Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberry ledges, photo by John R. Boettiger (2001)

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

Attention to such themes is often 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.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over about 18 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location.

Now in 2019 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when I was living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My crafts or practices are still words and images, poetry and story, fiction, memoir, biography and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (I confess the last three are now more memory than current activity, but in the last seven years I'm grateful to have added meditation.)

My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, Notto Thelle, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, David Whyte, Wendell Berry, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul,  my eight grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

The more the years, the more I feel blessed.

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 reckonings 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 poet 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 (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time, when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. 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; I'll try to understand and respond. 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. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

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* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'" 

St. Patrick's eve celebration of Celtic spirituality

I spoke briefly to a standing-room-only auditorium last evening as we celebrated St. Patrick's Day a few hours early.

I co-lead (with Carol Saysette and George Wilson) a large seminar of Redwoods folks who are exploring the many dimensions of the Celtic spiritual tradition. I wanted to give those assembled some context about our seminar, which sponsored last evening's wonderful music, song and dance:

St. Patrick’s Eve, March 16, 2019.

"I wrote these brief remarks this afternoon. I hope they evoke some still, small voice in you, as they did and do in me.

"The seeds of this evening are in the hardy band of forest folk, our ‘red-woods-hood’ we call Celtic Spirituality, and earlier in a three-day retreat with John Patrick Newell. I speak of us. We are always in motion and always still, always constant and always changing. The mysteries of this evening, the music, song, dance and drama, the poetry and stories we remember and have forgotten but can recall, and those for which we can as yet only listen. Our celebration of Patrick, the ur-saint if you will, of Celtic spirituality, the weave of the ancient traditions, the druids in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the gifts we know and are still learning and as yet barely glimpse or intuit from the traditions, the stories and the practices—I think especially the practices—of Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

"All that is part of our inheritance, our foremothers and forefathers, our birth, life, death and rebirth, the legacies we’ve left, still leave, have yet to leave, will never finally leave, for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… and they in turn for us and for their children. At our Celtic heart is the earth, the precarious, precious, terribly endangered earth, and our fellow sentient beings, that sustain us as we awaken to them and still destroy them, so often before we even know them, much less their place in the family of life.

"I’m grateful for—and only a little embarrassed by—the number of Johns in our Celtic heritage and in the voices to which we listen: There is John the Evangelist also known as John the Beloved, who listened to the heartbeat of God. We’ve had the companionship of John Patrick Newell and John O’Donohue. Those to whom we—our band of Celtic folks here at The Redwoods—return again and again, growing, deepening our practices, returning, reconnecting, following an invitation. In Newell’s words, 'The invitation is to recover an inner stance of listening that will equip us to move forward into new beginnings we may not yet even be able to imagine. This is my prayer,' John Patrick said to us—'that we may grow in such awareness and commitment. Together they—and we—hold the promise of rebirth.'

"Our spirit is one of pilgrimage, with Patrick and Columba, Brigid and Brendan, and in the green shamrock, the walking stick, the living tree, the bell. Patrick described a vision he had: 'I saw a man [or was it a woman?] coming, as it were from Ireland. He [or she] carried many letters, and gave me one. I read the heading: ‘The voice of the Irish.’ As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.’ So he did; so he does this evening. Welcome, dear brother Patrick."

 

The symbolism of the Celtic cross: heart for love, two hands for friendship, crown for loyalty.

 

 

Individuation, C.G. Jung, and W.H. Auden's poem, "The More Loving One"

I am grateful in manifold ways for C.G. Jung's wonderful enlargement of my chosen field of psychology. That gratitude had its fortuitous, unsought birth in the first of my many years as an analysand, a patient in psychotherapy. The first of my two Jungian therapists was Edward F. Edinger, whose office in those years was on Central Park West in New York City. I was young, in my 20s, newly married, a graduate student of political science at Columbia University.

My understanding of psychology, particularly of the dynamics of human development in its social, historical, and cultural context, which would become the calling of a lifetime of practice, had hardly begun to emerge, so it appeared wholly accidental that, in my search for a therapist, a friend urged me to seek out Dr. Edinger, a psychiatrist and analytical psychologist who was prominent among what I came later to understand as the second generation of American students of C.G. Jung.

Our weekly sessions together over the better part of three years were revelatory and transformative, even if I began them imagining myself as the student I remained. At first, I would characteristically arrive early, sit for a half-hour or so on the greensward of Central Park, consciously preparing myself for what I anticipated as kin to an hour with one of my professors at Columbia. In fact, I was beginning, with Dr. Edinger, a lifelong journey of absorption in a deeply meaningful process of what Jung called individuation, the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, with central attention to human relations, family dynamics across generations, and the central integrative function of dreams. For a thoughtful interview with Edward Edinger, read here in Psychology Today.

I recall that early work now, a full half-century later, as I contemplate a remarkable short poem by W.H. Auden called "The More Loving One." Auden's poem was drawn to my attention today in reading the current issue of Maria Popova's online journal, Brain Pickings. Listen to the poem as read on Brain Pickings or SoundCloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin. The image that comes to mind in reading this particular Auden poem is the night sky, particularly when we are blessed with clarity of vision, so the stars are not obscured by clouds or by a plethora of more earthly and proximate lights. Here is Auden's beautiful, almost whimsical poem.

 

THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 

Once more, Wendell Berry

Over the years in Reckonings, more times than I can recall, I have drawn upon the wisdom of Wendell Berry, expressed with wonderful depth and variety in his many novels, essays, and perhaps most essentially, his poetry, in which his contemplative character emerges with dialogical richness. I say dialogical in part because all fine writing provokes and inspires diverse response from readers' experience, but more specifically because Berry is a true master of dialogue, of meaningful conversation. In his poems that mastery is especially suggestive.  For example, in any of his Sabbath poems I find invitation and companionship. Yesterday, for example, I had good reason to remember and employ these lines as a kind of lifeboat. Deep thanks to a dear friend, Andrea, for reminding me of them.

 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

       --Wendell Berry

 

Jane Kenyon's advice to writers

I find myself returning to the poetry and poetic prose of Jane Kenyon as I contemplate a fresh piece of writing unlike much of what I have done earlier. Maria Popova reminded me in a current issue of her blog, Brain Pickings, of Kenyon’s wise advice to writers:

 

“Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk.”

Figuring, by Maria Popova

Maria Popova, editor and author of a wonderfully capacious and thoughtful online journal called Brain Pickings, has just published a remarkable book, Figuring. Of the book, she writes,

"It only took twelve years of Brain Pickings and the most beautiful, difficult, disorienting experience of my personal life. Figuring explores the complexities, varieties, and contradictions of love, and the human search for truth, meaning, and transcendence, through the interwoven lives of several historical figures across four centuries."

 

Here is Maria Popova's prelude to Figuring:

 

 

"All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality — it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

"How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our 'inescapable network of mutuality,' what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that 'every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.'

"One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision — that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution — pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no — it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation in magic and witchcraft. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle.

"Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider — and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

"We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

"Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry — intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

"There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

"So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections — between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands."

 

Wild and Domestic - by Wendell Berrry (Orion)

 

In thirty-three short points, Wendell Berry says a great deal about the meaning of wildness, wilderness and domestication, assuming that the reader pauses and considers after each point. See if you're up to that discipline. Thanks to Orion.

 

Wild and Domestic

 

by Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I. Gary Snyder said that we know our minds are wild because of the difficulty of making ourselves think what we think we ought to think.

II. That is the fundamental sense of “wild” or of “wilderness”: undomesticated, unrestrained, out of control, disorderly.

III. There are two ways to value this, as exemplified by the sense of “wild party”: from the point of view of the participants and that of the neighbors.

IV. To our people, as pioneers, “the wilderness” looked disorderly, undomestic, out of control.

V. According to that judgment, it needed to be brought under control, put in order by domestication.

VI. But our word “domestic” comes from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home.” To domesticate a place is to make a home of it. To be domesticated is to be at home.

VII. It is a sort of betrayal, then, that our version of domestication has imposed ruination, not only upon “wilderness,” as we are inclined to think, but upon the natural or given world, the basis of our economy, our health, in short our existence.

VIII. It was hardly surprising that, as our dominant economy battered and plundered “the wilderness,” some would undertake to save it in parks and wilderness preserves.

IX. But this began a theoretical, and false, division of the world and our minds. Some of the world, though never enough, would be preserved as wilderness, whereas much the greater part would be abandoned to the violences of our “domestic” so-called economy. We would love the wilderness and plunder or ignore the economic landscapes of food production and forestry, not to mention mining.

X. But if we were really to pay attention to what we’ve been calling “wilderness” or “the wild,” whether in a national park or on a rewooded Kentucky hillside, we would learn something of the most vital and urgent importance: they are not, properly speaking, wild.

XI. Our overdone appreciation of wildness and wilderness has involved a little-noticed depreciation of true domesticity, which is to say homemaking, homelife, and home economy.

XII. With only a little self-knowledge and a little sitting still and looking, the conventional perspective of wild and domestic will be reversed: we, the industrial consumers of the world, are the wild ones, unrestrained and out of control, self-excluded from the world’s natural homemaking and living at home.

XIII. To that world we strangers can come home only by obeying both Nature’s laws and the specifically human laws adding up to self-restraint and love for neighbors.

XIV. I have in mind now what Robert E. Lee, from the far side of defeat and humiliation, said to a mother who asked for his blessing on her son: “Teach him he must deny himself.”

XV. Defeat and humiliation are our inescapable subjects now. We are defeating ourselves and our land by economic violence, normative homelessness, all the modes and devices of estrangement and divorce.

XVI. The so-called wilderness, from which we purposely exclude our workaday lives, is in fact a place of domestic order. It is inhabited, still, mainly by diverse communities of locally adapted creatures living, to an extent always limited, in competition with one another, but within a larger, ultimately mysterious order of interdependence and even cooperation.

XVII. The wildest creatures to be found in any forest, if not surface miners and industrial loggers, are the industrial vacationers with their cars, cameras, computers, high-tech camping gear, and other disturbers of domestic tranquility and distracters of attention.

XVIII. The “wilderness vacation” is thus a wild product of a wild industry and is a sort of wild party. One “escapes” to the “wilderness,” leaving one’s home vacant, to what purpose? Not, apparently, to study the settled domesticity of Nature’s homelands and households, and thus to make one’s home less a place needing to be escaped from.

XIX. And what of the world in which and from which we live our “domestic” lives and “make our living”? Well, I can think of no wilder weeds than corn and soybeans as they presently are grown. The seeds, the poisons, the gigantic machines and their fuel, all come from our wildest industries to our wildest fields. The fields which, remember, are the very substance of our country and the world are eroded, toxic deserts, drained by waterways similarly degraded and toxic. Cropped continuously, the fields lie naked to the sky all winter, without the protection of a cover crop.

XX. Crops of soybeans and corn are reliably profitable to the corporate suppliers of “purchased inputs,” but they are notoriously unreliable as sources of income to farmers. Because production is unlimited, there is an ever-present threat of surpluses, which can depress prices below the cost of production.

