Revised and expanded — Spiritual development: two hypotheses, two poems, and Beethoven's conclusion

Dear friends,
 
This morning I reread this excerpt from Wordsworth's ode, "Intimations of 
Immortality," and it reminded me of a thought I've long had about our access 
to the deepest spiritual experience — we could say, our relationship to God, 
perhaps as at least distant kin to that of Moses by the burning bush.

Here is Wordsworth,
 from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" 
 
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more!

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

So something like this: There was once a time for me 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
 But no more; the "celestial light" is gone. The world is still lovely — 
rainbows come and go, I find delight in a rose, the moon, a starry night,
the warmth andlight of the sun. But that glory I once saw, I can no longer see.


The simple thought I had was only this: 
Like most of our generous capacities of body, mind and heart, the depth 
and range of our later experiences of spiritual life — in Wordsworth's 
terms, what we see and what we do not — are first and foremost nourished 
— if at all — in our years of early childhood, an interactive combination 
of neuronal growth — largely, perhaps, in the prefrontal cortex, but more likely 
throughout our bodies — and, critically, the deep bond with at least one Other 
that is secure, continuous, and deeply loving. 


We've usually imagined, and exhaustively observed, the early bonds 
between mother and child. It might not be mother — it could have been 
another, an aunt, a grandmother, a nurse, even a father or grandfather. 
But by age 5 or so that capacity for spiritual experience 
has often grown about as much as it will for the rest of life.
That is no small growth — the whole of life is immesurably
enriched. The early glory may still appear at moments of 
numinous experience. But as Wordsworth said with such
courage and anguish, its continuity is lost. 
And yet.... 


the remarkable plasticity of the human brain, of our whole body's 
neuronal capacity to regrow what was lost, allows for 
exception, for neuronal and social development later in life that 
can increase and nourish our capacity for spirituality — largely, 
I imagine, through enduring practice of spiritual disciplines —
particularly the practices of prayer and meditation —
and most often in the company of others sharing similar devotion.
The experimental evidence is compelling, from such sources as neuro-
imaging of Tibetan monks*, and at least suggestively in Dan Siegel's 
pioneering work at UCLA  in interpersonal neurobiology.
 
• See also:  
http://www.mindandlife.org (Mind and Life Institute)

http://www.psyphz.psych.wisc.edu (the affective neuroscience lab at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison)



Dürer's engraving depicting St. Jerome


Here is the second poem I promised, by Stephen Mitchell:
JEROME


In Dürer’s engraving
You sit hunched over your desk,
writing, with an extraneous
halo around your head.
You have everything you need: a mind
at ease with itself, and the generous
sunlight on pen, page, ink,
the few chairs, the vellum-bound books,
the skull on the windowsill that keeps you
honest (memento mori).
What you are concerned with
in your subtle craft is not simply
the life of language—to take
those boulder-like nouns of the Hebrew
text, those torrential verbs,
into your ear and remake them
in the hic-haec-hoc of your time—
but an innermost truth. For years
you listened when the Spirit was
the faintest breeze, not even the
breath of a sound. And wondered
how the word of God could be clasped
between the covers of a book.
Now, by the latticed window,
absorbed in your work,
the word becomes flesh, becomes sunlight
and leaf-mold, the smell of fresh bread
from the bakery down the lane,
the rumble of an ox-cart, the unconscious
ritual of a young woman
combing her hair, the bray
of a mule, an infant crying:
the whole vibrant life
of Bethlehem, outside your door.
None of it is an intrusion.
You are sitting in the magic circle
of yourself. In a corner, the small
watchdog is curled up, dreaming,
and beside it, on the threshold, the lion
dozes, with half-closed eyes.





Literally, yes, "the word becomes flesh," the sacred language 
comes alive, bursts from the text into life. "Flesh" is descriptive 
of more than human being, of mule and leaf-mold and sunlight, 
of all the earth. 


If Jerome was the man evoked by Stephen Mitchell, and heard 
his words, I can imagine Jerome at such a moment taking up 
his quill pen and writing his own poem in response, something 
in the spirit of these lines by Robinson Jeffers:


..... I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great life of the ancient peaks, 
the patience of stone, I felt the
     changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain... 
and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood;
and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, 
each one the lord of his own summit;
    and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, 
they were a part of me. I was mankind also,
a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...

_______________________



"I was mankind also, a moving lichen 
On the cheek of the round stone..." 
That is as lovely — I cannot claim as accurate — an image of 
humankind as I know — as lovely and as necessary to absorb 
into our hearts, minds and bodies, that we might renew 
ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy.*


Finally, and most tentatively, because I am a beginner as a student of 
Beethoven, I come to what I've termed "Beethoven's conclusion."
I love his late work, the string quartets, the Missa Solemnis, and the 
adaptation of Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" in his Ninth symphony. 
I am adopting a hypothesis I first heard on NPR (Weekend Edition,
February 12, 2006) from the American composer Jan Swofford.


A reader must hear the music Swofford and I describe to begin to have an aural 
sense of its meaning. Even then the mystery remains. I suggest, whenever 
possible, listening to live performances of the Missa Solemnis and the 
Ninth Symphony, and then the recordings by the Vienna Philarmonic conducted 
by Karl Böhm. 


The key passages of the Missa Solemnis are the last two movements, 
Sanctus: Praeludium - Benedictus, and Agnus Dei ; and of the Ninth 
Symphony, the final "Ode to Joy." 
Here is Jan Swofford:
    The Catholic mass which Beethoven called the Missa Solemnis is rarely performed. 
It's eclipsed by the better-known Ninth Symphony. But taken together, the two works 
shed light on the composer's spiritual world view.
   The Missa Solemnis may be the greatest piece never heard. Nearly 90 minutes long, it requires 
a large chorus, an orchestra and four soloists. It's impractical for the concert hall and fits far less 
comfortably into a Catholic church service.
    It concludes with a fraught, fragile and unanswered plea for peace amid the drumbeats of war. 
    But the answer comes in the Ninth Symphony, with its chorale finale based on Schiller's poem
"Ode to Joy," written in a time of revolution.

Those words and Beethoven's music call for humankind to kneel before the creator, but for
answers to turn to one another. The path to peace, he suggests, is bestowed not from above
but from within us and among us, in brotherhood.

 
 * Note: I am indebted to Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., for his account of 
Jerome's life in the Church and the character of his translations, to 

Stephen Mitchell's poems and his Jeffersonian volume, The Gospel 
According to Jesus (HarperCollins, 2001), to Joanna Macy's book, 
Coming Back to Life (New Society Publishers, 1998) for the gift of 
Robinson Jeffers' poem embodying earth consciousness. It is an excerpt 
from "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," The Collected Poetry of 
Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford University Press, 1988). 


I want to conclude this circuitous exploration of spiritual experience with lines 
from Leonard Cohen's song, "Anthem" They should also be heard, 
in his voice, before they are read:
Ring the bells that still can ring, 
Forget your perfect offering, 
There is a crack, a crack in everything, 

That’s how the light gets in.