land, whereupon no rain fell. G-d instructs Elijah to journey to the desert: "It shall be that you will drink from the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to supply you with food there." Thereafter, ravens brought Elijah nourishment. (I Kings 17:4-6).

"This, then, is the meaning of the Torah’s statement that Noah’s raven "kept going and returning until the drying of the waters." The raven’s calling was ultimately fulfilled when the rains "dried up" during Elijah’s era."

At the end, that particular teaching is lovely, if a little less than full of reminders of the struggle: "The raven teaches us to be merciful, patient, and forgiving toward others. Even if they do wrong, we must love them, reach out to them, and be compassionate to them. Everybody is important. The raven reminds us of the famous saying of our sages (Ethics of Our Fathers 4:3): "Do not be scornful of any person, and do not be disdainful of any thing, for you have no person without his hour and you have no thing without its place."

Found near our little house in South Hadley, MA, perhaps once a desert - a fossil that came to be known as the raven's footmarks:

There's a lot about Raven violating the prohibition against procreation aboard the ark, and impregnating his wife....

"... many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Daniel, 12:4s

"Why should I return?" Yet he returns, again and again, like a bodhisattva. 

Love on this Shabat morning,

Dad

50th Reunion Book, Amherst College, 2010

In 500+ words, a summary of one's life, view of the world and the impact of Amherst:

The poet David Wagoner was 28 when, at his friend Theodore Roethke’s suggestion, he moved from his Indiana homeland to the Pacific Northwest. He was awestruck by the green luxuriance of life. “When I came over the Cascades and down into the coastal rainforest for the first time in the fall of 1954, it was a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.”

I didn’t travel as far – just a few miles down the Notch road, in fact. But I felt a similar new life in the offing at about the same age, when I resigned my faculty position at Amherst to join the intrepid little band just down the road in the apple orchards of South Amherst, preparing to give birth to Hampshire College.

Mapping those liminal or threshold times is one way I’ve imagined the character and consistency of my life. It serves in this instance to say something that must be true in a sense for all of us.  The four years from the fall of 1956 to the spring of 1960 were an extended coming-of-age experience, with attendant pains, pleasures, accomplishments and missings of the mark.

The first months at Amherst were mostly excruciating. I did my shame-ridden best to hide the fright, but my skills of hiding seemed – to me, at least – to have deserted me with all the rest. Everything felt stripped away but the soft underbelly. At Thanksgiving I told my mother I was going to join the Army; it had to be more forgiving of my deficiencies.

My mother thought not, and I returned to Amherst. A kind of competence began to take hold, and an interest in the wider world reawakened – especially at that time the world of politics, my Roosevelt family’s delight and pride, bread and butter of the dinner table. Alongside a few Amherst friends and memorable teachers – foremost, Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx – my real mentor was my grandmother, whose home became mine in those years. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin my undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I graduated with some measure of both.

For me, Amherst seemed – and seems still – effectively to have done what it promised, or at least that which the College most prized. I learned how to think more carefully and usefully, to apply discipline, practice, and the rules of evidence to the intellectual challenges I encountered, to find satisfaction in words that fit what I needed to describe and understand.  

God knows – and my mother, sister and girlfriends knew – I didn’t grow up. Emotionally I was as callow a youth at 21 as at I’d been at 17. For me at least, and I think for the Amherst culture I knew, maturity in that deeper sense was not among the liberal arts. I later sought, with middling success, to make it so in my designs for Hampshire College.                 

Speaking of God, while I learned something about the application and misapplication of imagination and metaphor in those years, I learned next to nothing about their essential applicability to spiritual life. Intuitively I knew otherwise, but I didn’t find my way until later to those who would reawaken that hunger, help me understand that religion was more than the blessing of a no longer required attendance at Chapel. Soul and psyche – the central re-pairing of my adult years of teaching and learning at Hampshire and after – hadn’t yet come into conscious focus.

We’re born yearning for companionship and community, and I’m still growing in their realization. My wife and I now live and work as members of a gifted community of healing in southern Norway - psychiatric hospital, research institute, community outreach program for couples and families, pastoral and professional retreat centers for clergy, physicians, psychologists and nurses.

