Triocentric

A Debt We Must All Pay

2011-12-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

Man is born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward.--Eliphaz (to Job) ca A Long Time Ago

Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows, and we are gone—as though we had never been here. -- King David ca 1000BC

Life is suffering.--Siddhartha Guatama, the Buddha ca 530BC

But learn that to die is a debt we must all pay. --Euripides ca 430 BC

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.--Socrates ca 410BC

That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. For life is more than food, and your body more than clothing.--Jesus ca 30AD

God’s purpose for my life was that I have a passion for God’s glory and that I have a passion for my joy in that glory, and that these two are one passion.--Jonathan Edwards 18th Century

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.--Charles Darwin 19th Century

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.--Einstein 20th century

A Poor Life This

2011-12-10T21:32:00.001-08:00

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W. H. Davies

Death By Small Doses

2011-12-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

To follow yesterday's post of Ode To Life by Pablo Neruda, here is another poem by the same name. I've been told that it is also Neruda, but after scouring a dozen of his books I can find no trace of it. I don't know if it is his or not. Internet sites credit it to Neruda, but where is the paper version of it?

Regardless of who wrote it, it is an intriguing poem. The two are very different in many ways, but both sound clear and ringing warnings, and each are woven throughout with hope and possiblility.

Ode To Life

Slowly dies he who becomes a slave to habit,
repeating the same journey every day,
he who doesn’t change his march, he who doesn’t risk
and change the color of his clothes, he who doesn’t speak to him whom he doesn’t know.

Slowly dies he who makes of the television his guru,
Slowly he who avoids a passion dies, he who prefers
black on white and dots on "i"s rather than a gnawing of emotions
exactly those that make the eyes shine,
those that make the heart beat
before error and feeling.

Slowly dies he who doesn’t overturn the table,
he who is unhappy in his work,

he who doesn’t risk certainty for uncertainty
to follow a dream,
he who doesn’t permit himself at least one time in his life
to flee sensible counsel.

Slowly dies he who doesn’t travel, he who doesn’t read,
he who doesn’t listen to music,

he who doesn’t find grace in himself.
Slowly he who destroys his own love dies,
he who doesn’t allow himself to be helped.
Slowly he who passes his days lamenting
about his own misfortune or the incessant rain dies.

Slowly dies he who abandons a project
before beginning it,
he who doesn’t ask questions about topics he doesn’t know,
he who doesn’t answer when he is asked something that he knows.

Let’s avoid death by small doses,
remembering always that being alive
requires a much larger effort
than the simple act of breathing.

Only burning patience will bring
within reach a splendid happiness.

His Mistaken Solitude

2011-12-08T19:03:00.000-08:00

Today I walked around mulling over this question of life: What is it? Why do I sometimes feel very much alive and sometimes I feel hardly alive? Do the dead still feel, to themselves, as if they lived? And as I mused I noticed a bumper sticker that read simply: "Smile. You're Alive!" And so I smiled. Because I'm alive. And I can.

Then I came home and looked up the following poem by Pablo Neruda. While this is called Ode To Life, Neruda also wrote another poem that is much more well known and has the same title. I'll post it tomorrow.

Ode to life

The entire night
armed with a hatchet,
has broken me with grief,
but sleep
like dark water washed away
the bloody stones.

Today again I am alive.
Again, life
I lift you up,
upon my shoulders.

Oh life,
clear cup,
suddenly
you fill up with
dirty water,
lifeless wine,
agony, losses, and
overhanging spider webs,
and many believe
you will guard
this nightmarish tint forever.
That is not true.

A lingering night passes,
just one minute passes
and everything changes.
Life's cup
fills up
with transparent brilliance.
The wide quest
awaits us.
Doves are born in a solitary burst.
Light reigns again over the earth.

Life, the poor
poets
believed you to be bitter.
They did not rise from bed
with you
and face the winds of the world.

They received beatings
without searching for you.
They tunneled
a black hole
and continued their journeys,
submerged
in mourning,
drowning in a well of loneliness.
That is not true, life.

You are
beautiful
like my beloved;
between your breasts,
the perfume of spearmint sings.

Life,
you are
a complete instrument,,
happiness, sounds
of storm, tenderness
of mellow oil.

Life,
you are like a vineyard:
you treasure and dole out light-and share
in the fruits of transformation.

Whoever disowns you
should wait
a minute, a night,
a short or long year,
to emerge
from his mistaken solitude,
to search and fight, to join
hands with other hands.

Do not adopt, do not praise
misfortune,
Reject it, giving it the form
of a wall,
like the stonecutter with the stone.
Take scissors to misfortune,
and make
a pair of trousers.

Life
waits for us-
all of us
who cherish
the wild perfume of the sea,
and the celebration of spearmint
nestled between its breasts.

.

We Die In Earnest

2011-12-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

What is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division,
Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.

What really is our life? Is it, as Sir Walter Raleigh said, just a "short comedy"? Or should we complain with MacBeth that:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Having come, along with dozens of other big name philosophers, to the conclusion that life has no significance beyond itself (Life, and everything else for them was what they called "absurd.") Camus declared:

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

He's right. Job's wife recognized this also, and told him that in the face of what seemed to her to be cosmic injustice the only answer was to "Curse God and die." She meant, I think, suicide.

What we think our life is makes a bit of a difference in how we live it. Raleigh at the top of this post really wasn't talking half as much about his doctrine of what LIFE really is as he was poking fun at all of us for the half-hearted way in which we live it. But the two are related. And, as he reminds us, however we live and whatever we think it means, we die in earnest. If Camus and his fellows chose to kill themselves because that is what their philosophical ponderings drove them to, then their deaths would have been absolutely in earnest. They would have been fraught with all the angst and religious and political meaning that Camus et al denied really existed. Their deaths would have disproved the very basis and reason for them. But no matter. They would have been in earnest!

Now, I'd like to present a challenge to anyone who cares to take it up.

Over the course of this month, contemplate life: its meaning, the way it is done, how/why it ends, etc., etc., etc.. Then write a short (or not short) poem about what life is. Any form. Any approach. Any ideas. Anything.

Email them to me at my email address that is on the left hand side of my profile page. If you can't find that, my email is simply my name, with no dots or spaces, at hotmail dot com. I too will try to come up with something. Then, in the first day or two of next year I'll post your submissions.

So Remembering

2011-12-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sheltered From Winds That Beat On Thee

2011-12-04T17:41:00.000-08:00

Amy Carmichael: no soft slippers on her feet, no dainty parisian meals to be toyed with and coyly pushed around her plate, no doting hubby protecting her from the scars of the world. In her mission in India she faced the harsh realities of sin in our world, of destroyed lives, of meager rations and little hope for improvement. She willingly sought that life as a young woman, raised in a world of plenty, and more than plenty. Why? For others? Yes. For the girls whom she rescued? Yes! But there seems to be much more to it than that, as this poem and many of her others hint at.

FLAME OF GOD

From prayer that asks that I may be
Sheltered from winds that beat on Thee,
From fearing when I should aspire,
From faltering when I should climb higher
From silken self, O Captain, free
Thy soldier who would follow Thee.

From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified,
Not this way went the Crucified)
From all that dims Thy Calvary
O Lamb of God, deliver me.

Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire;
Let me not sink to be a clod;
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.

How can I become more like Amy Carmichael?

Your Book, Just As You Laid It Down

2011-02-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

Interim

The room is full of you! -- As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick! --

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room's dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers, --
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death --
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And wheresoe'er I look is hideous change.
Save here. Here 'twas as if a weed-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
And suddenly thought, "I have been here before!"

You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door. -- So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key! --
The room is as you left it; your last touch --
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly -- hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust's grey fingers like a shielded light.

There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table, -- I cannot believe
That you are gone! -- Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, "I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end";
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro. . .

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a "t",
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric "e's". You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again. If you had known --
But then, it does not matter, -- and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, "I picked the first sweet-pea to-day."
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow? -- O my love,
The things that withered, -- and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!)
That day -- that day you picked the first sweet-pea, --
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet? -- If only God
Had let us love, -- and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th' eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet, -- I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
'Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known --
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
There, there it dangles, -- where's the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!

"*I had you and I have you now no more*."

O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified? -- Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God -- O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? 'Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move, -- and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak, -- and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life, -- a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast, -- save that contrast's wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now -- what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
Plant things above your grave -- (the common balm
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.

I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, "My face is turned to you";
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
But this I know: -- not for one second's space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.
Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!
My sorrow shall be dumb!

-- What do I say?
God! God! -- God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken, -- that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing, -- birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant -- looking over -- and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight --

* * * * *

Ah, I am worn out -- I am wearied out --
It is too much -- I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.

For Our Conversation Is In Heaven

2010-11-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Ledderer relates the story that when St. Paul's Cathedral burned in the fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren was hired to rebuild it. After 35 years of work the new building was finished and Queen Anne came to see it. After a tour she told Sir Christopher that his cathedral was "awful, artificial and amusing." He was delighted! What splendid praise from the queen!

"Awful" of course meant awe inspiring. "Artificial" meant that it was very artisticly fashioned. And "amusing" meant that it was inspired by the muses, a godlike creation. How could these words have changed meaning so much in just three hundred years? They in fact mean something like the opposite now compared to what Queen Anne meant and what Sir Christopher understood.

It is an odd but common phenomenon that words can have two absolutely contrary meanings. In the end one of them usually gives way to the other so that we are left with but a single meaning and we forget that the other meaning once held sway. This is one reason people need to use their minds extra well when they read the King James Bible and Shakespeare. They are two hundred years older yet, and words have changed even more than since Queen Anne's day. But that's another story.

For now, consider a few words that we use every day that still have two diametrically opposed meanings that are both more or less standard. Will one meaning eventually win out? Who knows?

Weather-- (to wear down, to stand up well) I love the weathered look on old courthouses. This boat is built to weather any storm.

With -- (for, against) If you refuse to go to war with us against the infidels, then we will consider ourselves to already be in a state of war with you.

Clip -- (disattach, attach) After you clip the coupon, please clip it to the shopping list.

Left -- (gone, remaining) Q-If six children were playing in a schoolyard, and two left, how many were left? A-None, they were alright.

Of course there are hundreds more of these contronyms. What about fast, bolt, mortal, out, etc.

What favorites do you have that should be added to the list?

Had I Leant My Eyes Unduly?

2010-10-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

This is, I think, only the second time that I've posted an original poem of mine on here. I don't normally like to do so, but in honor of my friends Devika and Wan Dee I will do it. This is a first draft, so I totally welcome the harshest criticism while I work toward a final version.

When I wrote this I somewhat used Edna St Vincent Millay's poem Renascence as a jumping off point. You will notice similarities in our beginnings, but not much more. If you click on her name below you can see her poem.

Glimmer

Two tall pines and a sugar maple
Upside down in the pond I see;
Two tall pines and a scarlet maple
With dark’ning sky below the three.

I skip a rock and watch them falter
Just above their dark’ning sky;
But slow their lines return, unaltered,
True and solid there they lie.

Such glory there! Such majesty!
Of leaden pine ‘round maple’s fire;
While underneath their trinity
The purpling sky seems God’s own pyre.

To see them nearer, ‘round I trot
And turn again to where they’d been;
But now a hill, a field, a sunset,
Fill the pond where trees had lain.

Had they been there? Had I seen truly?
Had they existed in that pond?
Or had I leant my eyes unduly
Toward false beauty in that pond?

Was it just a trick of sight
That made me love what wasn’t there?
Did my eye manipulate
The fading light to fit desire?

Back around to where I’d stood
I turn again to face the pond;
But see no more the brilliant wood
Upon that gloomy little pond.