XXI. By ignorance, indifference, or a principled cynicism, both fields and farmers are sacrificed to the so-called free market. Thus our “domestic” crops become domicidal: homewreckers, destroyers of ecosystems, farms, farm families, rural communities, and ultimately, by the same dreadful logic of limitless consumption, also of urban communities.

XXII. Our lives now depend almost exclusively upon two kinds of mining: fast mining for fuels and ores; and agricultural mining, mostly by annual grains, which is comparatively slow, but much too fast. The rule in both is to take without limit and to give back nothing. We are treating the fertility of our croplands, not as the forever-renewable resource it in fact is, but as an extractable ore, the only limit being eventual exhaustion.

XXIII. This is the business of America, which has been and is fairly directly the pillage and ruin of both the natural world and its human communities, except of course for a few reserved plots of “wilderness.”

XXIV. The ruling assumption of both conservationists and political progressives appears to be that we will use our big brains and technological cleverness to bring about “clean” and “green” innovations, until we all can speed away on our wilderness vacations with our consciences clear.

XXV. This fails, typically, to see that our vehicles and our uses of them are as damaging as their bad fuels. The talk is all of limits on pollution, but not of the extravagance that is the cause of pollution and of all other damages. If we had an unlimited supply of “clean energy,” we would destroy the world by driving on it.

XXVI. The only antidote would have to be thrift in our use of all the quantitively limited resources of the world. Thrift, unfashionable as it now is, is yet apparently an inescapable law, both natural and traditionally human. Thrift requires attention to carrying capacity, land maintenance, the character of good work, and sustainable rates of use.

XXVII. Thrift would require not only the most careful husbandry of the world’s renewable resources, but also rationing of its exhaustible fuels and ores in accordance with their limited quantities and our actual needs. The test of the sincerity of conservationists should be their willingness to limit consumption.

XXVIII. By our habits of exploitation, our limitless consumption, and our version of conservation, about equally, we withhold our attention from the laws of Nature, the laws of human neighborhood, and the always vulnerable health and wholeness of the living world — the things to which our attention has most urgently been called by our best teachers.

XXIX. I don’t like or trust our obsessive talking of the future, but it is obvious that attention finally will have to be paid. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, our economy of limitless consumption will collide with the immutable limits of the given world.

XXX. And then, as some foresters, farmers, and ranchers already are doing, we will have to submit ourselves as students to Nature in her innumerable local incarnations, asking her how we humans, the most singular and the strangest of her children, can live as good neighbors to all of our neighbors.

XXXI. I now need to say plainly that I am not opposed to what is called “wilderness preservation,” which is necessary to the health of the natural world, of human nature, and of human livelihood. I wish there might be patches of “wilderness preservation” on every farm and in every working forest or woodland. The setting aside of such privileged places ought to be recognized as essential to the practice of good land use, and to the good health of land-using economies.

XXXII. What I am opposing is the language, by now utterly trite and thoughtless, by which conservationists prefer the parks and “wilderness areas” over the rest of the country, to which they consign the servitude, excess, and violence of our continuing version of domesticity, which is to say our misnamed economy.

XXXIII. Thus they falsely and impossibly consign Nature to the “wilderness areas,” forgetting that all the world is hers. By so confining her, if only in their thoughts, they imply, permit, and even require the uproar, waste, and ugliness of their domestic lives, which they need to vacate every year to spend a few days in scenes of “wild” quietude and beauty. O

 

Wendell Berry lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. An essayist, novelist, and poet, he is the author of more than thirty books. Berry has received numerous awards, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the John Hay Award, the Lyndhurst Prize, and the Aiken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review. His books include the classic The Unsettling of America, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.

 

Once more Mary Oliver

 

“The end of life has its own nature also worth our attention.”

—Mary Oliver

 

Mary Oliver rarely granted interviews. The richest exception was a 2015 interview with Krista Tippett, during which the topic of death arose. She recited a poem that I would like to reprint here. 

"About an hour into our interview with Mary Oliver, the poet discusses what she calls 'the cancer visit.' In 2012 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and said that death had 'left his calling card.' She was treated and was given 'a clean bill of health.'"

"In her collection Blue Horses, 'The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac' is a four-part poem that recalls the shadowy underworld of loss and survival. And yet, grief is coupled with a hopefulness. The poem is petitionary, asking of us to make what we can of the time we have left."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac

by Mary Oliver

1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

2.

The question is,
what will it be like
after the last day?
Will I float
into the sky
or will I fray
within the earth or a river—
remembering nothing?
How desperate I would be
if I couldn’t remember
the sun rising, if I couldn’t
remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t
even remember, beloved,
your beloved name.

3.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

4.

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?

 

 

The poems of Mary Oliver are prayers that anyone can pray. They are spacious and simple, expansive and ordinary. They don’t require us to believe in anything in particular, but they do ask us to pay attention to that fleeting and particular space of a moment.

When asked about the spiritual life of her childhood, Mary Oliver told Krista Tippett:

“Well, I would define it now very differently from when I was a child. I was sent to Sunday School, as many kids are. And then I had trouble with the Resurrection. So I would not join the church. But I was still probably more interested than many of the kids who did enter into the church. It’s been one of the most important interests of my life. And continues to be."

"And it doesn’t have to be Christianity, or Islam. I’m very much taken with the poet Rumi. Who is a Muslim, a Sufi poet. I read him every day. I have no answers, but I have some suggestions. I know that a life is much richer with a spiritual part to it."

Oliver has said that when she talks about prayer she’s thinking of that oft-quoted line of Rumi’s: “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Another poem of Mary Oliver will bring this entry to a close:

 

I Happened to Be Standing

by Mary Oliver

 

I don't know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can't really
call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that's their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don't know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don't. That's your business.
But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be
if it isn't a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

 

Mary Oliver: "When Death Comes"

If too many critics were not kind to Mary Oliver, she was probably the best read and most admired poet in America. On the day after she has left us, perhaps this is the poem to offer. May her death have been as she wished in this poem. I can testify confidently that she did not "end up simply having visited this world."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Death Comes

 

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

--Mary Oliver

 

 

David Whyte

“Your great mistake is

to act the drama as if you

were alone.”

 

       —  David Whyte

 

In no small measure because of their shared devotion to the Irish philosopher and writer John O’Donohue (a devotion that captures me as well), I am drawn toward these excerpts from a conversation between Krista Tippett and the poet and philosopher David Whyte, on Tippett’s truly marvelous program called “On Being.” This episode was recorded in 2016 and replayed in December 2018 (https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality-dec2018/).

In that conversation, David Whyte said of the poem below, “This poem is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind myself what’s first order. We have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze or the ground beneath our feet. This is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again.

 

 

 

 

Everything is Waiting for You

 by David Whyte

 

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

There is a second poem that David Whyte draws from memory and recites during his conversation with Krista Tippett, a  beautiful poem called “Everything is Waiting for You.” Just before he recites it, Whyte says,  

“I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved. So one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death of the periphery, the outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your personality and where you think you’ve been building who you are, starts to atomize and fall apart. It’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off or the television or not look at our gadget — is that giving over to something that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with and lead to your demise. The intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading toward your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get corroborated very much in our everyday outer world.”

 

Working Together

by David Whyte

 

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

 

The Spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt

This is a somewhat longer talk I first gave as the keynote address for a conference at The University of California at Berkeley on the subject of Women and The New Deal, and then, in a somewhat revised form, at The Redwoods in Mill Valley, California. Readers will see a little repetition of phrases and anecdotes included in the already posted talk on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was shortform, if you will. This is longform.

 

The Spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt

John Roosevelt Boettiger
Thursday, January 3, 2019

I’m inclined to identify my grandmother as among those William James called the “twice-born,” those who have experienced a renewal—a personal transformation, after enduring trauma and loss that could have buried the gift of a loving life but decidedly did not. In fact, the rebirthing that followed her trauma and loss drew her into an adulthood that nourished us all and led her to be one of the most well-known women of the 20th century. She was a great gift to me, and to so many others.

Like her other grandchildren, I knew my grandmother as Grandmère. (Thanks to her early caretakers, she was bilingual since childhood.) In my teens and 20s I often lived and traveled with her. We said goodbye the day before she died in November 1962. Eleanor Roosevelt was not only my beloved grandmother, but my first and best mentor. Her values did more to shape my own than those of any other person. I’m deeply grateful for her, for our time together.

She was a loving grandmother in my early years. She held my mother Anna’s hand when I was born. She joined us for many visits to our home on Mercer Island in Lake Washington, near Seattle. When my father—also John Boettiger—left for combat in World War II, I knew her when my mother and I—responding to my grandfather’s call—came east to live in the White House for the duration of the war.

When I think of the essence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit, the word that first comes to mind is a plain one. Its value is that it’s the word she used most commonly to describe herself and her care for others’ lives. Most of all she wanted to be useful.

When using that simple word to assess herself and her service on others’ behalf, she held herself to a high bar, and served those she loved, those for whom she worked untiringly in the wider world—the poor, those (in her husband’s words) “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” those who suffered from racism and imprisonment, even death by lynching, as well as ordinary folks in search of a viable, meaningful life—she worked for all of those, with an energy that exhausted and inspired others of us who were a lot younger than she.

I remember words spoken in eulogy about her by one of those she knew and admired as he knew and admired her: Adlai Stevenson. As our ambassador to the United Nations he spoke to the General Assembly two days after she died and a few days later at a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “Yesterday,” Stevenson told the General Assembly, “I said that I had lost more than a friend —I had lost an inspiration: for she would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world. My country mourns; and I know that all in this Assembly mourn with us.”

The United Nations itself, Stevenson added, “is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last 15 years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—as he said, “ideals that made her, only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always, was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, Stevenson said, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

I remember, too, a serendipitous occasion in 1958, when I was living with her at Val-Kill, her home in Hyde Park, browsing in her library. I came across a biography entitled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics. Opening it, I found an inscription: “To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience,” (signed ) Adlai Stevenson.

One of a few aspects of my grandmother’s character inadequately recognized by her biographers was her sense of humor. She comes across in too many accounts as knowing and wise but sober. No one who heard her wonderful narration of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” would believe that. Nor anyone who sat around the table at a rambunctious family dinner at her home. She always led the toasts, the first being “To the president of the United States” to which she often enough added, “It’s to the office we raise our glasses, not necessarily to the present incumbent.”

In order to deepen my account of Grandmère’s spirit, I need to share with you a particular story that cuts close to home for me. My father returned from the war with battle fatigue, what we now know as PTSD, compounding a lifetime of susceptibility to depression. Despite my mother’s entreaties, he would not seek treatment. (In those days there was little effective treatment to be had). We had moved to the desert outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, where my parents were determined to sink all their resources into a brave but ill-starred effort to establish a liberal Democratic daily newspaper, The Arizona Times, which came, alas all too briefly, to be.

