Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Don't go back to sleep

In our midweek meditation this afternoon we focused on the experience of awakening, and I found myself reciting a favorite poem of Rumi. Another of our members said that in her Buddhist tradition the same poem was regularly part of day-long shesshins. So we said together:

 

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

 

Remembering Rumi's poem, another poem, a prayer, came to mind, from Shantideva, an 8th century Buddhist monk and scholar:

 

May I be a protector to those without protection,

A guide for those who journey,

And a boat, a bridge, a passage

For those desiring the further shore...

 

Listening for the Heartbeat: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality

Two weeks ago two friends and I attended a retreat at Santa Sabena Center in San Rafael, devoted to an exploration of Celtic Christianity. The leader was John Philip Newell, a deeply informed and eloquent minister in the Church of Scotland, whose understanding of the spiritual tradition of Celtic Christianity is unparalleled. The retreat’s theme was “Falling in Love Across Traditions.” John Philip devoted a day each to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Celtic presence in all three. We are exploring the development of a presentation on Celtic spirituality at our own community, The Redwoods, in Mill Valley, CA, a project for which I wrote the summary below. I emphasize the summary's brevity: Much of importance in the practice of Celtic Christianity has been left out, including the importance of meditation, the lives, legends and thoughts of most of those who have kept the Celtic flame burning, rekindling it when it has been ignored or rejected by the Church, and the distinctive Celtic perspective on sin and evil.

 

Listening for the Heartbeat: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality

The title above reflects our gratitude to John Philip Newell, a gifted and accomplished minister in the Church of Scotland and leader for many years in the study of Celtic spirituality. Some of us had the privilege of meeting John Philip at a recent retreat that moved us deeply. Much of what follows is grounded in his teaching, which is widely available via YouTube video and in his books.

The Celtic tradition has been practiced in Europe since at least the 4^th century AD.  It has found its deepest and most continuous expression in regions

we recognize as Gaelic*—Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

John Philip has identified two major features of the Celtic spiritual tradition that distinguish it from what has been commonly called a ‘Mediterranean tradition’. The first, in his words, “is marked by the belief that what is deepest in us is the image of God.” All living beings have that common core, so it could as well be said that deepest of all in our natures we are ‘of God.’ And implicit in that fact is the second feature, that creation itself is essentially good. “Not only is creation viewed as a blessing, it is regarded in essence as an expression of God,” to be cherished and nourished.

If, then, Celtic belief and experience are grounded in an assumption that the universe emerges from the womb of the Eternal, matter is no neutral substance, but (again in John Philip’s words) “a holy and living energy born from the hidden depths of God… It is a body with one Heartbeat. Christ comes to lead us back into the dance. In him we hear the beat that comes from the heart of all things…” The well-being for which I yearn will come only in relationship to my, your and our well-being and the well-being of all things. Our salvation will come through and with one another, because “it is the ancient Wholeness of which we are a part.”

The Christian tradition of Celtic life, “inspired by John, remembered him as the beloved disciple who leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper. He had become an image of the practice of listening for the heartbeat of God. This spirituality lent itself to listening for God at the heart of life… As such, it was part of an ancient stream of contemplative spirituality stretching back to St. John the Evangelist and even to the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament. It was [and remains] a spirituality characterized by a listening within all things for the life of God.” As Pelagius, one of Celtic Christianity’s early 4^th  century exemplars, wrote,“It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him.”

The implications of such striving are manifold. For example, loving our neighbor as ourselves means loving not only our human neighbor but all the life forms that surround us. Becoming like a child is “recovering the inner faculties we were born with and using them to glimpse the presence of spirit in created matter.”  Or again here is Newell on Gaelic perspectives on gender and sexuality: “The Celtic world was one that gave much greater scope to the role of women and more fully incorporated both the feminine and the masculine into its religious life and imagery.” Either male or female images may be used to describe God… “Our sexual energies reflect, in their goodness, God’s yearnings for intimacy, creative expression and new life.”

St. Patrick’s mission to Ireland in the 5^th century exemplifies many of the distinguishing features of Celtic spirituality. The famous ‘Breastplate’ hymn attributed to Patrick includes the following lines:

 

I bind unto myself today

The virtues of the star-lit heaven,

The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,

The whiteness of the moon at even,

The flashing of the lightning free,

The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,

The stable earth, the deep salt sea

Around the old eternal rocks.

 

“There is not in the Celtic way of seeing a great gap between heaven and earth. Rather, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.”

In the century following Patrick’s mission to Ireland “there came the greatest flourishing of Celtic spirituality… in which 6^th century Ireland witnessed a creative encounter between the Christianity that Patrick and others had brought and the nature mysticism of the pre-Christian Druidic religion… The pre-Christian nature mysticism became almost like the Old Testament of the Celtic Church… The gospel was seen as fulfilling rather than destroying the old Celtic mythologies.”