For in their place are silhouettes
Of black above a black’ning sky.
I wonder how I could have let
Such drabness so beguile my eye.

So now, my God, when you I spy,
Is it really, truly, Thou?
Or trick of how I hold my eye
And cup my hand over my brow?

It's Academic

2010-10-12T21:09:00.001-07:00

Someone just told me (in an email) that the type of writing I do sounds rather academic. I responded that some of it is, but that the most academic writing I've done (Covenant And Community) has changed me in countless ways. She asked me to explain. Here is my response.

To begin with, you need to understand that I’m religious, Christian. That’s why I do theology.

For years I had seen my religion as being primarily between myself and God. I tried to have a relationship with God, study his word, obey him, etc. Of course, that has plenty to do with other people, because God has lots to say about how we treat each other. But still my personal religion was my account with God.

Thus, I could be a perfectly good Christian with or without other people. And I generally found it preferable to spend most of my time alone. It was just me and my Bible and Jesus. (I exaggerate somewhat, but that was the general direction of my life.)

Then I began studying the idea of the image of God. In the first chapter of the Bible God proposes to make humanity to be his image. That, I think, is our primary purpose in creation. The more I studied, the more clear it was that this image is not each of us separately being God’s image. Instead, we all together are to be his image. That makes personal/private religion almost like no religion at all.
As I worked through some of the implications, I found that I needed to really be willing to become part of a community of Christians, all working together, all working for each other, all building each other up.

This all has changed how I think of myself (no longer so much as an individual, more as a member of a group of like-minded folk), how I think of the church (no longer as a place only to learn, now as a place to work for the benefit of others), how I think of evangelism (no longer as trying to prove my point and convince someone of some vital truth, now as drawing people into the community and letting God work as he chooses). No longer is my religion primarily academic, now it is almost entirely interpersonal.

Thus, my whole life is changed. Where once I was content to do my work, try not to sin, repent when I did, etc, now whatever I am doing I know that God is working through me to build his image through me and those around me. At every moment the people around me (Christians or not, no matter) matter much more now than ever before. And I don’t have to convince them of anything! And everyone is just as vital. No longer are pastors and teachers the great people and the rest of us just followers. Each person has their own gifts to bring, each person is absolutely needed.

Depending on your background, this may sound like “Well, duh!” or it may make no sense. I hope it is at least somewhat coherent.

Hast thou no scar?

2010-07-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

When God was converting Saul (Paul), he didn't suggest that anyone tell him how much rosier his life would be with Christ. Instead he promised Ananias that:

"I will show him how much he must suffer for my name." Acts 9:16

That was God's appeal to Saul? Is that how we sell the Gospel? Paul later seemed to assume that suffering for Christ was a proof of our usefulness to him.

"Are they servants of Christ?-- I speak as if insane-- I more so; in far more labors, in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death." 2 Cor 11:23

Is that how we assess God's movement? Do we brag that we are suffering? Or do we rather brag about the great band at church, or the new coffee bar where we have "fellowship."

Those who have had the greatest beneficial impact on the church throughout history have all gone through tremendous personal suffering. Why do we think this norm should not apply to Americans? Are we exempt?

"Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory." Rom. 8:17

Why do we not preach suffering with Christ as a sign that we truly have been adopted into his family?

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land;
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned.
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And piercèd are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who hast no wound or scar?

--Amy Carmichael--

Church Happens When . . .

2010-07-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, two friends were acting as missionaries, befriending and evangelizing a group of people who would never intentionally go to any church. They purposely gave up their own ownership of their lives to be available to their new friends. Their goals were to:

A) live out the Gospel in community with these people
B) show them Jesus through their relationships (more than in talk or on paper)
C) see them come to know Jesus for themselves
D) help them find good church homes in which to grow

One day, as they were meeting with some of these friends who had become as close as family, a woman who had come to faith with them asked, "So . . . is this my church?" The leader answered that, no, this was not a church. This was a faith community.

The woman persisted, "Yah, that sounds good, but I came to faith and so have some others here, so aren't we supposed to go to a church?"

In that moment this man who had no intention of starting a church knew what he had to tell her. "Actually, church is something everyone should be a part of, but it's different than being a faith community. Church happens when a group of people decide to go on mission with God together."

In that moment this mission gained a new and un-looked for goal:

E) guide converts to pursue these three goals together

And very quickly it became clear that their friends were on board with them, for better or worse seeking to also give up their lives to grow the mission of Christ in that neighborhood. And so a church was reluctantly born.

As Matt Smay and Hugh Halter worked through the practical and theological implications of what God was doing with them, they came to understand a great truth: God gathers people together in the body of Christ (community), so that he can scatter them into the world (missions), so that in every place they find themselves they can gather new people into the body, so God can scatter them . . .

You see the pattern. The body of Christ is constantly gathering together and purposely scattering. Or it should be. In general we are better at the gathering than at the scattering.

And so they wrote AND: THE GATHERED AND SCATTERED CHURCH.

Among all the church planting/missions/street evangelism books I've read, this one tops my list. It is altogether down to earth. There is no great promise of huge crowds (in fact that isn't desired) but the true promise of great sacrifice and blessing in the living out of Christ's body.

They ask, "How can we engage the culture to which God has called us?" To reach the unreachable, discourse on theology, frightening sermons and tidy church services wouldn't do. They also needed to overturn the framework in which people understood themselves. And cultures, worldviews, and frameworks don't buckle to reasoned argument. The answer, they learned, was "The community, not the individual, is the primary witness to this 'bigger' gospel."

I am truly excited to recommend AND. It is the first book I've found whose message of a real, solid, tried and true, biblically reasoned lifestyle of community and self-sacrifice corresponds in great detail to many of my conclusions in COVENANT AND COMMUNITY. Christ is seen as his body functions together, as the hands and feet and eyes all live in love/service to the others. And in every way the community/church that they have grown seems strikingly similar to the community/church of the New Testament.

At last! A church planting book that I can highly recommend.

Exponential Growth

2010-06-13T18:29:00.000-07:00

"Half of all churches in America did not add one person through conversion last year."

Read that again.

Now, read it again.

That is pathetic! Our nation is crumbling, the people are searching, searching, searching. What they are searching for, no one seems sure. But they are searching. This nation is hungry, and we in the Church know that we have access to a food that truly satisfies.

So what is wrong?

Jon and Dave Fergusson, two of the founders of a fantastically quickly growing circle of churches, think that they have the answer. In part I think they are right. As the foreword says, "They are as many of us desire to be--successful leaders of a very large multisite church." Well, I tend to like neither very large, nor multi-site churches, but let's let that go for the moment.

Their new book, EXPONENTIAL, is a high octane description of how they have grown from four evangelistically minded college kids into an enormous network of churches, many of them multi-site congregations. These churches, in many cities and increasingly many countries, have all grown from the initial set of four friends, dreaming about how they could impact Chicago for Christ. Crunching the numbers that were involved in this rapid growth feels like I am crunching my skull! How is it possible? And is it what Jesus called the Kingdom of God? Is this how church is supposed to be?

Imagine the worst it could be: huge churches that function like social clubs, with maybe a few truly saved Christians among them. Is that any worse than that half of all American churches that grew by NOT ONE SOUL last year? I honestly couldn't answer that, but I'm glad to say that that is not what I think Dave and Jon Ferguson are all about.

Church growth for the Fergusons takes place on three levels, or in three spheres: the personal, the numerical and the structural.

PERSONAL GROWTH, as they describe it, is all about moving from one level of leadership up to a higher level of leadership. Yes, their system is very hierarchical. Don't let hierarchy scare you off quite yet, it has its strengths as well as its drawbacks. But, so far as I can tell from this book, personal growth has little to do with "knowing Christ in the fellowship of his sufferings." It has little to do with growth in grace, or with walking as Jesus walked, which John encourages us to do. When looking for someone who is ready to move from one level of leadership to another, they do not encourage us to examine a person by the criteria that Paul sent to Titus and to Timothy: temperate, gentle, not a lover of money, not quarrelsome, etc. Instead they point us to their main criteria: that "a leader must be able to attract followers."

As Dave writes, "I had to set aside my selfish reluctance and begin encouraging Troy to continue moving forward on his leadership path by planting this new church." Throughout much of the book, that seems to be the real goal, each person's "leadership path."

They are right that within the church, "Everything rises and falls on leadership." A church without a leader will fly as well as a kite without a string. But they take this fact and elevate (if one can take the book at face value) anyone who is a natural leader into positions of leadership over God's people. Not all leaders are Godly leaders. Ask Germany. Ask Chicago. Ask anyone.

If we are going to use some principles from EXPONENTIAL, we must do so with care and caution. But don't misunderstand. I honestly don't think that this is how the Ferguson brothers built their churches. I think they did use discernment, and caution, and biblical principles in choosing future leaders. But this does not really come through in the book at all. They seem to assume that naturally we will use such discernment. But the real danger is that once one makes a strategy--and this book is a strategy for rapid church growth--once we make a strategy our focus, we run the risk of losing sight of such details as biblical qualifications for leadership in the Body of Christ. In fact, if the way this book is written is any indication, I wonder if the Fergusons have become too enamoured with the strategy and have lost sight of the goal.

NUMERICAL growth is, for the Fergusons, the purpose of God's Church. A child is born to grow, if it does not grow then something is very wrong. Perhaps that is why new churches grow rapidly and churches more than ten years old rarely grow at all.

They are right, churches should grow. New converts should be added to their numbers. A stagnant church is a dying church. A church that does not feel compelled to reach out beyond those church doors should be tossed out into the streets where they would have no choice but to mingle with the hoi-poloi.

But growth by itself is not evangelism. While their approach really does encourage evangelism and sees conversions, that is not the only source of their growth. Although they do once mention that they do not seek to draw members from other churches, still they mention at least one leader whom they drew away, and I get the impression that much of their rapid growth comes from such "stealing." How else do you get (after months of canvassing and tele-marketing) four to five hundred people at the first service in a new church? The huge success they have enjoyed is the triumph of highly professional marketers for Jesus. And like any marketer, they pay great attention to the packaging.

STRUCTURAL GROWTH takes place, in the Ferguson system, when leaders move up to higher levels and eventually one or two are deemed ready to head their own congregations, using of course the Ferguson strategy in those new congregations. Thus the strategy spreads, and in theory (they do crunch the numbers) soon the whole world will be Christian, living in an EXPONENTIAL church, all hoping to move from one level of leadership to the next.

Sound a bit like Amway hype? Oh, it is. Very much like Amway hype.

But still . . .

I think that many church leaders could learn a lot from tiny workings of how the Ferguson brothers explain the system.

Consider Charles Spurgeon, that prince of preachers. A great man, a Godly man, a superhuman evangelist. But where is his church now? What happened to it? It has become just a wispy shadow of what it once was. Within just a few years of his death, the Tabernacle had veered away from his great and true doctrines, and had lost the power that his careful passion had overseen. What happened? Well, it seems that he prepared no successor.

And that is what the Ferguson strategy is all about: successors.

They make much of Paul's instructions to Timothy: "The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others." If you look at that carefully, you will see that there are four generations mentioned: Paul, Timothy, Reliable Men, Others. And the idea is that those others will then be able to continue the pattern.

Timothy was Paul's protégé, his apprentice. And Paul was telling him that Timothy was to do what Paul was doing, that is, he was to take apprentices and teach them to take apprentices. This is what Jesus had also done; he took disciples and trained them to make disciples, who would in turn make disciples.