In all senses of the term—financial, marital, psychological—the costs were too high. My parents’ marriage broke under the stress. My mother Anna’s greater resilience served her well, literally re-grounding us in Los Angeles. My father hadn’t her inner resourcefulness. He struggled with his pain for two years without finding a way through it, and in despair he took his own life. He was fifty. I was eleven.

That is background. Now the foreground. I lived with my grandmother on vacations during my undergraduate years at Amherst College. One day I’d drafted a paper about the United Nations. Knowing her deep knowledge of the UN, before departing for work that morning I gave her the draft, asking her, if she had time, to take a look at it and let me know her thoughts when I returned home that evening.

It wasn’t until 1 or 2 in the morning that I returned home. I expected to find her asleep. But she was in her study, lit only by a gooseneck lamp over her desk and a low fire in the grate. She was signing and adding brief handwritten notes to letters she had dictated earlier in the day, and listening to Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I asked her if she’d had time to read my draft, and her reply touched a deep and tender place in me that she had the remarkable insight and love to understand. She said, “I did, and what struck me most was how your writing is like that of your father.” I didn’t know how to reply. No one had spoken to me about him in the eight years since his death.

How could she possibly know—I hardly did myself—how my hunger for him remained. So she filled my silence. “Come sit by the fire with me and I’ll tell you about him”: how much she had loved him, admired his writing, how deeply she wished she could have done more to save my parents’ marriage and prevent his suicide.

I realized later that Grandmère and I had experienced, at the same age—she just before she was ten, I at eleven—the loss of a treasured, anguished,
self-destructive father.

Her mother, though, was something else, if hardly more accessible. She remembered Anna Hall Roosevelt as extraordinarily beautiful, but reserved,
stern, lacking empathy and understanding, minimal in performing the tasks of mothering, disappointed in her daughter’s shyness and solemnity. “I can remember standing in the door,” Grandmère wrote, “very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden—and I can see the look in [my mother’s] eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said: ‘Come in Granny.’ If a visitor was there she might turn and say: ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her Granny. I wanted to sink through the floor in shame…” Anna Hall died of diphtheria at age 29 when her daughter Eleanor was eight.

Given her childhood—her father Elliott’s alcoholism, his addiction to opium, many long absences from home in fruitless searches for cure, and his own semi-suicidal death at age 34; given her mother’s disregard; and the strictures imposed by her stern grandmother Hall, to whom she was entrusted after her mother’s death, it’s not surprising that mothering did not come easily to Eleanor Roosevelt, especially when her children were young. She felt anxious responsibility: helplessness, dependency. She wrote later, “I do not think that I am a natural born mother… If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.”

I think the point I want most to convey is that given those emotional absences and losses of Grandmère’s childhood, it’s all the more remarkable that she developed such a vivid capacity for sustained, close love and friendship as she grew through her adult life. I think of her deep friendships with Lorena Hickock, whom we all knew as “Hick”; with Joe Lash, who would become her first biographer; and later with her physician and confidant David Gurewitsch, as well as her many longtime friends like Esther Lape, Molly Dewson, Isabella Greenway, Justine Wise Polier, Lady Reading in England.

I won’t try to summarize this evening the most important and complex relationship in her adult life, with her husband Franklin, but there’s no doubt that it was a profound and knowing if sometimes stressful alliance.

Why stressful? Well, she was a compassionate and canny political and social activist. She understood him, supported him, sought his support, and knew she wasn’t burdened with the responsibilities and limits of the presidency. They shared the same humane liberal vision for the country and the world. If she sometimes provoked impatience (“Dear God,” [my grandfather is said to have said] “make Eleanor slow down.”), she always consulted him, and often enough responded to his requests and needs in ways he could not or would not. I think of her brilliant address to the 1940 Democratic party convention in Chicago, and her strong support for the nascent civil rights movement. There was a basket in his bedroom reserved for appeals and information from her, a basket that was seldom empty. On balance, I’d say that she, more than any other of his close advisors, enriched his conduct of the presidency.
____________________

Having spoken of the absences of her childhood, I want to circle back for a moment to the gifts of those early years that nourished her growth into the woman she became. However frequent and long her father’s absences, their love for each other was real, and fueled by her imagination. His presences, however infrequent and undependable, stayed in her heart.

On another occasion, reflecting upon her childhood, she offered a revealing comment about what she felt a strength of her adult years:
“Thanks to my childhood, I was very disciplined by the time I grew up. I remember the method by which a nurse taught me to sew, when I was only six. After I had darned a sock, she would take the scissors and cut out all I had done, telling me to try again. This was very discouraging, but it was good training…. When people have asked how I was able to get through some of the very bad periods in my later life, I have been able to tell them honestly that because of all this early discipline I inevitably grew into a really tough person.”

“A really tough person.” It was true in the sense that she intended: able to withstand suffering, hardship or difficulty; strong, tenacious, responding vigorously to challenges. Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote of it truly, “For Roosevelt, being a lady and being tough was no contradiction in terms, and her explicit fusing of the two turned older understandings inside out.”

Then, for three years, there was Allenswood, probably the greatest early gift to her growth into the woman she became. When she was turning fifteen, Grandmother Hall sent her to an English boarding school headed by a remarkable Frenchwoman, Marie Souvestre. Her time at Allenswood, and particularly her vivid relationship with Marie Souvestre, nourished a vitality and independence of mind, an inclination to know and speak the truth, and a new confidence in relationships with her peers. Most notably, Souvestre also stimulated her social and political consciousness, reinforcing the central guiding principle with which I began: to be useful to others.

I think that’s the best way to understand the thoughtful recollection of her friend Isabella Greenway, who wrote: “Even at that age life had, through her orphanage, touched her and made its mark in a certain aloofness from the careless ways of youth. The world had come to her as a field of responsibility rather than as a playground.”

Finally, there is a second important element in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and spirit that has too often been overlooked by her biographers. I mean her Christian faith and her Christian practice. It may have been the only subject on which she and Mlle. Souvestre disagreed. In a conversation with her friend William Turner Levy about Souvestre, my grandmother said, “She simply refused to acknowledge that she was following standards she hadn’t invented. She was following love, as we all must, and that is to follow God.”

She abandoned the severe religiosity of her grandmother Hall, but throughout her whole life she kept her habits of regular evening prayer at her bedside, and of church attendance. In one of her books, The Moral Basis of Democracy, she wrote, “We do not begin to approach a solution of our problems until we acknowledge the fact that they are spiritual. Even more than other forms of government, she added, democracy requires “a spiritual, moral awakening…We may belong to any religion or none, but we must acknowledge that the life of Christ was based on principles which are necessary to the development of a democratic state.”

She was distressed that many Americans [these are her words] “who call themselves Catholic, Protestant or Jew, behave as though religion were something shut up in one compartment of their lives. It seems to have no effect on their relationship to their surroundings and activities.” When I was living with her in Hyde Park, I remember often driving her to St. James Episcopal Church, at first, I confess, because no one who was visiting her was interested in going, and she was sometimes, let’s say, an inattentive driver.

I was always moved that she kept by her bedside at Val-Kill a framed copy of a prayer attributed to St. Francis that says a great deal about her spirit. Listen to the choice in the pairs of words, for they describe the character and radiance of her spiritual practice and its centrality in her private and public life:

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is discord, union;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Grandmère has been gone now for more than half a century. I’m more deeply knowing and grateful today than I was as a teenager for her presence in my life. I have in my home a small replica of a statue by the sculptor Penelope Jencks, a lovely statue and likeness whose life-size original stands on the southern tip of Riverside Park at 72nd Street in New York City. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll see it, linger with it a while. I have a photo of that statue that I trust fits the theme of this evening. A couple of years ago, some enterprising soul—a woman, I know—climbed the statue and added a pink knitted cap. She would have been very pleased and would have joined in your laughter.

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I gave this talk to the United Nations Association of San Francisco on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2018.

 

Remembering Eleanor Roosevelt
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

John Roosevelt Boettiger
San Francisco, December 10, 2018

 

Good afternoon. Thank you for the privilege of talking with you about a subject that is simultaneously very dear to my heart and also a little daunting. That’s always been so, as long as I can remember, not only on special occasions like today’s celebration. Junior high and high school, college and graduate school years; whenever. Anticipating a visit from my grandmother subtly changed the normal emotional tones of my family. We were excited but—what? — a bit less relaxed? a tad anxious? She was “Mummy” to my mother, “Mother” or “LL” to my father (the initials stood for “Lovely Lady,” dreamed up by a small group of admiring newspaper reporters, including my father, well before my parents had met), and she was “Grandmère” to us kids, my sister, my brother and me. But we all knew that she was also Eleanor Roosevelt. Thus the frisson, the small undercurrent of anxiety, perhaps that she would hold us as she held herself, to a high bar….Thankfully that frisson dissipated with the hugs of greeting.

My grandmother has been gone now for over half a century. I’m more deeply knowing and just as grateful today as I was as a child for her presence in my life. I lived and traveled with her in the still formative years of my late teens and early twenties. She was my loving, compassionate and indefatigable Grandmère. She was bilingual virtually from her first words. She was Grandmère to my sister and brother when she held my mother’s hand during my birth in March 1939. About 20 years later she and I looked at each other across the boardroom table of the American Association for the United Nations in New York. Time and again over those years she taught me, not so much with words as by example, her devotion to peace, reconciliation and love, in our homes, with our families and friends, our churches and synagogues, communities of fellowship, our relations with other nations, and, of course, the UN. She has been and remains, far and away, my first and best mentor. I had to remind you, my sister said, she wasn’t a saint. Like the rest of us, she had her share of impatience, anger, dismay, suffering, loss—more than her share of loss, I say.

Remembering the two of us sitting across from each other at the AAUN’s boardroom table, I also recall another of her practices for which I’ve been grateful. It was one of the secret sources of her virtually superhuman energy: her mastery of the short and restorative power nap. I can still see her in my mind’s eye. She would nod her head slightly and close her eyes as if she were thinking carefully about the agenda being discussed. A minute or two later, she would raise her head. To the other board members at that table, she never missed a beat. I don’t think anyone but me knew she was briefly, restoratively and thoroughly asleep.

During the years of World War II, when I was very young and my father had left for combat, my grandfather Franklin — PaPa, as I knew him — invited my mother and me to leave our home near Seattle and come to live in The White House. Those White House years were extraordinary personally, but my memories of FDR at that time were more vivid than those of Grandmère; I imagine because she was so often traveling, alone and with friends, in the States and visiting our troops abroad. She was always learning, following her purposes as well as those of her husband, as “his eyes and ears.” Some of you may remember a New Yorker cartoon from that time: two coal-grimed miners deep underground, one looking up, startled, and saying to the other, “My gosh, it’s Mrs. Roosevelt!”

My time living and traveling with her more consciously and intimately was later, when naturally I came to share her devotion to the United Nations. I sat at that AAUN boardroom table with her because there was a seat on the board for one student, the president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations. So while I was too young to accompany her during the years of crafting the Declaration we celebrate today, I’ve always felt her presence palpably on the 10th of December each year, the anniversary of that day in 1948 when she presented the Declaration to the General Assembly; and the entire Assembly, for its first and perhaps still its only time, stood as one to applaud: applaud the Declaration, which was adopted without a single dissenting vote, and applaud her and the fruits of her labor.

