Words expressive of spiritual experience — especially our very conceptions of psyche and spirit, God and religion — but also others to which I've devoted attention in Reckonings, such as Sabbath, pilgrimage and prayer, tend to suffer in our popular culture from constrained and reductionist definitions that fail to do justice to their richness of meaning and distort our awareness of the interconnectedness of things. In conventional usage and understanding they deny us access to the fullness of experience available to us.
The very religious traditions in which many of us were immersed in the formative years of our childhood too often set the pattern for such impoverishment, leaching into our adult lives.
It's often useful to put aside conventional questions of of belief and existence in order to dwell on the importance of attention.
In doing so we can remind ourselves of and become more alive to what we've missed, and of that for which, knowingly or not, we yearn. Poets whom I have invoked in Reckonings, like T.S. Eliot, Stanley Kunitz, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, have written of this opportunity for redemption. Here, for example, is Mary Oliver's short poem on prayer, from her book Thirst.
Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
another voice may speak.
~ Mary Oliver ~