Simple? Well, duh! But the problem is, we don't do this in most of our churches. The church is full of people who can teach, and many of them do. But how often do they make a focus of also training one or two to be able to also teach? Where do most churches get their leadership? their pastors? their priests? their musicians? Don't they expect them to come from a seminary or the music department in some university or some burned out rock musician? Why do we not train our own pastors and leadership and musicians?

The pattern that Jesus and Paul display and encourage is that they expect each person who is any type of leadership to prepare others to also fill that type of leadership. Thus, the leader of a Bible study does in fact teach the Bible study. A group of people are in fact edified through the Bible study. But one or two of those in the group are also being shown exactly how the leader prepares, are praying with the leader for the members of the study group, are paying close attention not only to the lesson but also to how it is presented. Over time the "apprentice" learns how to lead a group, and also how to train a new leader. The Fergusons lay it out simply:

1) I do. You watch. We talk.
2) I do. You help. We talk.
3) You do. I help. We talk.
4) You do. I watch. We talk.
5) You do. Someone else watches.

It is that simple. But by doing this over and over, preparing new leaders for new Bible studies, one soon multiplies the leaders of study groups exponentially. Bravo!

But the process is not lightning quick, for it takes time to really train a new convert to lead a Bible study. The Fergusons have the advantage in that many of their leaders came to them ready equiped with a grounding in the Bible. My church has no such luxury. We intentionally seek those who have no such grounding.

And training a new leader involves a HUGE investment of time on both the current leader's part and on that of the apprentice. They spend time together preparing and discussing each meeting of the study group. They pray together. As is stressed in the book, the time investment is crucial in order to really train a person, and the time investment also makes it impossible for any person to train more than one or two at a time.

Simple!

Simple in the extreme!

Simple but not easy.

Simple, but also thoroughly biblical. One to one training, training within the church, these are the pattern that we see in the Bible. Sending our bright young folk away to seminary for four to six years, having them trained by professionals, and then probably never seeing them again because they will be sent elsewhere to lead some other church: that is not the biblical pattern. If they are sent elsewhere, it should be their home congregation that has trained them and sends them off with their blessings to further God's kingdom.

Interestingly, while the hype of big numbers and rapid growth tends to mask it, the Ferguson's strategy is one that actually engenders a true sense of community. It is all about one person spending and being spent for the building up of another person. Strip it of the grandiose ego pumping hoopla (OK, then it would be 20 pages) and you will find that at the core of what drives their machine is one heart beating alongside another, as they each learn to keep time with Christ's heart.

If every leader within our churches were intentionally guiding and training an apprentice to do that same work, then would our churches be dying? Begin simply; lead a Bible study including both Christian and non-Christian friends (you can do that, right?); and work with one of the people to get them ready to lead a Bible study. When they are ready, you help them launch their study group, and help them to pick and to train an apprentice of their own. Simple.

Oh Death, Set The Dying Free!

2010-04-10T23:08:00.000-07:00

Written by Christina Rossetti on the fourth (or fifth?) anniversary of the death of her dear friend (and old beau) Charles Bagot Cayley.

Bury Hope (originally untitled, title added by later editors)

Bury Hope out of sight,
No book for it and no bell;
It never could bear the light
Even while growing and well:
Think if now it could bear
The light on its face of care
And gray scattered hair.

No grave for Hope in the earth,
But deep in that silent soul
Which rang no bell for its birth
And rings no funeral toll.
Cover its once bright head;
Nor odours nor tears be shed:
It lived once, it is dead.

Brief was the day of its power,
The day of its grace how brief:
As the fading of a flower,
As the falling of a leaf,
So brief its day and its hour;
No bud more and no bower
Or hint of a flower.

Shall many wail it? not so:
Shall one bewail it? not one:
Thus it hath been from long ago,
Thus it shall be beneath the sun.
O fleet sun, make haste to flee;
O rivers, fill up the sea;
O Death, set the dying free.

The sun nor loiters nor speeds,
The rivers run as they ran,
Thro' clouds or thro' windy reeds
All run as when all began.
Only Death turns at our cries:--
Lo, the Hope we buried with sighs
Alive in Death's eyes!

*********

"There had always been present to him, unrecognized but secure, man's last hope, the possibility of death. It may be refused, but the refusal, even the unrecognized refusal, admits hope. Without the knowledge of his capacity of death, however much he fear it, man is desolate."
Charles Williams, from Descent Into Hell p 33
.

Too Stupendous For Comprehension

2010-04-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

"I suppose no man ever saw Niagara for the first time without feeling disappointed. I suppose no man ever saw it the fifth time without wondering how he could ever have been so blind and stupid as to find any excuse for disappointment in the first place. I suppose that any one of nature's most celebrated wonders will always look rather insignificant to a visitor at first, but on a better acquaintance will swell and stretch out and spread abroad, until it finally grows clear beyond his grasp - becomes too stupendous for his comprehension. I know that a large house will seem to grow larger the longer one lives in it, and I also know that a woman who looks criminally homely at a first glance will often so improve upon acquaintance as to become really beautiful before the month is out."

Mark Twain, Sacramento Daily Union, Nov 16, 1866

Hey editors, remember the glory days of newspapers? Do you remember when people looked forward to reading their newspapers? Do you remember when your best writers thought of their readers as wise old friends with whom they were sharing a pipe and a conversation, not as children to be quieted? Remember Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Ogden Nash, James Whitcomb Riley, Ambrose Bierce, and James Thurber? Remember Nellie Bly and Ernie Pyle? Do you want to stop your circulation numbers from falling through the press-room floor? You won't do it by printing the same old poorly written supercilious tripe that can be had from AP, Knight-Ridder, and Gannett.

Profoundly Emptied Souls

2010-03-07T21:44:00.000-08:00

This is from a book that I am not allowed to review until the middle of the month, but then I will post a review on here. It is a most excellent book, so stay tuned. Until then, I can't wait to post a quote or two.

When we adopt an ideological approach to Christianity, we travel a road that inevitably leads to sectarianism. And when we follow this road for a long time, a knock on the door of our souls may well demonstrate that no one is home. Our lives will have become filled with arguments, and our souls will be profoundly emptied of Christ's love.

from YOUR CHURCH IS TOO SMALL by John H. Armstrong

Silent Fear, Overflowing With Love

2010-02-27T19:47:00.001-08:00

William Cowper had a break down. That is a very mild term for what he had. He became an invalid and nearly a lunatic for a couple of years. It was all caused by his panic when he finished his tutelage in the law and was to give his defense before a panel of lawyers. He couldn't get up in front of them. He couldn't have them looking at him. He had stage fright. I can so well relate! Not so long ago I was so paralized to think of getting up in front of the church and preaching that on Sunday morning I couldn't quit thinking how much easier it would be to just kill myself than to have to go up there. Stupid? Maybe. But I can relate to Cowper's panic.

During his "illness," as it is so placidly referred to, some kind folk took him in and nursed him. They didn't push religion on him, but they made sure that a Bible was always at hand. One day, while in a fit of utter despair and hopelessness, he picked it up to try to distract his mind from its panic and opened it at random. He later wrote:

"The passage which met my eye was the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter of Romans. On reading it I received immediate power to believe. The rays of the Sun of Righteousness fell on me in all their fulness. I saw the complete sufficiency of the expiation which Christ had wrought for my pardon and entire justification. In an instant I believed and received the peace of the Gospel. If the arm of the Almighty God had not supported me I believe I should have been overwhelmed with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears; transports choked my utterance. I could only look to heaven in silent fear, overflowing with love and wonder."

The verse he had read said:
"Whom God hath set forth to be a reconciliation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness, by the forgiveness of the sins that are passed through the patience of God"
Romans 3:25, Geneva Bible (which is probably the translation that was at hand, considering the people with whom he was staying).

It is not even a full sentence. The sentence starts two verses earlier and ends at the end of the next verse. God's word is powerful! Even little phrases can work change in people's lives! From that day on William Cowper's life was dramatically changed and he became the greatest poet of his day--the forerunner of the Romantics, a great hymn writer, a social radical in the early movement to free the slaves of England and abolish the slave trade worldwide.

In two weeks (March 14th) I will be preaching on this verse and the verses before and after it. May God speak through it so that it is as powerful to me and those who hear it as it was to William Cowper!

Cowper Quoted by Martin Lloyd Jones in The Cross: The Vindication of God

Whut He Was Called To Do

2010-02-16T19:34:00.000-08:00

True story about my dad's mom, as told to me by her sister:

"One day when we were little girls we were riding the horses out into the back field, taking some water to our dad who was working out there. As we got close her horse jumped and your grandma fell off and got hurt. Dad caught the horse and told her to get back on, but she didn't want to. She was scared! But Dad scolded her and told her that if she didn't get back on right away then she would always be scared and would never ride again. Well, she was a stubborn one, so she got back on and rode that horse all the way back home. And then she never rode again!"

The zinger she threw in at the end and the way she had prepared earlier in her story for that final line kind of reminds me of some of the stories collected by the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston early last century.

HOW THE BROTHER WAS CALLED TO PREACH

Ellis: These was two bothers and 'one of 'em was a big Preacher and had good collections every Sunday. He didn't pastor nothin' but big charges. De other brother decided he wanted to preach so he went way down in de swamp behind a big plantation to de place they call de prayin' ground, and got down on his knees.

"O Lawd, Ah wants to preach. Ah feel lak Ah got a message.If you don called me to preach, gimme a sign."

Just 'bout dat time he heard a voice, "Wanh, uh wanh! Go preach, go preach, go preach!

He went and tol' everybody, but look lak he never could git no big charge. All he ever got called was on some saw mill, half-pint church or some turpentine still. He knocked around lak dat for ten years and then he seen his brother. De big preacher says, "Brother, you don't look like you gittin' holt of much."

"You tellin' dat right, brother. Groceries is ain't dirtied a plate today."

"Whut's de matter? Don't you git no support from your church?"

"Yeah, Ah gits it such as it is, but Ah ain't never pastored no big church. Ah don get called to nothin' but sawmill camps and turpentine stills."

De big preacher reared back and thought a while, then he ast de other one, "is you sure you was called to preach? Maybe you ain't cut out for no preacher."

"Oh, yeah," he told him. "Ah know Ah been called to de ministry. A voice spoke and tol'me so."

"Well, seem lak if God called you He is mighty slow in puttin' yo' foot on de ladder. If Ah was you Ah'd go back and ast 'im again.

So de po' man went on back to de prayin' ground agin and got down on his knees. But there wasn't no big woods like it used to be. It has been all cleared off. He prayed and said, "Oh, Lawd, right here on dis spot ten years ago Ah ast you if Ah was called to preach and a voice tole me to go preach. Since dat time Ah been strugglin' in Yo' moral vineyard, but Ah ain't gathered no grapes. Now, if you really called me to preach Christ and Him crucified, please gimme another sign."

Sho nuff, jus' as soon as he said dat, de voice said "Wanh-uh! Go preach! Go preach! Go preach!"

De man jumped up and says, "Ah knowed Ah been called. Dat's de same voice. Dis time Ah'm goin ter ast Him where must Ah go preach."

By dat time de voice come agin and he looked 'way off and seen a mule in de plantation lot wid his head all stuck out to bray agin, and he said, "Unh hunh, youse de very son of a gun dat called me to preach befo'. "

So he went on off and got a job plowin'. Dat's whut he was called to do in de first place.

Armetta said, "A many one been called to de plough and they run off and got up in de pulpit. Ah wish dese mules knowed how to take a pair of plow-lines and go to de church and ketch some of 'em like they go to de lot with a bridle and ketch mules."

Oral story telling is an art that has largely died out in America. If we don't pay attention to our oldest generation, it will fade into history and be gone. Because natural story telling is an art passed on from one person to another (not learned from books or study) once lost completely it will be very hard to revive it.