And labor it was. She said of that work at the time, "I drive hard, and when I get home, I will be tired! The men on the Commission will be also!" She was appointed to the US delegation to the United Nations by President Truman in 1945. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson said to the General Assembly two days after she died in 1962, “I have lost more than a friend; I have lost an inspiration…The United Nations itself is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last fifteen years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—“ideals that made her,” he said, “only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always,” said Stevenson, “was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, he added, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

She soon dispatched the skepticism and won the admiration of the men who were her fellow American delegates. So it was natural, to them and to the representatives of other countries, that early in 1947 she was elected to chair the commission that worked to give birth to what I’ve come to think of as a humane cross-cultural embodiment of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” and the living circumstances that allow those angels to flourish. In her own estimation and in the historical record, the Declaration was her greatest single achievement. Its accomplishment also demonstrated and required her supple political savvy, especially in her skillful, determined negotiations with Andrey Vyshinsky and Alexei Pavlov of the Soviet Union. She made ingenious alliance with the able Canadian representative John Humphrey, the Lebanese philosopher turned master diplomat Charles Malik, and especially the legal genius and yet-to-be Nobel Peace Prize winner René Cassin of France. It was Cassin’s contribution, it’s been said, that “transformed what might have been a list or ‘bill’ of rights into ‘a geodesic dome of interlocking principles.’”

She knew, of course, that the Declaration was aspirational, a source of guidance intended to clarify the character of the human adventure and the crafts of government at their best. The covenants that would have given it more legal clout died on a vine not yet dug deeply enough into our humus, or human soil. That said, she was as devoted to the completion of the Declaration as to anything in her lifetime. She believed it set a standard to assess our accomplishments as individuals, families, villages and cities, businesses and nations.

In her address to the General Assembly exactly 70 years ago today she said, "We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men, [women and children] everywhere.”

But she also wisely, realistically, said that documents expressing ideals “carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.” [italics added].

So I think the most revealing, deeply felt, enduring and well-known remark she made about human rights was this: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

Hers was an inspired, I think deeply grounded, blend of contemplative and active living. I treasure her wisdom and courage, her humor, her accomplishments, her truth-telling, and my memories.

Joshua and family in Portugal

 

I'm glad that my son Joshua and his family are in Europe for the next months, starting with several weeks in Portugal. Vanessa, having been born and raised in Brazil, speaks fluent Portuguese, and has been teaching the language to their seven-year old daughter Paloma. They're going to settle down in a quiet locale for the next few weeks, but are still staying in the southern Portugal coastal town of Lagos, which has beautiful beaches and cliffs.

Ponta da Piedade, Lagos, Portugal

 

 

Discovering a kindred spirit: D.L. Mayfield on The Song of Mary (The Magnificat)

My sister sent me yesterday an article in her hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, about Mary and The Magnificat, taking its text from the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, verses 46-55, in which Mary—who will become the mother of Jesus—speaks the words that have come to be known as The Magnificat. I hope you find them as important as I did, and that you will take the further step to become familiar with the author of the essay, D.L. Mayfield. Here it is:

 

Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in the Bible is revolutionary. Some evangelicals silence her.

The artist Ben Wildflower's depiction of Mary, based on the Magnificat.

 

 

by D. L. Mayfield [www.dlmayfield.com]

December 20, 2018

When I was 15, I was cajoled into playing the role of Mary in our church’s Christmas nativity scene. I was embarrassed, stuffing a pillow under a robe to signify pregnancy, but I felt I had no choice: I was the pastor’s daughter, and there was no one else who could play the role. My cheeks burning in shame, I remember feeling little connection to Mary, the mother of God. I was silent in the play. Mary, in our tradition, was a vehicle for Jesus: a holy womb, a good and compliant and obedient girl.

Much later in life, I was shocked to discover that Mary wasn’t quiet, nor was she what I would call meek and mild.

Go read the first chapter of Luke. Read the song, called the “Magnificat,” that Mary sings. [Luke 1: 46-55]

The first verses were always familiar to me: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” Same for the next few lines about Mary being overwhelmed at the goodness of God looking upon a humble girl, that God is mighty and has done great things, that he is holy and will bless those who fear him. But then comes this:

“He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;

he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones

but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things

but has sent the rich away empty.”

In all my long years of being in church, of knowing the Christmas story backward and forward, I never heard these verses emphasized. Here, Mary comes across less like a scared and obedient 15-year-old and more like a rebel intent on reorienting unjust systems.

I loved this Mary. Where had she been all my life?

Throughout history, I would learn, poor and oppressed people had often identified with this song — the longest set of words spoken by a woman in the New Testament (and a poor, young, unmarried pregnant woman at that!).

Oscar Romero, priest and martyr, drew a comparison between Mary and the poor and powerless people in his own community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis, called the Magnificat “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.”

Revolutionaries, the poor and the oppressed, all loved Mary and they emphasized her glorious song. But the Magnificat has been viewed as dangerous by people in power. Some countries — such as India, Guatemala, and Argentina — have outright banned the Magnificat from being recited in liturgy or in public.

And evangelicals — in particular, white evangelicals — have devalued the role of Mary, and her song, to the point that she has almost been forgotten as anything other than a silent figure in a nativity scene.

I asked evangelical Christians on Twitter about the passage, and more than 1,100 responded: 28 percent said they had never heard the title “Magnificat” (Latin for “magnify”); another 43 percent said their churches never read or discussed it; 21 percent said they had encountered it just a few times; and 8 percent said they read it every year.

Almost all of the popular evangelical songs that incorporate the Magnificat stop after the first few verses. According to Spotify, this version by ZOEgroup is the most popular English-language version of the Magnificat; it leaves out the parts about the rulers being brought down and the rich being sent away.

However, some pastors are trying to bring Mary’s song back into church. Brian Thomas, a former Southern Baptist pastor, said he left his denomination after learning how Protestantism, and evangelicalism in particular, dismissed certain parts of the Bible — including the importance of Mary.

Thomas Irby preached on the Magnificat last year as a response to the #MeToo movement. He spoke of Mary’s physical vulnerability and her courage to share her own story. “Preachers have too often settled for a pliable passage about a devoted woman and the mighty God she serves,” said Irby, an associate pastor at Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, Ala., which has gained notability as the congregation of former attorney general Jeff Sessions. Irby said he is planning on preaching the Magnificat again this year.

The artist Ben Wildflower grew up evangelical, reading the Bible over and over. Yet he never heard the song of Mary emphasized in church until he started attending an Anglican congregation. There, the Magnificat was a part of the evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, and Wildflower found it beautiful and profound. One day he picked up a piece of wood outside of a construction site and crafted an image of Mary that was different from all the sweet pictures of her staring up into heaven. He drew her with her fist raised to the sky, and her foot stepping on a snake. It is now his most popular image.

“She’s a young woman singing a song about toppling rulers from their thrones. She’s a radical who exists within the confines of institutionalized religion,” he said. Some Christians took issue with the political nature of his image, until Wildflower wrote a post explaining the revolutionary text came from the Bible.

Why has this song been forgotten, or trimmed, for so many people who grew up evangelical? It could be a byproduct of the Reformation, which caused Protestants to devalue Mary in reaction to Catholic theology. Or a lack of familiarity with liturgy, and an emphasis on other texts. Or perhaps the song doesn’t sound like good news if you are well fed, or rich, or in a position of power and might — or if you benefit from systems that oppress. How does the Magnificat feel if you aren’t one of the lowly, if you aren’t as vulnerable and humble as Mary?

Theologian Warren Carter writes that in the time of Jesus, 2 to 3 percent of the population was rich, while the majority lived a subsistence-level existence. “Mary articulates an end to economic structures that are exploitative and unjust. She speaks of a time when all will enjoy the good things given by God.”

This year, I will be reading the Magnificat as it was meant to be read. As Gustavo Gutierrez, a Dominican priest, once wrote, we will miss the meaning of the text with any “attempts to tone down what Mary’s song tells us about the preferential love of God for the lowly and the abused."

It might not feel like good news to me, exactly, as someone who is neither hungry nor poor. But Mary and her song are good news for my neighbors, both locally and globally, who continue to be crushed under a world that thrives on exploitation and injustice. And as someone who is trying to take the Bible seriously, I know that loving my neighbor is the No. 1 way I can love God in our world.

Mary, no longer just a silent member of the nativity, or a holy womb for God, or an obedient and compliant girl, has become the focal point for how I, and many other Christians, celebrate Christmas while living in the reality of waiting for true justice to come. She has helped me understand the true magnificence of how much God cares about our political, economic and social realities.

The economic and political worldview of many white evangelicals has led to a silencing of Mary and of God’s dream for the world. But now she is helping me trust that the eventual upending of the systems of the world will be good news for me, and for other evangelicals, as well.

 

Amos Oz dies at 79

Amos Oz, one of my favorite Israeli authors (alongside David Grossman, the poet Yehuda Amachi, A. B. Yehoshua), peace activist, memoirist, novelist extrordinaire, died yesterday in his sleep, of cancer, at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 79, just a month younger than me. I admired his writing and his activism: his tenacious devotion to a two-state solution for Jews and Palestinians in Israel. 

I think the last of his books I read was his novel Judas (2016), a complex and moving story, and before that his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), more beautifully told and different in many respects, but which I've always thought, not only in its title, a companion to my own A Love in Shadow (1978).

Emily Barton concludes her nuanced review of Oz's Judas, "The novel grapples with the humanity of Jesus; the basis of anti-Semitism in particular and prejudice in general; the hope for eventual peace in the state of Israel; love. Oz pitches the book’s heartbreak and humanism perfectly from first page to last, as befits a writer who understands how vital a political role a novelist can play."

The interview that follows—that appeared in The New York Times a couple of years ago, toward the end of Barack Obama's presidency— conveys, in Amos Oz's own words, a good deal of why I treasure his writing, and why his death saddens me. The questions are pretty standard interview-an-author style. The answers reveal a truly gifted and deeply thoughtful man.

 

 

______________________________________

 

 

Tell us about some of your favorite writers.

You see, I don’t have a bookshelf with my eternal beloved ones on it. They come and go. A few of them come more often than the others: Chekhov, Cervantes, Faulkner, Agnon, Brener, Yizhar, Alterman, Bialik, Amichai, Lampedusa’s “Il Gattopardo,” Kafka and Borges, sometimes Thomas Mann and sometimes Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

The short answer is that when a work of literature suddenly makes the very familiar unfamiliar to me, or just the opposite, when a work of literature makes the unfamiliar almost intimately familiar, I am moved (moved to tears, or smiles, or anger, or gratitude, or many other, different, kinds of excitement).