This past March all of my immediate family – Leigh and I, four children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren – gathered on a Pacific Northwest shore, my birthplace, to celebrate Grandpa’s 70 years. My first great-grandchild - a girl, we already know - is expected at Christmas time. I worry a lot about the state of the earth; I’m very happy to anticipate sharing it with her.

Robert Bly's "In the Month of May"

Robert Bly's poem came to me today, over the transom, through the ether, at the right moment, and as I read and reread, resonance grew. It is a love poem, a layered weaving of season, spirit, the vivid life of an aging, unfinished, still changing soul waiting for - celebrating - the miraculous.

I find such tenderness in his last lines:

Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

In the Month of May

In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.

I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn't the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?

And why shouldn't Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.

                                - Robert Bly

A Wendell Berry poem, for contemplation

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Memento Mori

                                                          PERSONAL HISTORY

                                     MEMENTO MORI

                                   "The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

                                                                            - Henry James

Preface

It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978].  I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as possible into the realm of autobiography.

One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff, recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that they may know better a part of their own histories.

Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own, have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others, from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of him when they were young.

My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member.  Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.

[continued]

Sabbath 2 - Reflections on a Parable

The following reflections and retelling - reimagining - of a familiar story are drawn from one of a series of talks shared in the winter and spring of 2007 with staff and patients at Modum Bad, a psychiatric hospital, retreat center and learning community in Vikersund, Norway.

I discovered Modum Bad in 2005, and returned for a second extended time as a consultant in February 2007. Of course I've learned more than I've taught. My first impressions of Modum Bad, gathered after a first leisurely visit in 2005, are gathered in an informal essay on Modum Bad's website. I am revising and extending that essay for publication later in 2007, Modum Bad's 50th anniversary year -  in fact,  its 150th anniversary year, as it began as a healing spa in 1857. Modum Bad means The Baths at Modum, gathered around St. Olavs Kilde, St. Olav's Spring. My own retelling of Jesus's parable owes a great deal to the translation and commentary of Stephen Mitchell in his Gospel According to Jesus Christ (2001).

The story I retell here is the last and longest of three parables of Jesus recounted in Luke's gospel. The thread they share is that of losing and finding and rejoicing in the renewal or life-redeeming experience. It is a tale of critical turning in life's journey. The theme of turning – a cycle of loss, of tender, halting discovery, and of redemption – is a central one in the history of the human psyche and soul, in the generations that gave us birth, in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The movement is that from life to death to rebirth.

[continued]

                                                                            

A Brief Reflection on T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit
of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


Every day as I climb the stairs to our second floor I pass those lines framed on the wall. More often than not, used as I am to them, they register obliquely, with little consciousness. But I always know they are there. Less often, but sometimes, I stop and say them again, as prayer, breviary. The calligraphy in which they were written is sun- and time-faded now. The words and their plea will outlast us all.

They are the last eleven lines of T.S. Eliot's poem, "Ash Wednesday." Less widely celebrated and anthologized than his earlier and later work--especially "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and, incomparably, "The Four Quartets"--"Ash Wednesday" is a poem of midlife, both chronologically and spiritually. It was completed when the poet was 42 years old, three years after he was confirmed in the Church of England: his first major poem after that formal turning.

And "Ash Wednesday"—like and unlike its great successor “The Four Quartets”—is a poem of spiritual turning, purgatorial and penitential, as is the day, the changing season, the cyclical movement of its meditation: life, death, and rebirth. Turning (which I'll discuss elsewhere in Reckonings) is explicit in the poet's language, in the poem's structure, its circling, moving refrain.

It is liminal time, between time, dream time.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…

The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

….....


Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

The absence of hope is not foregone, but turns from loss, mourning, mimetic hunger for worldly things, turns slowly, with many a backward, suffering slip—is one "between birth and dying" or "between dying and birth" or both?—to sitting still, silent, listening, waiting for new life.