Read more of the stories Hurston collected at the same place I borrowed this one. Or listen to Hurston sing some other stories in the manner that she heard them from the old timers by going here and typing "Hurston" into the "search" box.

'Tis When A Value Struggle - It Exist

2010-02-03T07:44:00.001-08:00

I'm loving the almost-rhymes in some of Emily Dickinson's poems. Where a perfect rhyme would have lent these a sing-song giddiness, the not-quite-rhymes invite a more contemplative spirit in us.

This Bauble was preferred of Bees -
By Butterflies admired
At Heavenly - Hopeless Distances -
Was justified a Bird -

Did Noon - enamel - in Herself
Was Summer to a Score
Who only knew of Universe -
It had created Her.

A Plated Life - diversified
With Gold and Silver Pain
To prove the presence of the Ore
In Particles - 'tis when

A Value struggle - it exist -
A Power - will proclaim
Although Annihilation pile
Whole Chaoses on Him -

All Ye That Walk In Willow-wood

2010-01-20T01:23:00.000-08:00

Here are four of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnets, a series called the Willowwood sonnets, followed by a response from his sister Christina Rossetti. I am interested here, besides the beauty of the language and the depth of emotion that all five sonnets produce in me, in the question of originality.

Our modern conception is that for a work of art to be great it must be thoroughly original. But that has not always been the assumption for great art. Sometimes it is in the interplay between the source material and the new version that we find the real ART. Take for example CS Lewis' reworking of the Myth of Sisyphus, which he titled "Till We Have Faces." As a stand alone piece it is a grand work. But it is, as he emphasized, a re-telling of the ancient myth. But in the re-telling he has breathed a new and much more intense and eternal meaning into the old myth. His new work is amazing, but much more so when we think on how his work can be a commentary and critique of the old. That interplay between new and old adds immesurable depth to a story that Lewis might have written simply from scratch without involving the ancient sources.

Or sometimes the wonder is simply in a better telling, in a more perfect version of an old tale. Consider the work of William Shakespeare. Was Hamlet original? Hardly! The story had circulated in various versions and various languages for hundreds of years. But Shakespeare provided it with a couple of new and seemingly irresolvable twists, and reworked it into language so glorious that few can forget it once they have heard it. MacBeth was simply working out from the old history books. (As an aside: Do you know what part of MacBeth is the most historically accurate according to the old histories? It is the witches and their portents. Later, prosaic, portions of his life are less clear and Shakespeare took more liberties there. But the lines of the witches are taken down almost verbatim from the histories.) Troilus and Cressida is simply extrapolation from Homer and other Greek storytellers.

Original? Perhaps not in the modern sense of that word. Great art? Who would dare malign the artistry of Shakespeare or Lewis?

In the parable of the vinyard, Jesus is simply re-working a story that popped up a couple of times in the Old Testament. But is his story great art? Absolutely! And the New Testament authors took pains to prove that they were not "original" but that all they were saying was in fact already said by the old authors. Yet I can't get past the artistry with which John, Luke, Paul, Peter and the rest told it!

This modern penchant for the "original" work of art is not only out of sinc with the Bible's understanding of what makes art great, but it denies all that we by nature find exciting in art.

Jeremy Erickson sang in a great song, "This is my attempt at being original," before he proceeded to demolish that originality.

So, without further babbling on my part, here are four sonnets by the brother of Christina Rossetti, followed by her sonnet in response. Hers is obviously derivative. The word "derivative" is in literary parlance a synonym for "worthless." Dante's four sonnets greatly move me. But is not the "derivative" one, the poem of his little sis, immeasurably greater? Does it not surpass his four in its depth, its involvement of us, in its gain and loss withing the space of a single word? Derivative? Certainly, in the modern sense. Greater art? I know what I think, but what think you?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Willowwood Sonnets

I

I sat with Love upon a woodside well,
Leaning across the water, I and he;
Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me,
But touched his lute wherein was audible
The certain secret thing he had to tell:
Only our mirrored eyes met silently
In the low wave; and that sound came to be
The passionate voice I knew; and my tears fell.

And at their fall, his eyes beneath grew hers;
And with his foot and with his wing-feathers
He swept the spring that watered my heart's drouth.
Then the dark ripples spread to waving hair,
And as I stooped, her own lips rising there
Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth.

II

And now Love sang: but his was such a song,
So meshed with half-remembrance hard to free,
As souls disused in death's sterility
May sing when the new birthday tarries long.
And I was made aware of a dumb throng
That stood aloof, one form by every tree,
All mournful forms, for each was I or she,
The shades of those our days that had no tongue.

They looked on us, and knew us and were known;
While fast together, alive from the abyss,
Clung the soul-wrung implacable close kiss;
And pity of self through all made broken moan
Which said, 'For once, for once, for once alone!'
And still Love sang, and what he sang was this:Ñ

III

'O ye, all ye that walk in Willow-wood,
That walk with hollow faces burning white;
What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood,
What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night,
Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed
Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite
Your lips to that their unforgotten food,
Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!

Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood,
With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red:
Alas! if ever such a pillow could
Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,Ñ
Better all life forget her than this thing,
That Willowwood should hold her wandering!'

IV

So sang he: and as meeting rose and rose
Together cling through the wind's wellaway
Nor change at once, yet near the end of day
The leaves drop loosened where the heart-stain glows,Ñ
So when the song died did the kiss unclose;
And her face fell back drowned, and was as grey
As its grey eyes; and if it ever may
Meet mine again I know not if Love knows.

Only I know that I leaned low and drank
A long draught from the water where she sank,
Her breath and all her tears and all her soul:
And as I leaned, I know I felt Love's face
Pressed on my neck with moan of pity and grace,
Till both our heads were in his aureole.

Christina Rossetti
An Echo From Willowwood

Two gazed into a pool, he gazed and she,
Not hand in hand, yet heart in heart, I think,
Pale and reluctant on the water's brink,
As on the brink of parting which must be.
Each eyed the other's aspect, she and he,
Each felt one hungering heart leap up and sink,
Each tasted bitterness which both must drink,
There on the brink of life's dividing sea.
Lilies upon the surface, deep below
Two wistful faces craving each for each,
Resolute and reluctant without speech: —
A sudden ripple made the faces flow
One moment joined, to vanish out of reach:
So those hearts joined, and ah! were parted so.

If I Have Freedom In My Love

2010-01-13T21:47:00.000-08:00

To Althea, From Prison

When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fetter'd to her eye,
The gods, that wanton in the air,
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deep,
Know no such liberty.

When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my king;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlarged winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Richard Lovlace 1642, written while he was in prison.

.

I Have Not Yet Stopped Shivering

2010-01-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

Well, a new decade for us all! 'Tis the season for evaluating our pasts and for making goals for the future. In that spirit, I want to present a couple of "Top Ten" lists.

First, here is the Top Ten list of books that I have read over the past decade. It is not the top ten books written in the past decade, but rather ones that I have read. I'm not so big on reading all the new books, I like to read and re-read books that have timeless authority and that give me a larger vision of life, this world, and God's hand in the lives of his people.

So, without further ado:

10. The Rabbit Proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington Garimara
This is the beautiful true story of three aborigine girls, girls who were half "white" and therefore (according to the Australian gov't) had more "potential" than pure aborigines, who were relocated by the Australian government to be schooled as "white" children. They rebelled against their captivity and chose to "relocate" themselves back home. Their courage, their love and care for each other, and their dedication to their family are unsurpassed in any stories I know of. And the movie is (contrary to the norms) almost as good as the book.

9. Galusha The Magnificent, by Joseph Crosby Lincoln
Galusha, an ill archiologist, goes on doctor's orders to seek rest and recuperation in a New England village. While there his high (but rather useless) learning is forced to give way to simple interpersonal relations, which is something that Galusha did not excel in. Funny and sometimes deeply moving, this is the best that I have found in what could be called "literature for the masses."

8. Commentary On The New Testament Use Of The Old Testament, edited by Beale and Carson
This book will not find its way onto many people's top ten lists, not because it isn't a great work, but because very few will ever read it from cover to cover. It is a commentary, after all, and thus it will be used as a reference tool. We will dip into it as the need arises rather than simply reading it. But I have read very large sections of it, and as I read it I have been quite surprised by the care with which the authors of the New Testament quoted the Old. This book has given me a whole new level of awe and confidence regarding the unity of the message of the whole Bible.

7. Cry The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
Cry The Beloved Country is one of the most deeply religios novels I have ever read. In that respect it is a peer of Uncle Tom's Cabin or Anna Karenina. Too many novels have a surface Christianity, but Cry The Beloved Country is Christian in a way that goes to its core, to its very marrow. It is a Christian novel in the way that water is wet, in the way that fire is hot. Yet (like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Anna Karenina) Christianity is not made to seem easy. It is a cross, a heavy cross, but also it is the power that carries that cross and carries us along with the cross. Anyone not moved to tears of sorrow and of joy a dozen times in this book is not only dead, but decomposed and their bones petrified.

6. The Complete Poems Of Emily Dickinson
No other poet (perhaps Christina Rossetti excepted) has written with such empathetic intimacy on so many different subjects. She knew the wistful thoughts of the romantic thrush, the longings of a snake or a fly, the joys and fears of the newly dead, and the glorious power of paper. Yet she very seldom moved beyond her own voice. She seems to have been truly afraid to speak for others, to assume too much in regard to what deep motivations moved the will in other humans. She knew where holy ground lay and she stepped on it only with bare feet and a soft tread. Yet it is not this but the subtlety of her ear that makes her impossible to ignore once we have first heard her.

5. The Iliad, by Homer
When I was a kid my mother read Homer's two great books to me. For those early years it was the Odyssey that captivated me, with its Scylla, its Polyphemous, its four winds treacherously given by Poseidon. But now that I am old I find that the Iliad interests me far more, with its unbearably intense interplay between characters, none of whom are wholy good; none wholy bad. The Achaians are the protagonists. Or are they? The Trojans are the antagonists; except that Paris is the only husband we can honor in the whole book. Was Helen kidnapped or did she run away from a home she could not bear to live in? The impossibility of coming to solid provable conclusions in this poem is a great warning to me. Please God, that all Christian thinkers would read this poem before "proving" their point, whatever that might be!

4. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Is this a book about the lingering evil of American slavery? Or is it a book about children spending their young lives painfully learning to understand, to live up to, to live down to, their elders? Or is it a gothic novel that puts on morbid display the life-in-death and death-in-life character of growing up white in a racist world? Is it a Christian novel? Is it emphatically pagan?
Yes.
More than almost any other novel other than Lord Of The Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird requires that the reader make serious, educated decisions about what it means.

3. Hamlet, by some guy named Shakespeare
His father is dead, his mother marries her late husband's brother. Thus the brother becomes King, while young Hamlet should have been crowned. Is it murder? A "ghost" tells young Hamlet it was. But Hamlet is far too philosophical to accept that. Was the "ghost" really his father? Or was it a demon in the guise of his father tempting him to commit a mortal sin? How can one know? Hamlet devises a plan to (as Scripture advises) test the spirit. But then does Hamlet have the courage to fulfill his murderous obligations? This is by far the most psychologically intriguing stories that appeared before Dostoyevski.

2. Brideshead Revisited, by Evely Waugh
An agnostic becomes romantically involved in a homosexual friendship with a young Catholic man. Not an auspicious start to what is actually the most beautifully Christian of Evelyn Waugh's novels. The first time I read it, I ended with a vague suspicion that it had religious undertones that I had somehow missed. The next time, I was watching for the hints, and found many. Each of the first five times I read it was more beautiful and more truly Christian than the time before. And this from an author who mourned his state as a "lapsed Catholic."
Waugh was ashamed of this book in his later years, saying it was too sensual. But some of those "sensual" parts that he got embarrassed about (like the dinner of Charles and Rex in which the entire order of the menu is gorgeously laid out) are among the most amazing descriptions in any literature I've seen.
If this book doesn't (on your third reading of it) challenge your simple assumptions about what Christianity is at its heart, then you either were born perfect, or you were born unteachable.