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

Omnivorous, I read everything. Anything at all. I read the user’s manual of the electric heater, I read novels that were way above my grasp, I read poetry which could only offer me the music of its language while the meaning was still far from me. I read newspapers and magazines of all sorts, leaflets, ads, political manifestoes, dirty magazines, comics. Anything at all.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

Almost every good book changes me in a small way. But I may have not gathered the courage to send an early story to a literary editor were it not for what I learned from Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and from Agnon’s “In the Prime of Her Life” and from M. Y. Berdyczewski’s short stories. “Winesburg, Ohio” taught me that sometimes the more provincial a story is, the more universal it may become. I wrote about these early literary epiphanies in “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”

What author, living or dead, would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?

I would very much wish to spend half an hour with Anton Chekhov. I would buy him a drink. I would not discuss literary issues with him, not even bother to interview him or ask him for some useful tips, just chat about people. Even gossip with him. I love Chekhov’s unique blend of misanthropy and compassion. (And gossip — which is a mixture of both — is, after all, a distant cousin of stories and novels, although they don’t say hello to each other in the street, as novels and stories are embarrassed by this member of their family.)

What books are currently on your night stand?

A few weeks ago a beloved friend and colleague, the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua lost his wife to an illness. Rivka Yehoshua was a leading psychoanalyst, and both of them were close friends for more than five decades. Thirty years ago, Yehoshua published “Five Seasons,” a wonderful novel about a delicate man losing his wife in the prime of their lives. “Five Seasons” describes the first year of the protagonist’s life as a widower. I am rereading it now with awe, in tears, and with admiration. I can’t help shuddering at the thought that rather often life imitates literature.

What are a few of the last great books you read?

I read “Lenin’s Kisses,” a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer, Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: It is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion. I reread Anita Shapira’s biography of David Ben-Gurion rediscovering the greatness of this founding father of Israel who, as early as the beginning of the 1930s, recognized the rise of Palestinian nationalism and its fierce resentment toward Zionism, and conducted a series of painstaking meetings with Palestinian leaders, trying in vain to formulate a far-reaching compromise between two legitimate national movements, both rightly claiming the same tiny homeland.

Who are some under-appreciated or overlooked authors? Are there Israeli writers who aren’t as widely translated as they should be whom you’d recommend in particular?

Two great Israeli writers, S. Yizhar and Yehoshua Kenaz, are hardly known outside the realm of Hebrew. Yizhar’s work has an almost Joycean quality about it, while Kenaz at his heights makes you think of Marcel Proust.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

Recently, I’ve developed a growing addiction to well-written memoirs and biographies, whether they relate to artists, statesmen or failed eccentrics: “Stalin,” by Simon Sebag Montefiore; “Kafka,” by Reiner Stach; “Nikolai Gogol,” by Nabokov.

Do you have a favorite fictional hero or heroine? A favorite antihero or villain?

Don Quixote. The hero and the antihero of the first modern novel, which is also the first postmodern novel, and also the first deconstructionist novel. Don Quixote’s genes can be found in thousands and thousands of literary and cinematic figures created since. Maybe some of his genes are in every post-Quixotean human being.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The Israeli prime minister?

Unfortunately, there are many political leaders in today’s world, including my country, who would pleasantly surprise me if they read any book at all. To President Obama I would give, as a farewell present, with admiration, my “Tale of Love and Darkness.” Prime Minister Netanyahu may perhaps benefit from reading “Richard III.”

Whom would you want to write your life story?

All my children are very fine writers. Any one of them could tell my story with the right blend of kinship, empathy and irony.

 

Christmas III: From Heartbeat: A Sacred Journey Towards Earth's Wellbeing

Thanks to Heartbeat: A Sacred Journey Towards Earth's Wellbeing.

 

 

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Christmas II: In Praise of Wonder

Editor's note (JRB): I came across the following short essay by felicitous accident, browsing The Times this Christmas morning. I am unfamiliar with Ed Simon and happy for this encounter. If I find myself in disagreement with some of what he writes here that's primarily to say I would have written a few passages differently, something unexceptional in writers sharing the same fundamental persuasion. For example, neither God nor Christ is truly foreign; both are mysterious and omnipresent. Fighting on behalf of wonder is an infelicitous usage—active devotion to wonder is perhaps clearer. I am uncomfortable with uses of capitalization in phrases like "the Other." But more important, I am moved and persuaded by Simon's praise of wonder and its centrality to the Christmas story. I share his love of Blake's illustration of the Nativity. I think his characterization of anxiety as a terrible obstacle to wonder is an inspired and important insight. He has enriched my experience of Christmas this year, and for that I am grateful.

In Praise of Wonder

By Ed Simon

Mr. Simon is a staff writer for The Millions.

New York Times, Dec. 24, 2018

 

William Blake, Illustration 1 to Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: The Descent of Peace, 1814-1816, pen and watercolor

For me, few images of Christ’s nativity convey its strange, luminescent wonder as much as William Blake’s “The Descent of Peace.” Painted in the early 19th century as part of a series of illustrations for John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Blake imagined the scene as bathed in an otherworldly light that holds the darkness at bay while an angel somersaults in the heavens. Within the manger, the infant Christ floats in the air with arms outstretched above an exhausted Virgin Mary.

Blake’s reality thrummed with a charged beauty — as a child he had visions of a “tree full of angels,” and when he was 4 he saw God put his head in through his family’s kitchen window. Yet it is precisely that sense of the sacred and the profane being commingled, of our prosaic reality being a site for divine wonder, which makes Blake a prophet perfectly attuned to Advent.

Christmas, according to the carol, is the “most wonderful time of the year.” Certainly it’s one of the most commercialized, where it’s hard to sense much of the sacred import between Black Friday and the perennial culture-war scuffles over the meaning of the season. How much better, then, to see the holiday through Blake’s eyes, where “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” One need not be a conventional Christian — I’m not — to see the significance of the nativity story. Because what the nativity story conveys is a narrative of wonder threaded through prosaic reality, where the birth of a child is an act of God’s self-creation, where a manger can be the site of the universe’s new genesis. Perhaps Blake’s seeing angels in trees and God in his kitchen is the true nature of things, and everyday appearances are the real delusions.

It is difficult to see those angels today. We live less in an “age of wonder” than we do in an age of anger, anxiety and fear; the age of the weaponized tweet and horrific push notification. I don’t believe that one can die from lack of wonder, but I’m certain that a deficit of it will ensure that one has never really lived. If that’s true, then few of us, including myself, are really totally alive in this anxious age, for anxiety is the great enemy of wonder. Anxiety implores us to retreat, wonder to expand; ignorance festers in small minds, wonder spreads out from the open one; fear demands we build walls, wonder that we tear them all down. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed in his “Culture and Value” that “Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples.” What would it mean here and now to cleanse the doors of perception, to reclaim this strange awareness we call wonder?

The power of the story of the nativity is its ability to transform our prosaic experience. One need not be a believer to see the value in this. What would appear to be a humble human birth is at the same time holy and miraculous, with animals laid down before the Lord, and the star of Bethlehem guiding the Magi to Christ’s cradle.

To wonder is to dwell in amazement, surprise and the miraculous. One can experience wonder when meditating upon the magnitude of the universe, or in contemplating Blake’s poetry or art. Wonder is when we apprehend the sublime and the magnificent in what we encounter every day, with both humility and delight. The wonder in the Christmas story is that something as human as a baby could also be something as foreign as God.

In thinking about the meaning of the nativity today, I find its most potent and radical message to be one not just of wonder, but of wonder as means of approaching difference, of experiencing and understanding the Other. As God, Christ is supposed to be radically foreign, but as Jesus he is intimately human. The theology of incarnation explains that union’s tension, but the broader philosophical implications concern how love must be inculcated by wonder at this paradox. The philosopher Simon Critchley, describing the contours for a “faith of the faithless,” writes that “Christ is the incarnation of love as an act of imagination … the imaginative projection of love onto all creatures.”

Wonder is the antidote to hatred, for wonder is fundamentally radical. Had Herod any sense of wonder for the exquisite singularity of all people, would the massacre of the innocents have commenced? If we had wonder at the individual universe that is each fellow human, at the cosmic complexity of other people, would we put refugees in cages?

We do not have to look far into the current state of the world to realize that this time requires a return to wonder — what I would call a “politics of wonder,” predicated on both empathy and celebration of difference. Those of us, religious believers or not, who understand the profound meaning of the nativity must fight on behalf of wonder and in the service of a future society that places wonder at its very center.

If a “right to wonder” sounds utopian or quixotic, if it implies radical reorientation and questioning, if it seems untenable or strange, then that’s precisely the point. To put wonder at the center of our personal and political lives is not denialism, but a rebellion against the life-denying strictures of the present. To wonder is an act of resistance and an act of love. We require this not just on Christmas, but on every day of the year, not just because it may save our lives, but also because it will remind us of why they need saving in the first place.

 

Christmas I: This Christmas, remember the powerless and the light-bearers

By The Editorial Board of The Washington Post

“DO NOT be afraid,” the angel tells shepherds in the Gospel of Luke. “I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people.” The good news in Scripture was, of course, the birth of Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom of God. But as the Christmas story proceeds, there is still bad news to confront. Herod, the Roman-installed king of Judea, upon hearing reports of the birth of a child whom he fears will be a potential rival for power and glory, orders the killing of all male infants from Bethlehem — an event known as the Slaughter of the Innocents.

And so, Jesus of Nazareth, by some Gospel accounts, spent his earliest years as a refugee in Egypt, where his family had fled, and did not return to Judea until Herod had died. When he began to teach and preach as a young man, he found a ready following for his message, which was one of love, humility and understanding. But it was also profoundly upsetting to the established order. The author Tod Lindberg says of Jesus’ Beatitudes (“Blessed are the meek . . . those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . the merciful . . . the peacemakers”) that they provide “a dizzying commentary designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire . . . Jesus describes those who are truly fortunate, the lucky ones of their day. But it is not emperors, conquerors, priests, and the wealthy who enjoy this favor. Rather, it is the common people, those whom earthly success has largely passed by.. . .”

The message is universal. It’s no wonder that it has resonated through much of the world, Christian and non-Christian, over two millennia. It reflects values and sentiments common to many peoples and faiths. But it also marks out a difficult and challenging path, one that has proved hard to follow for Christians (and often their institutions) and non-Christians alike. “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” is one of the most familiar of Jesus’ proclamations. But much of the world is still not free, and the truth is under mounting assault, subject to a vast new array of distortions and malevolent misuses by those who would deny its very existence.

There have been many Herods over the centuries — leaders who, out of fear, greed or lust for power, have wrought death and destruction on their own people and others. Today new Slaughters of the Innocents are looming, most ominously in the land from which one of the Three Wise Men of Christmas is said to have traveled: the nation of Yemen. Hundreds of thousands of children there are threatened with death by starvation and bombing inflicted by the neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has done all it can to stifle the horrifying reports and, of course, to silence those who say and reveal things that it cannot allow to be heard. Bringing urgent news of this kind to the world requires the work of many brave, devoted, disinterested men and women: journalists, principled government officials and judges, volunteer organizations that advance human rights and welfare, medical missionaries to the poor. It has cost a number of them their lives in numerous places, but their comrades carry on the work. In this holiday season, we remember them and the light they cast.