Newell spoke with particular affection of the legendary 6^th century Brigid, the abbess of Kildare. “Kildare means ‘church of the oaks’ and oak groves had of course been sacred places for the Druids… and St. Brigid’s Kildare was a Celtic religious community for both men and women. There were many such double monasteries, for the Celtic Church neither totally separated the sexes nor displayed the fear of sexuality that was to dominate much of the Western Church. As in Eastern Orthodoxy, there were married priests and celibate monks, but the ecclesiastic leadership of women such as Brigid was peculiar to the Celtic Church. The Irish came to revere Brigid as their patron — or rather, mother — saint, second only to Patrick. Pre-Christian holy sites and communities like Kildare, including that on the western island of Iona and the monastery of Lindisfarne, have regained their Celtic character to this day.

Consider the Celtic Cross, in which creation and Scripture themes are again combined and inseparable. “The orb at the center of the cross, probably representing the sun and the light of the world, and certainly the Scripture and nature images carved on opposite sides of the cross, express the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Bible. They reflect the practice of listening for the Word of God in nature as well as in the Scriptures.”

 

From Krista Tippett’s wonderful weekly program called “On Being (www.onbeing.org): “The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Ċara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual — the visible and the invisible — intertwine in human experience. His voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.”

Here is O’Donohue’s most well-known poem. The word "bennacht" means blessing in Gaelic.

 

Beannacht

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought                            
and a stain of ocean                                   
blackens beneath you,                               
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 

* Indeed, the two words are of common origin.

A second poem by James Wright

Having just addressed myself to James Wright's poem "The Blessing," I found that I couldn't let him go, for rereading "The Blessing" led me to another of his most admired poems, one bearing close kinship to "The Blessing."

 

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

 

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

 

Like "The Blessing" but with more diverse interpretation, discussion in critical circles has focused particularly on the last lines—in this instance on the single last line, "I have wasted my life." In relation to "The Blessing," there is considerable agreement that the poet's experience of the ponies in the pasture inspire a recognition of transcendence. Here, however, there is more wonder about the suddenness and ambiguity of the last line, almost at the expense of examining its relationship to the lines above, the butterfly, cowbell and horse droppings, the coming of evening and the chicken hawk's looking for home. How has the poet concluded that he has wasted his life? Analogy with "The Blessing" suggests a sense of mystery, even grandeur, in the natural world that has eluded him, prompting a dark conviction of his life wasted. But the critical response to the last line of  "Lying in a Hammock" is rich in confusion and variety. As an article in The Paris Review (where the poem was first published) puts it: 

"[T]hat last line has inspired reams of analysis and debate—is it a lament? Is it a joke, a kind of boast? Did Wright intend to undercut or to bolster his pastoral scene with it?" Wright himself characterized the line as "a religious statement... here I am and I’m not straining myself and yet I’m happy at this moment, and perhaps I’ve been wastefully unhappy in the past because through my arrogance or whatever, and in my blindness, I haven’t allowed myself to pay true attention to what was around me," a characterization similar to the consensual understanding of the conclusion of "The Blessing." His friend Robert Bly writes similarly, "In poems the deepest thoughts are often the most painful thoughts, and they come to consciousness only despite the rationalist road-blocks, by slipping past the defenses of the ego."

James Wright's poem, "A Blessing"

This morning a friend who was leading our meditation group recited a poem that has long been a favorite of mine, but which I'd never heard read aloud. If one is truly listening, and the reader at least passably skillful at the demanding task of reading poetry aloud well (alas, less common among contemporary poets than one would wish), there is a distinctive pleasure to be had in the hearing. I put it this way for the moment: The poem, in effect, is lifted above the page, comes alive in a different way than when read in privacy — not to say better, but different. So I wish I could offer the poem read aloud, as well as here on the page of Reckonings: alas, not possible, at least to one of my technical skill.

The poem was James Wright's "A Blessing."

 

A Blessing

 

 

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.   

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me   

And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

 

                — James Wright

 

 

I am now so close to my re-experiencing of the poem that I have no desire to wade into discussion of its meaning, except to say what comes clear in its last lines: how lingering with the ponies inspires the poet's experience of transcendence. I say lingering, but it isn't a matter of time's quantity, rather of its quality. Wright's friend, the poet Robert Bly, wrote of his memory of the occasion for its composition: "One day James and I were driving back to Minneapolis from a visit with Christina and Bill Duffy at their farm in Pine Island, Minnesota. Christina loved horses, had been a rider in Sweden, and continued to keep horses here. So horses were very much on both our minds. Just south of Rochester [Minnesota], James saw two ponies off to the left and said, "Let’s stop." So we did, and climbed over the fence toward them. We stayed only a few minutes, but they glowed in the dusk, and we could see it. On the way to Minneapolis James wrote in his small spiral notebook the poem he later called "A Blessing."