1. Till We Have Faces, by CS Lewis
How many of us really fully felt (before we read this myth) that Pagan human sacrifice was closer to Christianity than is mild agnostic uncertainty. Is the Fox, with his subtle Greek philosophy, a better teacher than the priest of Ungit with his ignorant thirst for blood?
First time I read this, I was stunned at the end and immediately began again. At the end of my second reading the final scene in which the gods are accused and make their "answer" was so overwhelming that I was unable to drive. I sat shivering in an ecstacy of beauty, awe, and terror. In some ways I have not yet stopped shivering.

That's How I Believe

2009-12-24T03:17:00.000-08:00

Here is a snippet from BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, by Evelyn Waugh. Charles Ryder, the atheist, and Sebastian Flyte, the Catholic, are discussing religion.

"Oh dear, it's very difficult being Catholic."

"Does it make much difference to you?"

"Of course. All the time."

"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."

"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastion indignantly.

"Well then?"

"Who was it used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"

"I don't know. You, I should think."

"Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned to the pages of the News of the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."

"I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?"

"Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me."

"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all?"

"Can't I?"

"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."

"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."

"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."

"But I do. That's how I believe."

. . .

"Well," I said, "if you can believe all that and you don't want to be good, where's the difficulty of your religion?"

"If you can't see, you can't."

Sometimes I think that we get too wrapped up in trying to "prove" to an atheist's satisfaction the various tenets of our religion. We begin to think that our hope rests on whether our Creation story can overcome the evolutionist's dogma. We try to wrap up every loose end and explain every facet of the great story. We philosophize endlessly: Why was it necessary that Jesus be born of a virgin? How could he be sinless and human if all humans are born sinful? Did Jesus have a body before he was born or only afterward, and if only afterward then how can he say, "I, the Lord, do not change?" There are countless questions to ponder, countless arguments in which we can find ourselves trapped. And the answers that satisfy me may well not satisfy you.

Far be it from me to disparage the serious inquiry into all manner of questions regarding the great story. A large part of my life is involved in asking such questions. The questions matter and the answers we give matter very much! But sometimes we get so involved in the minutia of argumentation that we forget what drew us to the great story in the first place. Few of us first began to see the loveliness of the lovely Christ through a vigorous debate of the metaphysical understanding of how Jesus can be fully God and fully human at the same time. At some point we do need to wrestle with that question; at some point we do need to try to understand it; at some point we do need to fall down in front of it acknowledging that such a question is truly beyond our ability to comprehend. But that is probably not the first cause that drew our curiousity and our love to the great story, the story of the Bible, and the story of a bastard child born in a barnyard, born out of wedlock of vagrant parents, whose first bed was a trough from which donkeys and sheep were eating.

It is good sometimes to pause, in the midst of all our huge theological debates, in the midst of the Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox struggles, in the midst of our attempts to make Christianity logical to the scientific mind; it is good to pause and recall what first drew us to invest ourselves and our loves and our lives in this story. For most of us what first drew us was the story itself, not the debates. Most of us can, if we look back at the beginnings of the faith that has overturned our lives and our worlds, most of us can agree with Sebastian Flyte.

"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea." "But I do. That's how I believe."

For most of us, in the beginning and in the end, it is the beauty of the story God is telling that inexorably pulls us into itself. It is the story's loveliness that disables our attempts to remain aloof. On this beautiful rainy Christmas eve I am going to re-read the various passages of the Christmas story in my Bible, trying to ask no questions of it but simply basking in the unparalleled loveliness of the story.

As I Bent Beneath The Rod

2009-12-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Rather than introducing this poem, today I will let Robert Service introduce it. Here is his poem The Quest along with his own preface to it.

"Calvert tries to paint more than the thing he sees; he tries to paint behind it, to express its spirit. He believes the Beauty is God made manifest, and that when we discover Him in Nature we discover Him in ourselves.

But Calvert did not always see thus. At one time he was a Pagan, content to paint the outward aspect of things. It was after his little chld died he gained in vision. Maybe the thought that the dead are lost to us was too unbearable. He had to believe in a coming together again."

THE QUEST

I sought Him on the purple seas,
I sought Him on the peaks aflame;
Amid the gloom of giant trees
And canyons lone I called His name;
The wasted ways of earth I trod:
In vain! In vain! I found not God.

I sought Him in the hives of men
The cities grand, the hamlets grey,
The temples old beyond my ken,
The tabernacles of to-day;
All life that is, from cloud to clod
I sought . . . Alas! I found not God.

Then after roamings far and wide,
In streets and seas and deserts wild,
I came to stand at last beside
the death-bed of my little child.
Lo! as I bent beneath the rod
I raised my eyes . . . and there was God.

I Am The Beauty That I See

2009-12-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

THE WONDERER

I wish that I could understand
The moving marvel of my Hand;
I watch my fingers turn and twist,
The supple bending of my wrist,
the dainty touch of finger-tip,
The steel intensity of grip;
A tool of exquisite design,
With pride I thnk: "It's mine! It's mine!"

Then there's the wonder of my Eyes,
Where hills and houses, seas and skies,
In waves of light converge and pass,
And print themselves as on a glass.
Line, form and color live in me;
I am the Beauty that I see;
Ah! I could write a book of size
About the wonder of my Eyes.

Waht of the wonder of my Heart,
That plays so faithfully its part?
I hear it running sound and sweet;
It does not seem to miss a beat;
Between the cradle and the grave
It never falters, stanch and brave.
Alas! I wish I had the art
To tell the wonder of my Heart.

Then oh! but how can I explain
The wondrous wonder of my Brain?
That marvelous machine that brings
All consciousness of wonderings;
That lets me from myself leap out
And watch my body walk about;
It's hopeless--all my words are vain
To tell the wonder of my Brain.

But do not think, O patient friend
Who reads these stanzas to the end,
That I myself would glorify. . . .
You're just as wonderful as I,
And all Creation in our view
Is quite as marvellous as you.
come, let us on the sea-shore stand
And wonder at a grain of sand;
And then into the meadow pass
And marvel at a blade of grass;
Or cast our vision high and far
And thrill with wonder at a star;
A host of stars--night's holy tent
Huge-glittering with wonderment.

If wonder is in great and small,
then what of Him who made it all?
In eyes and brain and heart and limb
Let's see the wondrous work of Him.
In house and hill and sward and sea,
In bird and beast and flower and tree,
In everthing from sun to sod,
The wonder and the awe of God.

Robert Service

My Hour Divinely Closes

2009-12-21T06:27:00.000-08:00

Robert Service, in a voice that hardly will recall to mind his older Cheechako ballads. In this one do you hear just a little bat-squeak echo of James Thurber's "Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

MY HOUR

Day after day behold me plying
My pen within an office drear;
The dullest dog, till homeward bound hieing,
Then lo! I reign a king of cheer.
A throne have I of padded leather,
A little court of kiddies three,
A wife who smiles whate'er the weather,
A feast of muffins, jam and tea.

The table cleared, a romping battle,
A fairly tale, a "Children, bed,"
A kiss, a hug, a hush of prattle
(God save each little drowsy head!)
A cozy chat with wife a-sewing,
A silver lining clouds that low'r,
Then she too goes, and with her going,
I come again into my Hour.

I poke the fire, I snugly settle,
My pipe I prime with proper care;
The water's purring in the kettle,
Rum, lemon, sugar, all are there.
And now the honest grog is steaming,
And now the trusty briar's aglow:
Alas! in smoking, drinking, dreaming,
How sadly swift the moments go!

Oh, golden hour! 'twixt love and duty,
All others I to others give;
But you are mine to yield to Beauty,
To glean Romance, to greatly live.
For in my easy-chair reclining . . .
I feel the sting of ocean spray;
And yonder wondrously are shining
The Magic Isles of Far Away.

Beyond the comber's crashing thunder
Strange beaches flash into my ken;
On jetties heaped head-high with plunder
I dance and dice with sailor-men.
Strange stars swarm down to burn above me,
Strange shadows haunt, strange voices greet;
Strange women lure and laugh and love me,
And fling their bastards at my feet.

Oh, I would wish the wide world over,
In ports of passion and unrest,
To drink and drain, a tarry rover
With dragons tattooed on my chest,
With haunted eyes that hold red glories
Of foaming seas and crashing shores,
With lips that tell the strangest stories
Of sunken ships and gold Moidores;

Till sick of storm and strife and slaughter,
Some ghostly night when hides the moon,
I slip inot the milk-warm water
And softly swim the stale lagoon.
Then through some jungle python-haunted,
Or plumed morass, or woodland wild,
I win my way with heart undaunted,
And all the wonder of a child.

The pathless plains shall swoon around me,
The forests frown, the floods appall;
The mountains tiptoe to confound me,
The rivers roar to speed my fall.
Wild dooms shall daunt, and dawns be gory,
And Death shall sit beside my knee;
Till after terror, torment, glory,
I win again the sea, the sea . . .

Oh, anguish sweet! Oh, triumph splendid!
Oh, dreams adieu! my pipe is dead.
My glass is dry, my Hour is ended,
It's time indeed I stole to bed.
How peacefully the house is sleeping!
Ah! why should I strange fortunes plan?
To guard the dear ones in my keeping--
That's task enough for any man.

So through dim seas I'll ne'er go spoiling;
The red Tortugas never roam;
Please God! I'll keep the pot a-boiling,
And make at least a happy home.
My children's path shall gleam with roses,
Their grace abound, their joy increase.
And so my Hour divinely closes
With tender thoughts of praise and peace.

.

If The Worst Had Been The Best

2009-12-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

I have posted poems from Robert Service before, so I won't introduce him. If you are interested, just find his name in the list on the left and see my other posts on him.

This poem allows for at least two widely divergent readings. I find them both intriguing and can't quite decide which to allow precedence in my mind.

When I read it I think of a painting by Dante Rossetti, but I am not quite sure that Service had the same painting in mind although it is possible. The last line of the poem is a slight nod to a line by William Blake, so Service may have had one of Blake's engravings in mind and may have simply converted the engraving into a painting for the sake of the poem. But these speculations don't matter to the reading of the poem. If you are into research, go find out what paintings are hanging in St Hillaire.

MY MADONNA

I haled me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model's seat
And I painted her sitting there.

I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
" 'Tis Mary, the Mother of God."

So I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.

.

The Goodest Man Ever You Saw

2009-12-10T05:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we saw a snippet from the life of the real and original Raggedy Ann. Today we have a picture (a word picture) of the real and original Raggedy Andy. Written by the Raggedy Man's good friend, Bud (aka James Whitcomb Riley).