 

Mary Oliver on her great love, Molly Malone Cook

Maria Popova so often evokes a grateful response from me in her own online journal, BrainPickings. Here she is again, describing the poet Mary Oliver's long love of her partner Molly Malone Cook, in Oliver's book Our World. Oliver says she drew from Molly, "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter."

"Our World — part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soul mate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.'

"Oliver — who refers to Cook simply as M. in most of her writings — reflects in the opening essay:

'Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything. I do not know everything — but a few things, which I will tell. M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her.

[…]

'She was style, and she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic — be feisty, and bold.'

Oliver writes of the affair Cook had in the late 1950s, shortly before they met:

"She had … an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much."

The following year, Cook met Oliver and they remained together, inseparable, for more than four decades. That encounter — which calls to mind the fateful first meetings that occasioned such iconic literary couples as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — took place at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where Oliver had landed the day after her high school graduation at the age of seventeen and stayed for several years.

One evening in 1959, when Oliver was twenty-four and Cook thirty-four, the young poet returned to the house and found the photographer sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. She describes their encounter with her signature elegance of unpeeling the mundane to reveal the momentous:

"I took one look and fell, hook and tumble. M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve. She denied this to her dying day, but it was true."

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

It turned out that Oliver and Cook, in their regular lives beyond Steepletop, lived right across the street from each other in New York’s East Village. So they began to see one another “little by little,” and so their great love story began.

But perhaps the greatest gift of their union was the way in which they shaped each other’s way of seeing and being with the world — the mutually ennobling dialogue between their two capacities for presence:

"It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.

[…]

"I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it — those early signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] never expressed impatience with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness I found there. Our love was so tight."

To lose the love of one’s life is something few have dared to live in public — the most memorable such bravery being Joan Didion’s — but Oliver brings to death’s darkness her familiar touch of emboldening light:

"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms."

Oliver ends with a breath-stopping prose poem that brings full-circle her opening reflections on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

 

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

 

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Circle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, ca. 1590-95, Museum van Buuren, Brussels, Belgium

(double-click to enlarge)

 

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

The lost Father — yearning for God in our days — by Notto Thelle

Editor's notes (JRB):

Long reads of more than more than 5 or 10 minutes are seldom posted on Reckonings, but I hope readers will enjoy this exception. (Anyway, it barely makes it into the long-read category.) Notto Thelle is an old and dear friend.  We came to know each other during my years living and working in Norway. We continue to nourish our conversation via Skype every other week or so. He is professor of theology at the University of Oslo, a Christian minister in the long-prevailing Church of Norway, and a longtime student of diverse spiritual traditions, especially those whose homes include China and Japan, to both of which he has been a frequent visitor.

Whatever my talents as an adult, they have not included facility in the learning of languages other than English, which remains late in my eighth decade a deeply pleasurable work-in-progress. It is partially in anticipation of the response I would elicit that I don't say, when asked, that my favorite book is the Oxford English Dictionary.

As a psychologist, I have necessarily become adept in the practice, as Notto puts it, of "taking the dark side seriously." Doing so, indeed, is essential to our realization of the light within us and in the earth.

The other key element in the chapter of Notto's book reprinted below that is central to experience of the sacred and the life of the spirit, whoever is learning and practicing, is relationship or dialogue. Even when one is practicing alone, one is not alone, but in relationship to an Other. Notto writes that "conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God." There is, of course, risk in every conversation. "But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his [or her] reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it." And this: "We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation." The interplay of silence and speech is crucial.

"What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings."

"Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it....This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation."

I have followed Notto's writing as best I can, and have been grateful both to the Paulist Press for publication of some of his works in English, including the book excerpted below, and to Notto himself for translating portions of other publications, most recently his prefatory essays in a forthcoming collection of four books, translations into Norwegian of the haiku masters Bashō, Issa, Buson and Santōka.

 

The lost Father – yearning for God in our days

 

Apropos Solar Eclipse

 

Notto R. Thelle[1], Professor of Theology, University of Oslo

 

Nearly fifty years ago, there was a total eclipse of the sun over southern Norway. We knew what would happen, so we sat and waited, with over-exposed black and white film covering our eyes, to see the details of the sun’s disappearance. Slowly, the sun was eaten up by the moon, and then it vanished. Only the radiant corona continued to glow. It was not in fact the darkness that made the greatest impression, but something we had not expected – the silence.

First came the shadow, like twilight in the middle of the day, then the brief night; all this was expected, but not the silence! The birds stopped singing, the cheerful group of people stopped talking, the world held its breath. It was not the peace of the night that descended upon us, but a paralyzing stillness. Was it the groaning of creation we heard, or the fear of emptiness, of being abandoned?

In his short book The Eclipse of God, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber interprets our age, i.e. the last two centuries, as an historical hour of destiny in which the sun is eclipsed. God himself is overshadowed by other phenomena.

In the silence which descends after God has vanished, philosophers seek new words, new images, new ideas that can bring him back. But Buber affirms that God is silent in the systems of the philosophers. One can dedicate oneself to ideas, perhaps even love them – but ideas do not love, so our love remains unrequited.

Buber reminds us that an eclipse is an event which takes place between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself. How are we to see the light again? Not by recreating it in our systems, for our words and ideas sometimes block the view, intensifying the darkness and imprisoning us in a fictional conversation with our own selves; no, we must search behind the eclipse until we find the divine mystery.

How can God once again become a reality, so that our words are more than mere sounds in the empty air? I believe that, if our yearning is to succeed in uniting words and reality, we must also take the dark silence seriously.

Let us remain in the darkness of the eclipse for a little while. I shall not attempt to explain it; instead, let us listen to three writers, Sven Delblanc, Per Olov Enquist, and Arne Garborg. Their experiences are not mine, but I can recognize the truth in what they say. They intensify the darkness, but their somber words are also nourished by a yearning for the light, for play, for birdsong, and for conversation.

Are they talking with God? I think so, although I am not always sure whether the conversation is over – or only just beginning.    

Sven Delblanc’s solar eclipse begins in a cornfield one beautiful autumn day in the Canada of his childhood. The golden, sweet corn is attractive. The book is called Livets ax (Life’s Ear of Corn). A little boy is getting to know the world by tasting and biting. The ears of corn are sweet, but they become rough and sharp, they crawl down his throat and try to strangle him. He coughs and cries out, but in vain: his father stands there and laughs uproariously, since he is a brutal, unfeeling tyrant. His sisters too laugh, since they are afraid of their father. For the screaming child, his father is a tower reaching up to the skies, mocking one who is helpless. Those who are stronger refuse to help! And then he sees the sun for the first time, hanging there like a blind face in the cloud, burning evilly, a face without eyes. He thinks: the sun is stronger than I am. The father who should have bestowed love and security gave us nothing but terror. And the sun was blind and evil.

A terrible childhood formed the picture of a world without grace. “His father had given him an image of God. Childhood had given him an image of what life was about: there were two alternatives, to lead the life of an executioner when possible, or to lead the life of a victim when compelled to do so.” The blind god is the counterpart of his father. His father is the Yahweh in his life, and the son lives in his shadow.

“I am. I am the One who is. You are only my shadow.”

I understood that he was speaking the truth – he was my life’s Yahweh. I am his shadow. As the years pass and the divine evil rises to its zenith, I shall shrink more and more. At the last, I shall be merely a stripe of gray dust at his feet.

What does one do when life is eclipsed by a blind and evil god who is stronger? What does one do when one is destroyed by an avenger who demands sacrifices and forgives nothing? One hangs on. The child grows up in an unchangeable world where God is eternal, his father never gets older, and terror endures. And the fate awaiting him is a rest devoid of feelings, like a fossil with staring eyes, its fear turned to stone.

But this petrified endurance in the feelingless shadow is not the whole story. His yearning and his dreams are alive. He has seen glimpses of another world: the dream of a lost paradise, fragments of faith in Jesus, and a cherry tree in bloom.

This tree is the most important factor. He discovered it on one of his wanderings away from home, a fountain of blossoms in spring, full of dark berries in summer. The tree was a friend and sister, with an important message for him: “Something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … Only this flowering cherry-tree communicated to the boy that faith in life which many a time halted his steps on the threshold to madness, as he was on the point of going out into the darkness.” “The stony ground was bathed in a froth, the unimagined blossoms of the fruit-tree. It was like seeing God.” This is another God than the one he knew from his childhood home in Mölna.

The cherry tree is perhaps just another word for the dream of that lost paradise where the evil god had no power. “There existed a far-off country where his omnipotence did not reach: there, peace reigned. Only, you were expelled all too soon from that country, and this made you grieve all the more at the split in our existence.” In his childhood, he had wandered unnoticed and unhindered between that realm of shadows which we call “reality” and the far-off land of mysticism. He longed to get back to the true reality, to the light which cast shadows on the walls of his cave.

Jesus is a minor character in Delblanc’s world, far too powerless to create any hope in the narrator’s darkness. He could indeed recognize and understand Jesus’ suffering, but he could make no sense of the idea that this suffering was meaningful! In his world, there was no place for grace and reconciliation. What weapons did Jesus possess to resist the overwhelmingly powerful blind god who enjoyed seeing human beings suffer? And Jesus never knocked on the door of his childhood home at Mölna:

Perhaps Jesus did indeed bear the lamp of love in his hands – that was possible. But he knocked in vain on the gate of Mölna, for no one heard him, no one let him in. The only love that still existed there was female and nature-grown like the cherry tree in the wood.

Per Olov Enquist writes about a mind darkened by life. Kapten Nemos bibliotek (Captain Nemo’s Library) is a mysterious book on the borders between poetry and madness. Only gradually does the reader understand that we are going through an inner world which is confused and darkened. At the same time, this darkness is a place of refuge which opens up the path back to reality.

The external drama is simple. Two boys are mixed up at birth in the hospital and grow up as best friends. When they are six years old, the mistake is noticed, and they exchange homes. The newspapers write about them.

The inner drama is a callous story about what it means to be abandoned in a town in northern Sweden where people find it very difficult to express their feelings. A child loses his parents, loses the friend with whom he had been mixed up, loses his identity, loses his mind – or rather, he takes refuge in mental illness, and the reader is introduced to a part of the landscape of his mind. This is a world where imagination and recollection and reality are woven together, but where the boy can find interconnections and perceive signals; perhaps he can even “put everything together” and create a new wholeness.

What has all this to do with God? Our initial impression is of harshness and tears – nothing else. There are only three kinds of human beings: executioners, victims, and traitors. God is overwhelming, distant, one who punishes. The human fathers are absent and dead, but nevertheless represent a threat in virtue of their very absence; the same is true of God, the highest “father.” The boy had heard Mia Hallesby’s pious stories which were served up to children at that time, and had understood that God was eternal. Eternity was a huge rock in the sea, where a bird flew once every thousand years to sharpen its beak. It takes an immensely long time for the rock to be completely worn down, but all that time is merely one second in eternity. And the human being fights against this overwhelming God, sharpening his beak against the rock in order to destroy it and so gain access to his Benefactor.