The poem begins,

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

The poem is full of repetition, cadence, circularity in its journey like that of Dante as he rises through the circles of Inferno and Purgatory. Near the end of the poem there is, of course, no resolution, no final synthesis. There is prayer. It is still

….the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Always dialogue, even in solitude. The yew-trees: aged, ageless, often planted in churchyards, associated with loss, grief and strength, an ancient symbol of the tree of life.

__________________________________

Turning III: Turning and Following

Prefatory note: In much of what I write below--in this post's continuation or "extended body"--I owe so much to my reading and re-reading of Stephen Mitchell's inspired reflections on Jesus's tale of the prodigal son (in his Jeffersonian Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Harper, 1993) that it's hard, in retrospect, to pick all his thinking, his examples and imagery, from my own. I hope I've given him sufficient credit in the text as well as here. In the interest of narrative continuity, I have chosen not to clutter that portion of the text with as many quotation marks as it technically deserves. The story at its heart belongs to him, to me, and to neither of us.

When I was eleven years old I had a paper route, a beast of a paper route. It was the kind of beast that had red, predatory eyes even in the soft dawn of morning. I was folding and carrying on my bike and heaving toward peoples’ front porches a free shopping news filled from front to back with ads. That paper made up in weight for what it lacked in content. It was as if half the world had something to sell, and had chosen this particular paper to convey the news, in bold print and big colored pictures, to the other half of the world.

The bale of papers left on the corner for me to distribute was the size of a bale that might have been left for an elephant who hadn’t eaten in a week. And my route seemed to cover roughly the United States west of the Mississippi: including both the Sierras and the Rockies, if you can imagine them with tract houses cheek by cheek.

In short, if it had occurred to me to put my situation into church language—which it actually did, if you can believe it of a boy raised in a minimally observant Episcopal household—I didn’t exactly feel that I was doing God’s work.

I happened to notice one morning when my rebelliousness was reaching an intolerable pitch, that the truck which dropped off my elephantine bale of papers did so beside a long, tall and dense evergreen hedge. I realized that those six feet of dense evergreen provided adequate cover, in a large number of places, for bales even as big as mine. I convinced myself that I was doing virtually everyone a favor by depositing the bales in the hedge, and conveniently forgot that I was continuing to be paid for my labors. My freedom lasted about two weeks before somebody missed his shopping news, and I had to pull every waterlogged bale out of the hedge, and return my ill-gotten wages. My mother let me know that I was headed down the slippery slope to a life of crime.

But it’s the other part of my solution to this paper route from the Underworld that I want more to describe. Before Satan snuck in to my heart and revealed to me the irresistible hedge—while I was still trudging my rounds—I began to talk with God. At least I assumed it was God, before I later reflected on how the whole misadventure concluded. These talks were not aloud. I was too shy for that. These were silent conversations in which I mostly put questions and waited for answers. I was old enough to realize that my active imagination may have been at work, so we agreed on a secret word that only He could speak with impunity. Everybody else who tried would be instantly fried to a crisp.

I have tried, but I don’t remember much of the content of those talks, of that listening for the voice of God, that search, on ground I suppose as likely as any, for His Kingdom. I don’t think the talks had anything to do with my paper route. They touched upon the subject of fathers, present and absent (my own had died only a few months before), on fear in the nighttime, on anger and what only later I came to understand as forgiveness. I remember that we spoke of loneliness, and the kind of companionship one might experience even when one thought oneself alone. We spoke more than a little about Jesus, I think partly because I was preoccupied with fathers and sons, and because some of the stories of Jesus’s life, and the stories he told to others, had begun to exercise their mysterious hold on me.

It’s been a long time—fifty-six years, in fact—since those talks, a lot of time for puzzlement, for disbelief, for interpretation—too much time for interpretation. I’ve come to think of much that I call interpretation as close kin to whatever it was that led me into that thicket of a hedge. I’ve never lost the love of asking questions, or listening for answers, or of Jesus’s stories.
Now that I think of it, fifty-six years isn’t very long. (It may seem longer to some of you than to others.) I can talk more, and more articulately, about my confusion now than I could then. My grammar is both better and worse. For example, when I was eleven I was sure than God was a noun; now I’m as often as not inclined to think of God as a verb, and the Kingdom of God as a path rather than a destination.