THE RAGGEDY MAN

O The Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa;
An' he's the goodest man ever you saw!
He comes to our house every day,
An' waters the horses, an' feeds 'em hay;
An' he opens the shed - an' we all ist laugh
When he drives out our little old wobble-ly calf;
An' nen - ef our hired girl says he can -
He milks the cow fer 'Lizabuth Ann. -
Ain't he a' awful good Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
W'y, the Raggedy Man -he's ist so good,
He splits the kindlin'4 an' chops the wood;
An' nen he spades in our garden, too,
An' does most things 'at boys can't do. -
He clumbed clean up in our big tree
An' shooked a' apple6 down fer me -
An' 'nother 'n' too, fer 'Lizabuth Ann -
An' 'nuther 'n' too, fer The Raggedy Man. -
Ain't he a' awful kind Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
An' The Raggedy Man one time say he,
Pick' roast' rambos from a' orchurd-tree,
An' et 'em - all ist roast' an hot! -
An' it's so, too! - 'cause a corn-crib got
Afire one time an' all burn' down
On "The Smoot Farm," 'bout four mile from town -
On "The Smoot Farm"! Yes - an' the hired han'
'At worked there nen 'uz The Raggedy Man! -
Ain't he the beatin'est Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
The Raggedy Man's so good an' kind
He'll be our "horsey," an "haw" an' mind
Ever'thing 'at you make him do -
An' won't run off - 'less you want him to!
I drived him wunst way down our lane
An' he got skeered, when it 'menced to rain,
An' ist rared up an' squealed and run
Purt' nigh away! - an' it's all in fun!
Nene he skeered ag'in at a' old tin can...
Whoa! y' old runaway Raggedy Man!
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
An' The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes,
An' tells 'em, ef I be good, sometimes:
Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns, an' Elves,
An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers the'rselves:
An', rite by the pump in our pasture-lot,
He showed me the hole 'at the Wunks is got,
'At lives 'way deep in the ground, an' can
Turn into me, er 'Lizabeth Ann!
Er Ma, er Pa, er The Raggedy Man!
Ain't he a funny old Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
An' wunst, when The Raggedy Man come late,
An' pigs ist root' thru the garden-gate,
He 'tend like the pigs 'uz bears an' said,
"Old Bear-shooter'll shoot 'em dead!"
An' race' an' chase' 'em, an' they'd ist run
When he pint his hoe at 'em like it's a gun
An' go "Bang!-Bang!" nen 'tend he stan'
An' load up his gun ag'in! Raggedy Man!
He's an old Bear-Shooter Raggedy Man!
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
An' sometimes The Raggedy Man lets on
We're little prince-children, an' old King's gone
To git more money, an' lef' us there -
And Robbers is ist thick ever'where:
An' nen - ef we all won't cry, fer shore -
The Raggedy Man he'll come and "splore
The Castul-Halls," an' steal the "gold" -
An' steal us, too, an' grab an' hold
An' pack us off to his old "Cave"! - An'
Haymow's the "cave" o' The Raggedy Man! -
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
The Raggedy Man - one time, when he
Wuz makin' a little bow-'n'-orry fer me,
Says "When you're big like your Pa is,
Air you go' to keep a fine store like his -
An' be a rich merchunt - an' wear fine clothes? -
Er what air you go' to be, goodness knows?"
An' nen he laughed at 'Lizabuth Ann,
An' I says "'M go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!"
I'm ist go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!

Now that you have met the two originals who decades later were honored with these poems and with dolls and Broadway shows and movies (Annie, among others) why not see how they met.

An' Dry the Orphant's Tear

2009-12-09T03:45:00.000-08:00

Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy were real people! Who knew? Not me!
Their original names were Mary Alice Smith Gray and Wesley Gray. I highly recommend reading the history of these two.

Or you can take the version I will post here (Annie today, Andy tomorrow) written by a man who knew them well decades before they became dolls and one of the most instantly recognizable images in the modern age.

Incidentally it was Mary Alice (or Raggedy Ann, or Annie) who first prompted the young Bud to begin writing. And it was his writing that turned her into a worldwide sensation that now includes poems, songs, dolls, Broadway and movies.

LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE

INSCRIBED WITH ALL FAITH AND AFFECTION
To all the little children: - The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones - Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely
bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,
An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,
An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an'
sweep,
An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-
an-keep;
An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun,
A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,
An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn't say his prayers, -
An' when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an' his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An' when they turn't the kivvers down, he wuzn't there at
all!
An' they seeked him in the rafter-room, an' cubby-hole, an'
press,
An seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an' ever'-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz thist his pants an' roundabout: -
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!

An' one time a little girl 'ud allus laugh an' grin,
An' make fun of ever' one, an' all her blood-an'-kin;
An' wunst, when they was "company," an' ole folks wuz there,
She mocked 'em an' shocked 'em, an' said she didn't care!
An' thist as she kicked her heels, an' turn't to run an'
hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin' by her side,
An' they snatched her through the ceilin' 'for she knowed
what she's about!
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!

An' little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo!
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray,
An' the lightnin'bugs in dew is all squenched away, -
You better mind yer parunts, an' yer teachurs fond an' dear,
An' cherish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear,
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns 'll git you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!

Old Aunt Mary's

2009-12-08T05:36:00.000-08:00

James Whitcomb Riley would have been my neighbor, almost. Just a few short miles between our homes. A few short miles and about a hundred years. But, had our times coincided, we might have met. And he would have been glad to meet me! He was just that kind of person, the kind of person who when he meets you he really meets you. When he sees you, he really sees you. When you talk, he actually listens. He was a truly unusual person in this regard.

He has few if any rivals to the title of America's humblest poet. Nearly as popular in America as Mark Twain for their humorous lectures, in personality and biography the two could hardly be more different. The one arrogant and self promoting, the other intentionally introspective and self effacing. The one ostentatious to the point that he bankrupted his own millions, the other frugal and generous and simple in his habits.

Don't get me wrong, I love Mark Twain also, but for a neighbor or a friend I'd always choose James Whitcomb Riley!

OUT TO OLD AUNT MARY'S

Wasn't it pleasant. O brother mine,
In those old days of the lost sunshine
Of youth - when the Saturday's chores were through,
And the "Sunday's wood" in the kitchen, too,
And we went visiting, "me and you,"
Out to Old Aunt Mary's? -

"Me and you" - And the morning fair,
With the dewdrops twinkling, everywhere;
The scent of the cherry-blossoms blown
After us, in the roadway lone,
Our capering shadows onward thrown -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's!

It all comes back so clear to-day!
Though I am as bald as you are gray, -
Out by the barn-lot and down the lane
We patter along in the dust again,
As light as the tips of the drops of the rain,
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

The few last houses of the town;
Then on, up the high creek-bluffs and down;
Past the squat toll-gate, with its well-sweep pole,
The bridge, and the "the old 'baptizin'-hole,'"
Loitering, awed, o'er pool and shoal,
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

We crossed the pasture, and through the wood,
Where the old gray snag of the poplar stood,
Where the hammering "red-heads" hopped awry,
And the buzzard "raised" in the "clearing"-sky
And lolled and circled, as we went by
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

Or, stayed by the glint of the redbird's wings,
or the glitter of song that the bluebird sings,
All hushed we feign to strike strange trails,
As the "big braves" do in the Indian tales,
Till again our real quest lags and fails -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's. -

And the woodland echoes with yells of mirth
That make old war-whoops of minor worth!...
Where such heroes of war as we? -
With bows and arrows of fantasy,
Chasing each other from tree to tree
Out to Old Aunt Mary's!

And then in the dust of the road again;
And the teams we met, and the countrymen;
And the long highway, with sunshine spread
As thick as butter on country bread,
Our cares behind, and our hearts ahead
Out to Old Aunt Mary's. -

For only, now, at the road's next bend
To the right we could make out the gable-end
Of the fine old Huston homestead - not
Half a mile from the sacred spot
Where dwelt our Saint in her simple cot -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

Why, I see her now in the open door
Where the little gourds grew up the sides and o'er
The clapboard roof! - And her face - ah, me!
Wasn't it good for a boy to see -
And wasn't it good for a boy to be
Out to Old Aunt Mary's? -

The jelly - the jam and marmalade,
And the cherry and quince "preserves" she made! And the
sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear,
With cinnamon in 'em, and all things rare! -
And the more we ate was the more to spare,
Out to Old Aunt Mary's!

Ah! was there, ever, so kind a face
And gentle as hers, or such a grace
Of welcoming, as she cut the cake
Or the juicy pies that she joyed to make
Just for the visiting children's sake -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's!

The honey, too, in its amber comb
One only finds in an old farm-home;
And the coffee, fragrant and sweet, and ho!
So hot that we gloried to drink it so,
With spangles of tears in our eyes, you know -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

And the romps we took, in our glad unrest! -
Was it the lawn that we loved the best,
With its swooping swing in the locust trees,
Or was it the grove, with its leafy breeze,
Or the dim haymow, with its fragrancies -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

Far fields, bottom-lands, creek-banks - all,
We ranged at will. - Where the waterfall
Laughed all day as it slowly poured
Over the dam by the old mill-ford,
While the tail-race writhed, and the mill-wheel roared -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

But home, with Aunty in nearer call,
That was the best place, after all! -
The talks on the back porch, in the low
Slanting sun and evening glow,
With the voice of counsel that touched us so,
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

And then, in the garden - near the side
Where the beehives were and the path was wide, -
The apple-house - like a fairy cell -
With the little square door we knew so well,
And the wealth inside, but our tongues could tell -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom
Of the willow trees, - and the cooler room
Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were kept,
Here the cream in a golden languor slept,
While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept -
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

And as many a time have you and I -
Barefoot boys in the days gone by -
Knelt, and in tremulous ecstasies
Dipped our lips into sweets like these, -
Memory now is on her knees
Out to Old Aunt Mary's -

For, O my brother so far away,
This is to tell you - she waits to-day
To welcome us: - Aunt Mary fell
Asleep this morning, whispering, "Tell
The boys to come"...And all is well
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.

.

We Got Talking

2009-12-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

From the man who gave us The House At Pooh Corner:

Puppy and I

I met a Man as I went walking;
We got talking,
Man and I.
"Where are you going to, Man?" I said
(I said to the Man as he went by).
"Down to the village, to get some bread.
Will you come with me?" "No, not I."

I met a Horse as I went walking;
We got talking,
Horse and I.
"Where are you going to, Horse, today?"
(I said to the Horse as he went by).
"Down tot he village to get some hay.
Will you come with me?" "No, not I."

I met a Woman as I went walking;
We got talking,
Woman and I.
"Where are you going to, Woman, so early?"
(I said to the Woman as she went by).
"Down to the village to get some barley.
Will you come with me?" "No, not I."

I met some Rabbits as I went walking;
We got talking,
Rabbits and I.
"Where are you going in your brown fur coats?"
(I said to the Rabbits as they went by).
"Down to the village to get some oats.
Will you come with us?" "No, not I."

I met a Puppy as I went walking;
We got talking,
Puppy and I.
"Where are you going this nice fine day?"
(I said to the Puppy as he went by).
"Up in the hills to roll and play."
"I'll come with you, Puppy," said I.

.

If Men Were Angels

2009-11-24T06:24:00.000-08:00

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." -- James Madison

In other words, we deserve what we get.

Survival of a Hundred Defeats

2009-11-16T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hot salt tears burned my cheeks as I read the following:

"If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph."

GK Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, p 80

Amen and Amen to Homer and Chesterton!

The Royal Puns

2009-11-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

My young daughter Hope and I were writing messages to each other in picture writing earlier today. She would draw an eye (meaning "I") then put an "m" (meaning "am") then draw a hat (meaning "at") etc. It was great fun making the messages and trying to figure them out. We shared a great laugh, not so much over the messages as over our ability to make and to decode them. So I was rather intrigued when in my evening reading I came across the following wisdom on the origins of written language.

GK Chesterton, writing about the invention of writing by the folk living on the banks of the Nile:

There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture writing, like that of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a modern heiroglyphist might represent "at once" by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective story.

GK Chesterton, from The Everlasting Man, pp 66-67

Scissors, Pants and Glasses

2009-11-09T23:06:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that some funny words only exist in English in the plural. We can hold a pair of scissors, but there is no such thing as a single scissor. And we put on our pants, one leg at a time, but still that one leg is in our pants, not our pant.