Hope was to be found in the Son of Man, who was not evil like God. He had a wound in his side, in which one could hide. In the local chapel, there was a picture of him and the children, with indentations in its frame. He made intercession with the divinity. “It took me all my childhood to learn that the Son of Man usually had no time – only very, very seldom.”

If God is a crushing eternal rock, and the Son of Man has no time, one must find other helpers. The boy’s benefactor is Captain Nemo, whom he had met in one of Jules Verne’s books. Captain Nemo leads him into a concealed world under the rock, with his submarine “Nautilus” as its innermost, closed room.

The name Nemo means “No one.” In one way, both he and his world are the product of a sick imagination; but it is a world that offers a place of refuge, and Nemo acts as guide to the narrator’s ego, which has no identity of its own. “If one has no name, one is No one – and that too is a kind of liberation.”

Is this merely a story about someone who returns from the eclipse by reconstructing his life with the aid of a fictional helper? I do not think so: because en route, after more than four years in silent illness and confusion, he has perceived signals and signs.

He has come to understand that the biographies of the victims, the executioners, and the traitors are interwoven. He has perceived the clumsy, almost invisible signs of goodness in the barren society of his childhood, a society so poor in feelings. He writes without bitterness – and that in itself is a little miracle. He has seen the loneliness of the friend who became a traitor. Not least, he has grasped the abandonment and fear felt by his stepmother as she stood at the top of the stairs like a deity and destroyed her children’s lives. Her fear showed him a glimpse of a deity who was different: “I saw her face when she turned towards me. Afterwards, I thought: How strange that a powerful God who punishes us can be afraid of being abandoned.” He had experienced something similar when he made his escape and climbed a fir-tree with branches as thick as God’s fingers. The branches had begun to tremble, as if God was afraid:

One could reflect on that for a while. It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid, but this time the fingers had trembled, just like Elma Markström’s fingers – her hands were shaky. Really, it seemed that God was afraid.

When I looked for a Norwegian parallel to these Swedish voices, I thought at once of Arne Garborg (1851-1924). Some consider him a rather old-fashioned writer, but he may be more modern than we think, despite all the distance in time. When he writes about human life, he has something of the intensity we find in the two Swedes. He speaks of one so wounded by life, so wounded by faith, that he had to leave home in order to seek a remedy. And yet he still longs to find a light and a meaning behind the solar darkness of his childhood religion.

In Den burtkomne Faderen (The Lost Father: the title alludes to the parable of the “lost” or “prodigal” son), he writes: “I had lived like the lost son and had experienced destitution, just like him. But when I made my way home again, my father was gone. I never find peace. I am myself this unease that never comes to rest … I was a son of an age that has forgotten what ‘home’ and ‘rest’ are.”

 

         Truly,

         I am not the lost son,

         but you are a lost father;

         and no one dares to wait for your return,

         but you are missed by all your little ones.

 

The beautiful and empty words of the church sound like a wake held over the dead Father. But here there is nevertheless one last hope: the Master.

 

         A God?

         What do we need God for?

         We are perfectly capable

         of condemning ourselves.

         But a Son of Man

         who knew us

         and knew everything,

         and possessed the healing word

         and help

         where the others merely pronounce judgments

         and raise cold eyes;

         a Son of Man –

         oh, why are you no longer here on earth!

 

I have used fragments from the worlds of these three writers as material for my own reflections, but in doing so, I discovered that they also do something with me. They draw me into their world and make the subject matter much more difficult than I had initially thought.

Two points are particularly appropriate to this book. First, all three speak clearly about the pain caused when God is eclipsed. Their characters are marked by this absence, consumed by loneliness and abandonment, crushed by fear of the evil and arbitrary divinity. They hang on, they flee, or else they rebel. But will they ever escape?

Secondly, behind the pain and the flight and the rebellion lives a yearning: Garborg’s search for the lost Father, which leads him to yearn for the Son of Man; Enquist’s description of the helper in his imaginary world, Captain Nemo, the “No one” born of the imagination, and his glimpses of a God whose hands tremble; and Delblanc’s longing for “a far-off country.”

Both absence and longing are clothed in strong language. There is something universal here; we are not speaking of phenomena confined to Scandinavia at the beginning of the new millennium. When his longing reaches breaking-point, the human person returns anew to his search. The night is at its deepest just before the dawn.

Our task, then, is to speak credibly of God in a world full of distorted images of the divine. We must find something to replace the images of malicious and absent fathers and dominating mothers, something other than loneliness and guilt and repressed sexuality, something more human than power-hungry groups who so readily utter condemnations. We must speak of a God who does not crush us or force us down into the dust, but instead lets us stand upright so that we can meet him face to face and talk with him. Without a credible language, there is no true answer to human longings.

All this is no doubt true; but at one point, our writers disturb the clarity of our system, because they touch on something that gnaws at us and leaves us uneasy. It is not just a matter of a distorted religiosity that destroys people’s emotional lives, their language, and their images of God – for Delblanc’s father did not believe in God, nor did he desire to force any particular religious ideas on his son. He was merely a bad and brutal father who ruthlessly laid bare one aspect of reality, namely the cruel harshness of the world. How can we believe in a good Father, when it appears that quite different forces form human existence? Are not abandonment, violence, and heartlessness far more obvious realities than the goodness of existence? Is there any reason to believe in a good and loving Creator, rather than in a cold regularity, blind chance, or an evil power which has made the world our torture chamber? Is it not true to assert that we are abandoned? Must we not create our own world and find a benefactor, our own Captain Nemo?

If we take this reality seriously, we will not speak superficially about God.

However, many Christians breathe a sigh of relief in the present time: “Yes, people are truly longing! At long last, we can talk about God – and people pay attention to us. Our young people get involved in church activities. The poets and writers own up to their emptiness, the theaters take up religious problems. People are having religious experiences, they are rediscovering the Bible, they light candles in churches, they grope for words to describe their longings. There was indeed a silence after God’s light was eclipsed, but the empty space is now being filled!”

We must never forget that silence too is part of the conversation; nor that the solar eclipse and the paralyzing stillness were often due to the fact that the conversation had lost all meaning. The denial and mockery of religion can be prophetic words that are far more true than many a polished affirmation about God. If the conversation does not allow this silence too to be heard, words become cheap. Garborg noted something of this truth in his novel:

Many seek God today; and some even tell us that they have found God. I read these testimonies. But in this matter, one person cannot help another. They have had it too easy, and they write too fluently. They write and write and write. But we have so little confidence in words. We feel disturbed by everything that is said to the blast of trumpets.

 The solar eclipse is not experienced only by those who lack faith. Often, faith too speaks out of the same desperation, crying out to God and refusing to accept the account the Christian faith gives of him.

It was Abraham, our father in faith, who refused to accept God’s terrible solution to the problem posed by the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah. He called God to account, opposing the small-mindedness of the tribal deity in the name of the divine generosity. But perhaps he fell silent when the towns were destroyed all the same? Is it not Job’s protest against unjust suffering that has inspired people for more than two thousand years, rather than God’s overwhelming demonstration of power, which brings Job to silence at the close of the book? In every generation, there have been Christians who had to get out, to reject the language of their tribe, and settle somewhere else. They had to bid farewell to a fossilized theology and to the pious folklore of their childhood home. Faithfulness to God required them to say “no” to God. They had to lose their speech and their language before they could sing a new song.

A few years ago, I read Tatiana Goricheva’s little book Talking about God Is Dangerous. The title has a double message. It recalls that one risked one’s life in the Soviet Union if one talked about God – this could lead to prison and torture. But the title indicates something even more terrible. She refers directly to her title only once in the book, when she describes the church in the West. She saw a preacher talking about love on television with smoothly practiced gestures and a polished surface. He was long-winded, empty, faceless. “For the first time,” she writes, “I understood how dangerous it is to talk about God. Every word must be a word of sacrifice, full to the brim of authenticity. Otherwise, it is better to be silent.”

Otherwise, it is better to be silent … And yet, we speak!

What is it about faith that makes us break our silence all the time? And what makes us believe that the conversation is possible and meaningful? We are now coming near to the very center of our understanding of God, and of ourselves as human beings. In order to speak clearly, I shall employ images.

According to a Jewish legend, the world was created when God gave birth to the earth from his own body. In other words, the earth is life born of God’s own life, bound to the divinity by the bonds of love and of blood. But at the same time, when the world was born, it became something completely distinct and separated from God. It was to lead its own life: it would attain a true relationship to its origin precisely by being something other than God.

I remember clearly the birth of our first child. As soon as she emerged and the umbilical cord was cut, she opened two big blue eyes which looked at us and said: “Here I am, and there you are.” And we returned her gaze and saw the miracle of a new life – an infant totally dependent on our care and love, and yet the tie binding her to her mother had been cut.

A child is an autonomous living being who must find an equilibrium between nearness and distance, in order to become a complete human being. We can suck the strength out of a child by binding it to ourselves with a thousand ties, we can dominate it and over-protect it, raising it in a symbiotic relationship; but we can also cripple it by means of distance and poor care, creating a mirror image of our own inability to show feelings. In both cases, the relationship is distorted and we end up unable to communicate with each other on any meaningful level. A genuine relationship needs a wide space where child and parents can live in a free interplay. The nearness is taken for granted, but a living relationship presupposes freedom and difference. If a genuine conversation is to take place, distance is just as important as nearness.

The world is God’s first-born creation and bears the imprint of likeness to its Creator. But the umbilical cord is cut before God looks at his earth with proud and loving eyes and sees that his work is good. We must live in an open space of distance and nearness, free to form our lives and to become ourselves. Then we can encounter God face to face, as one distinct from our own selves, and we can talk together. The conversation needs a shared space, a relationship which binds both dialogue partners together; but it also presupposes their difference.

I have long been fascinated by two biblical expressions for the relationship between God and the human person: face and name.

This book speaks of the wish to find the true face of the Godhead. I have described the fear faith experiences when his face disappears. But many are just as much afraid of an insistent nearness, of the face that looms at close quarters, seeing everything and controlling everything.

What sets us free is the presence in an open space, the blessing and peace which are imparted when the Lord lifts his face and lets the light of his face shine. Our conversation with God is now an anticipation of what Paul calls the face-to-face encounter in perfection, when we no longer see only in fragments, and no longer talk like children. Our conversation trains us to approach the Godhead as fully mature persons, freed from parental authority and false ties, so that we can stand upright when we meet Him who is our origin. According to a mysterious tradition, Moses spoke face to face with God on the mountain, as one human being speaks with another (Exodus 33:11).

The name is related to the face. For the Bible, name and reality are one: to know the name is to have power, and power may be used wrongly; but to know the name is also the basis of trust and fellowship. To know God’s name is to share in God, but to misuse his name is to assault God himself.