When Andrew and Peter first encountered Jesus, they asked him, “Rabbi, where are you going?”; and he answered, “Follow me.” That has always been for me one of the simplest, hardest and most moving exchanges in the Gospels. Andrew and Peter meant the question simply and literally enough. Jesus's response dramatically raised the stakes. There was no way to tell them where he was going.

There is another simple exchange: another touchingly straightforward question, and another answer that continues to echo long after it is spoken, maybe the essence of gospel, of the good news.

“....someone asked Jesus, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ [there’s the noun]
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the kingdom of God is within you.” [listen: there’s the verb]

Four Poems of the Journey

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

              -Mary Oliver

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

             - Stanley Kunitz

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

          - Adrienne Rich

No, no there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

 
- Wendell Berry

Thoughts on Abiding

I linger beside a familiar granite boulder and small juniper in a pasture. I am drawn to their simplicity, common juniper (even in Latin: Juniperus communis) and common granite, united in lasting companionship. They aren't rare. We will find them on many of our walks. They thrive everywhere in our landscapes. Even after suburbia has invaded and overrun,  a keen and patient eye can see evidence of pastures, old fields, rocky slopes. There's strength in these two fellow creatures, a sense of lasting through whatever elements they meet. The granite boulder isn't especially dramatic or remarkable, but it was too large for the farmer to move aside when he cleared the pasture. So it was left, perhaps just where a receding glacier dropped it ten thousand years ago. The juniper, of course, came later, but its gnarled tenaciousness—like its cousin cypresses on the California coast—makes for fitting fellowship. These two rough textured green gray souls live together in satisfying complementarity. One can't imagine them losing each other.

The Parable of the Mountain

I have been moved over the years by the writing of John S. Dunne, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame. In his many books (perhaps most richly in The Way of All the Earth), Dunne has been engaged in what he has called "passing over" and "coming back," passing over into the lives, the spiritual stories and traditions, of others, and then coming back again, with new insight, into one's own. The spirit of such journeying is that of pilgrimage, and, less obviously, that of Sabbath. For it is in the natural rhythms of movement and rest, speech and silence, action and contemplation, that one finds (and gives) the greatest nourishment. Dunne writes of "the homing spirit," of his own pilgrimage: "I realized I had to find a point of rest in myself where I could rest in God, where God dwells in me, and let that be my point of origin and of return. I had to pass over to God in others and come back again to God in myself."

In the following parable, Dunne is contemplating a related pair of journeys, ours toward God and God's toward us. In doing so, he helps us to understand the inescapability and the holiness of the mundane world.

Man, let us say, is climbing a mountain. At the top of the mountain, he thinks, is God. Down in the valley are the cares and concerns of human life, all the troubles of love and war. By climbing the mountain and reaching the top, man hopes to escape from all these miseries. God, on the other hand, is coming down the mountain, let us say, his desire being to plunge himself into the very things that man wishes to escape. Man's desire is to be God, God's is to be man. God and man pass one another going in opposite directions. When man reaches the top of the mountain he is going to find nothing. God is not there. Let us suppose that man does reach the top and does make this discovery. Or suppose that that he passes God on the way, or finds God's tracks leading downwards, or hears a rumor that God is descending the mountain. One way or another, man learns that climbing was a mistake and that what he seeks is to be found only by going down into the valley. He turns around, therefore, and starts going down the mountain. He sets his face towards love and war, where before he had turned his back upon them.

Martin Buber, in a small gem of a book called The Way of Man, writes in a complementary vein of the teachings of the Baal-Shem Tov, legendary founder of the 18th century Hasidic movement in Eastern European Jewry. The Baal-Shem Tov taught about "the cares and concerns of human life" that

...no encounter with a being or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden significance. The people we live with or meet with, the animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence. It is my conviction that this doctrine is essentially true. The highest culture of the soul remains basically arid and barren unless, day by day, waters of life pour forth into the soul from those little encounters to which we give their due; the most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness until it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, yet near, being.