Of course, there can be scissor marks on a piece of paper, or we can notice the stain on our pant leg. That sounds singular. But really "scissor" and "pant" are here used as adjectives, and thus in English they are neither singular nor plural.

And even if only one lens gets crushed, you have still broken your glasses. Again, that word only exists in the plural (when it means the things you put on your nose to help you see).

How many other words do we use that can only be used in the plural?

The Weight of an Apple

2009-11-05T17:45:00.000-08:00

David Bazan is making a production of losing his faith. Never mind that he is one of the great poets of our time; never mind that he is a groovy musician; never mind that he is a college party philosopher. Never mind that I suspect he gets drunk at breakfast. His questions are serious, and I think they are valid.

This is the man who sang a couple years ago:

"i could buy you a drink
i could tell you all about it
i could tell you why i doubt it
and why i still believe"

His doubts were recognized, but they were overpowered at that point by a stronger belief. That belief is waning, the doubt growing.

His latest CD is brilliant, even if it is brilliantly wrong. As most Bazan albums, it is a theme album, and this time it is a prolonged attack on the Garden of Eden story from the Bible.

Snippets from a few songs on it:

"You've heard the story
you know how it goes
once upon a garden
we were lovers with no clothes

fresh from the soil
we were beautiful and true
in control of our emotions
'til we ate the poison fruit

and now it's hard to be
a descent human being

wait just a minute
you expect me to believe
that all this misbehaving
grew from one enchanted tree

and helpless to fight it
we should all be satisfied
with this magical explanation
for why the living die"

"God knows
if you notice the millions of small holes
and ponder the weight of an apple
compared to the trouble we're in

then a grown man might
be tempted to question his birth-right
in front of his kids and devout wife
causing the doubt to begin
to spread like original sin"

"when you set the table
and when you chose the scale
did you write a riddle
that you knew they would fail;
did you make them tremble
so they would tell the tale;
did you push us when we fell?"

"if you knew what would happen
and made us just the same
then you, my lord,
can take the blame."

These are questions that used to plague me too, not so long ago though it seems another life.

So, how do we answer Bazan? How would you answer him?

Be Still And Drink The Quiet

2009-10-31T03:18:00.000-07:00

PEACE

'Tis not in seeking,
'Tis not in endless striving,
Thy quest is found:
Be still and listen;
Be still and drink the quiet
Of all around.

Not for thy crying,
Not for thy loud beseeching,
Will peace draw near:
Rest with palms folded;
Rest with thine eyelids fallen --
Lo! peace is here.

by Edward Rowland Sill

This World Of Dew

2009-10-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Life is temporary and fragile, like a dewdrop. This whole world is temporary and fragile. Getting attached to life and this world is silly, or so Issa would like to believe. So his Buddhism taught him. His philosophy created the ideals of non-resistance and unsurprised acceptance of suffering in this transient world. After all, nothing could last.

Still, his heart would cry out against the tyranny of such a philosophy. His heart didn't mirror the ideals. His heart seems to have longed for a peace that went deeper than a mere acceptance that "Life is suffering" (the first of the Four Noble Truths taught by Buddha).

And his heart never seemed to quite accept the perfectly passive role that he tried to assign himself. Even in the image that he loved to use to remind himself of these ideas he had a hard time making the image fit the world in which life goes on.

The second poem below was written just after one of his children died.

A world of dew

and within every dewdrop

a world of struggle

This world of dew

is only a world of dew . . .

and yet

Bonfires for the dead-

soon they'll burn

for us

Delighted by bonfires

for the dead . . .

children

These texts taken from http://thegreenleaf.co.uk/HP/Issa/00haiku.htm and http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html

After Studying The World

2009-10-26T23:21:00.000-07:00

I know I've talked about him before, but let me do it again.

One of the most vibrant sites devoted to poetry on the whole of the WWW is Poefrika run by Rethabile Masilo. Continually, for years on end now, I have found it to be a gold mine.

His post on the 26th was great, but I was struck especially by one short line:

"I, too, have wondered why the moon, after studying the world for so long, is not yet tear shaped."

from Maseru Man by Rethabile Masilo

Amen! I too have been stunned by creation's ability to ignore human reality . . .

To read the whole poem please go over there, and while you are there check out all Rethabile has been doing!

http://poefrika.blogspot.com/

'Twas Whispered In Heaven

2009-10-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

Grace put me in the mood for riddles. Here is one I've never been able to solve. Who can help me?

'Twas whispered in Heaven,
'twas muttered in hell,
And echo caught faintly
the sound as it fell;
On the confines of earth
'twas permitted to rest,
And in the depths of the ocean
its presence confes'd;'
Twill be found in the sphere
when 'tis riven asunder,
Be seen in the lightning
and heard in the thunder;
'Twas allotted to man
with his earliest breath,
Attends him at birth
and awaits him at death,
Presides o'er his happiness,
honor and health,
Is the prop of his house,
and the end of his wealth.
In the heaps of the miser
'tis hoarded with care,
But is sure to be lost on his prodigal heir;
It begins every hope,
every wish it must bound,
With the husbandman toils,
and with monarchs is crowned;
Without it the soldier and seaman may roam,
But woe to the wretch who expels it from home!
In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found,
Nor e'er in the whirlwind of passion be drowned;'
Twill soften the heart;
but though deaf be the ear,
It will make him acutely and instantly hear.
Set in shade, let it rest like a delicate flower;
Ah! Breathe on it softly, it dies in an hour.

I'd tell you where I got this, but the answer is there and that would ruin it for both of us!

This Complicated World

2009-10-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

As long as I'm posting Muslim poets . . .

Who are we in this complicated world?
if we come to sleep we are His drowsy ones.
and if we come to wake we are in His hands.
if we come to weeping, we are His cloud full of raindrops.
and if we come to laughing, we are His lightning in that moment.
if we come to anger and battle, it is the reflection of His wrath.
and if we come to peace and pardon, it is the reflection of His love.
Who are we in this complicated world?

Mathnawi

I find that so many of the great Muslim poets are almost indistinguishable from Christian poets. Occasionaly they give themselves away. Just as the great Jewish philosopher/storytellers are often hard to tell from Christian ones (except for the tallent of the Jewish ones).

Seeing this on my (Christian) blog, if I hadn't introduced it as a Muslim poet, would you have automatically known?

Without Cause God Gave Us Being

2009-10-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

In a mood to read Rumi this evening. He is of course THE poet of love. And for that I adore him. But it is amazing how there is always a variety of totally unrelated but captivating thoughts that one can take away from him. For that I am in awe of him!

LOVE IS RECKLESS

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God's favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

.

Soak Into My Pores

2009-10-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

In discussing the way that different authors in the Old Testament are constantly quoting, arguing, and alluding to each other's writing, Walter Brueggemann says:

Those who are outsiders to the text may spot only the most explicit quotations, but those who are situated deeply and imaginatively in the world of the text can detect many other allusions. The outcome of this process is that a certain field of imagery, as well as grammar, dialect, and cadence, emerge in which all of reality is uttered and therefore construed and therefore experienced in a certain way.

This seems to me a very important fact, because we do not go to Scripture to learn facts (or not primarily for that) but rather to have the Word work through us and to slowly begin to build the reality in which we live and breath and have our being. As we interact with the Bible it becomes less of a book and more of a world. In it we find God not simply making us moral and nice, but he is actually removing us from one realm/world/reality and placing us into another.

I think I have sometimes been excessively occupied with 'proving' doctrine with the Bible. This is a clumsy process in which the Bible becomes almost a club to beat the competition. Truth, doctrine, and theological consistency are important, yes. But more important, I am beginning to think, is the long term effect of fully submerging myself in the Bible and letting it soak into my pores, interacting with it as it works through me to produce a new reality in which I live.

Ivory Tower Book-Heads

2009-10-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

I just got an email from Richard Weikart that his new book has just come out. Four years ago I reviewed his book FROM DARWIN TO HITLER for Christianity and Society Journal. It really rocked my world and helped to clarify my focus in my own work on a book about God's image. As I just told Weikart, part of my goal became to present a Christian antithesis to the fascist ethic that Weikart had described.

So I am eagerly waiting for my copy of his new book, HITLER'S ETHIC: THE NAZI PURSUIT OF EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS, to arrive at the bookstore. It is a sequel to the first, and I expect it to be just as clarifying of the ethical mindset and motivations of one of the most evil time periods our world has ever endured. In the meantime, here is the review I wrote on the earlier one. Spellings and punctuation may look a little odd; that is because it was published in an English journal and they edit things according to their own standards.

The journal is now available online and that issue can be found at http://www.kuyper.org/main/uploads/volume_15_no_2.pdf
The review is down at page 60, and you may find another article I wrote for them on page 54. But here it is to save you the trouble.

FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS,
EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY
By Richard Weikart
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, hardback, 312 pages

Reviewed by Doug P. Baker

Michael Polanyi, the great twentieth century philosopher, spent decades asking the question, “Why did we destroy Europe?” Wisely, he refrained laying the blame on the doorstep of others, but he brought it home to all of us, “Why did we destroy Europe?” He saw clearly that there is a complicity in the roots of that devastating war that goes far beyond the military and financial backing that Hitler and Mussolini received.

Drowning in economic depression though it was, Germany at the outset of the second world war held the esteem of the rest of the world for being the home of the greatest scholars and thinkers on Earth. For two centuries Germany had continually been the home of the physics world. From Ohm, Kirchoff and Hertz, to Planck, Heisenberg and Einstein, the discoveries of Germany’s physicists had paved the way for nearly every technological advance on earth. Likewise, the new field of psychology was led by Germans, from Fechner and Wundt to Ebbinghaus and Wertheimer. We could also list the greatest names in jurisprudence (Savigny), philosophy (Neitzche), literature (Brecht, Goethe, Hesse), music (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann) or theology (Bultmann, Bonhoeffer) and we would see Germans dominate the lists during the century leading up to the rise of the Nazi party. Germany was no small barbaric State, forgotten by civilisation and culture. Germany led civilisation and defined culture. The Germans were who we all wanted to be.

How then did Germany fall to such a level as the extermination of millions of their own citizens, their friends and neighbours? Is it really a fall from “civilisation” to “barbarity,” or is it rather the overflow of pride of an overly civilised and overly educated nation? Is it that “professing to be wise, they became fools”?

In From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart follows the growth of a philosophy, and the death of another, from the moment that Darwin’s major work hit the academy to the beginning of the implementation of its child, the Nazi death machine. This book is not a broad look at the social and moral implications of Darwinism, but a very narrowly focused tracing of the path that led directly from the publication of a text in theoretical biology to the national embrace of genocide in Hitler’s Germany.

The history that I learned as a child in school portrayed a kind and gentle Germany, naively overcome by the oratorical powers of an antichrist, half duped and half ignorant of the atrocities going on throughout German controlled areas. Certainly, in my history classes, few of the kind folk from the land of Luther would have condoned the actions of the madman. Sadly, I did not learn history. I learned a milksop myth.

Germany elected Adolph Hitler, not in spite of his ambitions, but because of them. Germany had been prepared for genocide by the insinuation of a new philosophy, an evolutionary ethic, into the moral fabric of its society.

Weikart guides us through the almost instant translation of the concept of evolution from the realm of biology to the realm of philosophy. Its initial relevance was obvious: if we were not created, then there is no Creator to judge us. But the discussion quickly progressed beyond that point.