According to the creation narrative, Adam was permitted to give names to all living beings on the earth. This implies an enormous power, for it is really the Creator who puts names to things. God calls the day light and the darkness night, he gives names to heaven and earth, he determines the number of the stars and calls each one by its name (Genesis 1; Ps 147:4). When he put names to things, Adam received a share in the divine power.

In reality, trust is more important than power. Trust is the close relationship between the one who knows the name and the one who bears it, as we see clearly in the manner in which the Bible employs names. Again and again, we are told that God calls people by name: “Adam, where are you? … Your name shall be ‘Abraham’.” Jacob is given the name “Israel” because he wrestled with God and won. God calls Moses, Samuel, the prophets. The Servant of the Lord is called from his mother’s womb, and God has spoken his name before he was born (Isaiah 49:1). He has called and formed the people too: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). The good shepherd calls his sheep by name. In the New Testament, the nameless are given a name: we do not know the name of the rich man who lived in luxury, but Lazarus, the beggar at his door, has a name that resounds down through the centuries (Luke 16:29-31). He is the representative of the innumerable nameless and despised persons who received life because the Master gave their names a meaning.

We say: “In the name of Jesus,” and there is a rich treasury of hymns and prayers which praise this name – love-poetry at its finest.

Faces can be disfigured, images can be distorted until they are unrecognizable, names can be misused for evil purposes. This is the risk in every conversation. But if we refuse to take this risk, there will never be any true encounter! Trust is created when we make ourselves vulnerable and turn an unveiled face to another, waiting for his reply. The conversation gets going when one of the partners dares to trust that the other will not misuse his name, but will instead protect it.

We are formed by the images and words we use. Faces and names do something to us. It is certainly not irrelevant to ask which images of God we carry around with us; and our choice of words and names for the divine thing is equally important. Do we evoke the radiant face of blessing, or the blind god, the stern father who mocks the helpless? God's eye can be full of concern, an eye that neither slumbers nor sleeps. But it can also be Garborg's divinity, who watched over him "with eyes of fire," so that he had to escape in order to know gladness. Or it can be the Son of Man who "possessed the healing word / and help / where the others merely pronounce judgments / and raise cold eyes.” Or it can be a divinity who is the eternal rock that blocks the path to our benefactor.

We have tried out a number of images and words: face to face; the name that calls to another name; the umbilical cord is cut and the child meets its own origin as Another. Many people criticize Christianity for directing its faith to something outside the human person, thereby depriving us of our autonomy. There is something correct in this charge, but it is basically wrong, since the point is not that we localize faith somewhere else and seek an object “out there.” The important thing is the relationship, the interconnection. Faith lives in the space between, i.e. in what we call trust, conversation, encounter, and love.

When we keep on breaking the silence and speaking, this is not because we have adequate words to describe God or to speak to him, but because conversation is the innermost essence of faith in God. If the divine had been a set of rules inherent in the world, an idea, or an impersonal divine force permeating all things – including the deepest dimension in our own being – then we could perfectly well have remained silent, as in some forms of mysticism, which rest in the realm of the unutterable. Enter your own sanctuary, they say, and remain in the silence; words are superfluous, since you yourself are the divine. Here there is no face for us to meet, no Other with whom we can converse, only unity with our own innermost self.

In the Christian faith, I encounter Another, a face and a name that are not my own. This is my origin, but the umbilical cord has been cut. I must grow apart from my mother’s womb and my father’s embrace, learning to straighten my back and stand face to face.

We too can remain silent as we stand before the divine mystery; words are obviously inadequate. But the silence will always be broken, just as a man and woman who love one another will always grope for words to express their love, however poorly. In the same way, friends cannot remain silent. The beloved one has a face.

How can we speak credibly about the object of our faith? How can language be recovered, and the words arise from the dead?

“We must pull up our socks,” think the preachers – and get a bad conscience. “We must improve our formulations, discover new images, seek inspiration in poetry and literature, speak with greater commitment, draw on art for help …”

Rhetoric and beauty are certainly important, but I have come to believe that the vital thing is not our ability to formulate or our rhetorical skill, but the space in which our words are heard, and not least the space which our words create. We must help people to experience faith anew as an open space, a landscape they can enter, where they will receive a language by hearing and speaking, seeing, and experiencing. But they need fresh air around them in this landscape, and they must be free to leave again.

People are accustomed to see faith as something ministers and preachers want to force down their throats: a system, a language, a whole world of opinions that they must accept. The words are weapons launched against them, seeking their weak points. They are meant to sting like salt in open wounds, giving them a bad conscience. The goal is to bring them to conversion. But they get claustrophobia and then retreat, since there is no place for their own reality in the words’ closed room. The church’s language reminds them too much of authorities that seek control, of parents who cannot let go of their children.

If language is to live, it must be formed in a vast space, large enough to accommodate the whole of life. It must be tested in longing and rebellion. It must have depths in which both blasphemy and adoration can resonate – and desperation, fear, and exultation. Abraham could quarrel with God because he inhabited a huge universe of faith. Job and the prophets shook their fists at God and cursed the day of their birth because they needed fresh air around them. Language must be heard in a vast room of faith which people can enter without feeling imprisoned. Perhaps such a room will make it possible for them to really commit themselves!

Some people have to go so far away that the last remaining bit of the umbilical cord breaks, before they come as adults to long for another kind of conversation, and try to pick up the threads once more. Perhaps the god who breathed fear and coldness into them may turn out to have loving qualities. There must also be space for the “foreigners” who want to try out a language they have never learned. In this way, faith can become a voyage of discovery, on which their lives are given a place in a larger landscape with new dimensions and new joys – though assuredly, there will be hitherto unknown abysses as well.

Ultimately, it is the Gospels’ stories about Jesus that open up the landscape and sketch a face of God that allows us to believe that our longing can actually lead somewhere.

It is not by chance that Jesus was a wanderer – from one village to another in Galilee’s mountain landscape, with their pastures and small fields, on streets and market squares, and in the wildernesses where no one lived. Around him, a whole world took form. People were drawn into a reality that was utterly close yet different and new – a reality he called “the kingdom of God.” This was not a place, but a path and a landscape which they were permitted to share by following him and trying it out for themselves.

The Gospels speak of very simple matters: Jesus meets people and talks with them, touches them, blesses them, eats with them, heals, weeps, speaks about life’s mysteries, about God. They had indeed heard about this, but now it was here! The path also went to Jerusalem, where it seemed that Jesus’ world was collapsing – the king in the kingdom of God received a gallows as his throne. In his world, God was the highest and the lowest. Heaven and hell were God’s place.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not a nice but powerless reconciler, with no weapons to challenge the divinity who was an “eternal rock.” The Jesus of the Gospels is not an absent figure who never dared to knock on the door, because a brutal father and a blind god were all too much alive for him. No, in the Gospels it is the Highest himself who visits the earth. God makes his way through narrow lanes and back alleys and says: “Let there be light!” Eyes that were dulled become bright, people straighten up. Those who had been despised are given back their names, and the sinners receive a face.

If this is the face of God, then we can straighten up and try to speak. The Almighty has a human countenance. This is a God whose hands tremble, to borrow Enquist’s image: “It had never occurred to me before now that God was afraid … Really, it seemed that God was afraid.” This is a God whose image is reflected in the fear felt by the victims – and by the executioners and the traitors. What other founder of a religion was terror-stricken and cried out: “Now is my soul full of fear” (John 12:27)? Jesus’ life and death – his failure, in human terms – were not a sacrifice demanded by a harsh God, nor were they the defeat of a well-meaning idealist. No, they were made of the same stuff as life itself. Those who ruled were able to take power and honor from Jesus, for he himself had already laid such things aside; but they could not take life and love from him.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, something of this Jesus was revealed in the glimpses of life and of meaning in Delblanc’s gloomy world: the fruit-tree in the abandoned smallholding which bloomed unseen in the dark forest and told him “something about consolation in spite of everything, a message about a generous love which grows in the barrenest of soils … It was like seeing God”!

What I have written about the relationship to God implies that the meeting between God and the human person takes the form of a conversation. This relationship is nourished by words, develops in words, and is shaped by words. The intensity varies, and there is an alternation between distance and closeness; words may be many or few. And it is certainly true that the spoken word is not the only form of expression! Nevertheless, faith seeks words.

It may be tempting to reflect on the consequences which this basic relationship to God has for the language of theology and of preaching, but I content myself here with one single affirmation. One element in the crisis in theology and preaching is that they have become detached from the fundamental language of conversation, that conversation which takes the form of prayer, lamentation and hymns of praise, cries of fear and of joy, accusation and protest, the longing of the abandoned lover, the intimate dialogue, the poetry of love, and the silence that simply waits for the other.

The language of preaching and theology is not, of course, this direct conversation itself. But its language is without passion when it loses contact with the experiences and insights we derive from the direct conversation. The words become abstract, lifeless, and tedious.

We must return briefly to one point, which was taken up in the introduction to this section: the solar eclipse, the silence after God disappears. For it is not only ideas that put God in the shadow; it is not only distorted images of God and a ruined language that reduce us to silence. We can solve such problems by renewing our language and painting other images. But what are we to do when the eclipse is caused by the brutality of reality itself, when we are plagued in our hearts by the absence of light and of goodness, when it seems that darkness reigns?

Faith has no solution to this, nor any genuinely satisfactory answer; nevertheless, it answers in the inner distress. It answers by speaking. The biblical answer is protest, the cry of anguish, accusation, and expectation – “How long? Have you forgotten us? Have you forgotten who you are, o God?” Faith speaks because it goes deeper than the inner distress, and is nourished by hope’s defiance. Many factors can block our view, dull our eyes, and spread the contagion of hopelessness. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is impossible for us to profess the optimistic faith in divine providence which came so naturally to earlier generations, whose life was successful but who perhaps saw less. A thousand truths assault our faith in God’s goodness, which is full of contradictions and as vulnerable as a little child in the thick of battle.

This is why we continue to speak. Hope must be proclaimed, hope must be repeated as a protest. We must urge people to hope, setting up a bulwark against pessimism and all the forces that destroy life. We must remind one another unceasingly of the signs that point to the deepest forces in life and are stronger and truer than the signs that point to annihilation.

In the depths, our words of hope draw their nourishment from faith in a God whose hands tremble, who is familiar with abandonment, a God who resembles the cherry-tree defiantly blossoming unseen on barren ground, a God who has a face like the Son of Man.

 

But a Son of Man

who knew us

and knew everything,

and possessed the healing word

and help

where the others merely pronounce judgments

and raise cold eyes;

a Son of Man –

oh, why are you no longer here on earth!

 

Garborg was right to reject the overwhelming, power-hungry Father. If he had persevered in his search, his appreciation of the Son of Man might perhaps have restored the Father to him. The reader perceives this possibility in the silent wonder at the close of his novel: “If I could live a few more years, and lead a new life, I believe that I could still find the Father.”

 

[1] Chapter from Notto R. Thelle, Seeking God’s Face: Faith in a Time of Perplexity, Paulist Press, 2008.