A major part of Darwin’s theory lay in the idea that in order for a species to progress evolutionarily, only the best of that species could reproduce, and nature would prohibit the others. This, he argued, happened naturally, thus making evolution progress without outside interference. But, if the health of a species was maintained and advanced through the attenuating effects of survival of the fittest, then the struggle for survival was necessary for the common good. Therefore it would not be in the best interest of a species for the struggle to be alleviated such that even the weak, sickly, crippled, or in the language of the day, the “unfit,” could reproduce.

And, so evolutionary theory goes, humanity is merely a species of animal, trying to evolve, or at least not to devolve. In the interest of the higher good, the struggle must be maintained. But modern conveniences and softer lifestyles, not to mention the great evil of humanitarianism, get in the way of the natural effects of that struggle. Some people even go out of their way to aid the “unfit,” thus making it easier for them to reproduce, counteracting all of the benefits of evolution.

Thus, Christian charity became positively antisocial and evil to the evolutionary mind. If nature was no longer serving to limit reproduction in the human species, then intervention would be needed. At the least, for the good of society, the “unfit” should be prohibited from reproducing; even better would be to unburden society of them altogether.

Propounding such philosophies is clearly not the work of the lowest classes, not the work of barbarians. Rather, Weikart follows a trail that leads up from Darwin, through the highest echelons of intellectuals and cultural movers. It was no roving bands of skinheads who prepared Germany to undertake the “final solution”; it was the academy. Ivory tower book-heads, scientists (the gods of the age) and social engineers, intellectuals whose soft hands had never been made dirty by work, orchestrated and defined Hitler’s bloody work long before he came to power to put their theories into practice.

Never have I read another book, besides the Bible, in which history and philosophy are so intertwined and so intensely pertinent to the present and to everyday life. The extreme speed with which genocidal and eugenic ideas caught on, permeated the academy, and took over whole societies from the lawmakers to the butcher’s delivery boys, is quite disconcerting.

Among its many values, From Darwin to Hitler should alert us all to the need for solid Christians to be in the centre of every field of study, and in the centre of philosophical
discourse. A little salt in the German academy might have preserved Europe. A little salt in America might deliver us from the abortion holocaust that has already dwarfed Hitler’s evils. A little salt in England . . . C&S

.

Strange Peace And Rest

2009-10-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

The poetry of Edward Rowland Sill was quite popular during his lifetime, the late 1800's. His work appeared in the popular magazines under many pseudonyms, though it seems that these pen names were generally recognized as being his signatures. No one seems to have been fooled.

But in the years that followed, the world's taste in poetry took a sharp turn toward the intellectual. TS Eliot began writing; Hopkins was finally printed; James Joyce and Ezra Pound became the new status quo. Modernism was born and suddenly the transparent verse of Sill sounded childish and naive.

But, fan though I am of Eliot and more than a fan of Hopkins, I think we lost more than we knew when we shut our ears so totally to the charm and simple elegance of the sweeter temperament that had come before.

A short one for now, but there is a longer one I plan to post in the next couple of days.

A Morning Thought

What if some morning, when the stars were paling,
And the dawn whitened, and the East was clear,
Strange peace and rest fell on me from the presence
Of a benignant Spirit standing near:

And I should tell him, as he stood beside me,
"This is our Earth--most friendly Earth, and fair;
Daily its sea and shore through sun and shadow
Faithful it turns, robed in its azure air:

"There is blest living here, loving and serving,
And quest of truth, and serene friendships dear;
But stay not, Spirit! Earth has one destroyer--
His name is Death: flee, lest he find thee here!"

And what if then, while the still morning brightened,
And freshened in the elm the Summer's breath,
Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel
And take my hand and say, "My name is Death."

.

Our Master Lies Asleep

2009-10-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

MARY MAGDALENE AND THE OTHER MARY.
A SONG FOR ALL MARIES

Our Master lies asleep and is at rest:
His heart has ceased to bleed, His Eye to weep:
The sun ashamed has dropt in the west:
Our Master lies asleep.

Now we are they who weep, and trembling keep
Vigil, with wrung heart in a sighing breast,
While slow time creeps, and slow the shadows creep.

Renew Thy youth, as eagle from the nest;
O Master, who hast sown, arise to reap:--
No cock-crow yet, no flush on eastern crest:
Our Master lies asleep.

Christina Rossetti

Contemplative Bible Study

2009-10-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Don't we Americans often have a very goal-oriented approach to life? Every undertaking is evaluated based on the projected outcomes. We have all asked ourselves, "What did I expect would happen?"

This is good to an extent. We shouldn't be absolutely random in our approach to life.

But sometimes it doesn't seem to fit the situation. A man I know has decided to become my friend in order to get me to enter into a business with him. My entering will help him. He is being very goal-oriented. Very American. Very Western.

In relationships we call that "using" someone.

And don't we also often take a goal-oriented approach to Bible study? We want to learn. We want to find a new piece of the great puzzle. We want to build the grand structure of our theological framework.

We should study; we should seek to understand; we should seek to hold a coherent vision of the work of God in the world and in ourselves.

But taken too far I am beginning to think that a purely goal-oriented study of the Bible is also using somebody.

So this evening I led a Bible study group in a very contemplative manner. It was an experiment. Usually any contemplative/meditative reading of the Bible is done in our private time. I've never been in a group that tried it.

We read Psalm 63, an exquisite prayer. Instead of taking it apart and asking "What does it mean?" we pondered a quote from Augustine about prayer. Then we read the Psalm again. Then another quote. Back and forth. As each person was reading the Psalm, the others were praying along, letting the Psalm/prayer reverberate with the ideas in the quote.

Here are the quotes we used:

Augustine
“A man is what his love makes him.”

“For this is the power of love, that it transforms the lover into the image of the object loved.”

“We must adhere to God by Love, and reach out for him in prayer.”

“Prayer is the affectionate reaching out of the mind for God”

“It is with the heart that we ask; with the heart that we seek; and it is to the voice of the heart that the door is opened.”

Matthew 6:8
“Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

Augustine
“The Lord our God requires us to ask, not that our wish may be made known to him−for to him it cannot be unknown−but that through the medium of prayer, that desire may be developed in us by virtue of which we may receive what he is prepared to bestow.”

Bonhoeffer
“The child learns to speak because his father speaks to him. He learns the speech of his father. . . Repeating God’s own words after him, we begin to pray to him.”

“All prayers of the Bible are such prayers which we pray together with Jesus Christ, in which he accompanies us, and through which he brings us into the presence of God.”

“If we want to read and pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ.”

“If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.”

“The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”

The thoughts, insights, and emotions that I heard expressed during this hour and a half process were very unlike what would have come about had we attacked the prayer/poem with the machetes of our Bible study formulae. Somehow I think that perhaps it was more respectful than my usual approach. I for one found it immensely rewarding. At the first reading I honestly didn't feel it to be a prayer, at least I don't think it was a prayer in me. But by the end that had changed radically! The change certainly wasn't in the text; it was in me.

Has anyone else out there ever tried anything similar?

A New Review

2009-10-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Just today I saw a new review of my book "Covenant and Community." It came out a couple of days ago in Tradition and Discovery journal, a journal dedicated to the philosophy of Michael Polanyi.

Polanyi's insights concerning "indwelling" helped me to clarify some of the relation between the members of the Trinity, and then in turn that helped to clarify the relations between humans. You can find the review near the bottom of the page at

http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD36-1/TAD36-1-fnl-p70-75-pdf.pdf

Coraline Was Bored

2009-07-31T22:04:00.000-07:00

Rereading CORALINE for the umpteenth time. Haven't seen the movie yet; I'm a little nervous that it will taint the way I see the story in my own mind.

Here is one of my favorite scenes from early in the book, before the adventure begins.

Coraline was bored.

She flipped through a book her mother was reading about native people in a distant country; how every day they would take pieces of white silk and draw on them in wax, then dip the silks in dye, then draw on them more in wax and dye them some more, then boil the wax out in hot water, and then finally, throw the now-beautiful cloths on a fire and burn them to ashes.

It seemed particularly pointless to Coraline, but she hoped the people enjoyed it.

Why I find that tiny scene so charming is tough to figure out. To my mind those few words go a long way toward making Coraline a real person, rather than just a character in a book. But exactly how they do that, I haven't figured out.

This is something that I have been struggling to understand for quite some time as I work on a story. My characters have not yet come to life. They still seem to be just characters, being pushed around by an author.

Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are real living human beings in my world. I know them like I know other people. Well, almost. Huck and Tom are real people who step off the page into our lives. Topsy, Eva, Eliza and Uncle Tom never seemed like just characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is a deep reality to them.

Meanwhile I feel like Dr. Frankenstein, yelling at my monsters, "LIVE! LIVE!" But they don't live.

Glory Be To God For Dappled Things

2009-07-10T01:20:00.000-07:00

Another from Gerard Manley Hopkins.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

More than most poems that I post, this one wants to be enunciated with exact clarity. Each syllable needs its own space, each stress must have its time. Don't rush, and you will feel the words forming themselves in your mouth in a glorious way.

.

Christ At All Hazards

2009-07-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

Gerard Manley Hopkins was converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and soon committed himself to the strict life of a Jesuit monk. Along with his renunciation of the world, he renounced poetry, though he secretly longed to be reunited with it, until such a time as his superiors would give it back to him. In fact he burned most of his earlier poetry (what a loss to the world!).

In reality, there was nothing in the vows that forbade poetry. He was free to pursue a literary life and be a devout Jesuit. It seems that he turned his back on poetry in some sort of extrapolation of a vow of silence. He makes a couple of veiled references to a similar idea.

But while he longed to return to poetry (and continued to work out his poetical ideas in his notebook) he steadfastly refused to request permission to write. To Hopkins, that would have been cheating. (He was much like my father in that respect.)

For nine years he wrote no poetry, except minor verses as they were specifically requested by his superiors. Then, in 1875, his superior asked him to write some verses commemorating the loss of a great ship, the Deutchland. The poem he wrote so overwhelmed all who saw it that he was henceforth invited to write freely.

The result is some of the most remarkable poetry that has ever done honor either to God or the English language.

Some of it is rather obscure and takes a deal of work to decipher. Whatever work it takes is always worthwhile--it repays the reader one hundredfold for the trouble. The following piece is among his simplest, though it shows well his heart.

NEW READINGS

Although the letter said
On thistles that men look not grapes to gather,
I read the story rather
How soldiers platting thorns around CHRIST'S Head
Grapes grew and drops of wine were shed.

Though when the sower sowed,
The winged fowls took part, part fell in thorn
And never turned to corn,
Part found no root upon the flinty road,--
CHRIST at all hazards fruit hath shewed.

From wastes of rock He brings
Food for five thousand: on the thorns He shed
Grains from His drooping Head;
And would not have that legion of winged things
Bear Him to heaven on easeful wings.

.

The Kind Of Thing That Always Does Take Place

2009-07-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

"Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean."

"The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls the universal event. You won't go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland--you go to it to learn what a man feels like after he's gained a kingdom and lost his soul. When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don't feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there's a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself."

from The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye

Naw Sir, I Ain't Got It Yit

2009-07-07T02:58:00.000-07:00

I found that Zora Neale Hurston story I was looking for.

Hurston was many things: poet, fiction writer, public speaker, political essayist, social critic, center of the Harlem Renaisance, America's premier folklorist. And she was a first rate anthropologist.

As a folklorist and anthropologist she travelled the American south collecting the old tales that had been passed down through the African American community since the days of slavery. And thank God she did, for within a few years it would have been impossible to collect such stories from people who had been born under slavery. Not only did she collect the stories, but some of them she actually was able to record in audio! Hurston's work on many fronts has left a treasure that America should cherish as long as we exist!

Toni Morrison was absolutely right when she called Hurston "one of the greatest writers of our time." No one who has read Their Eyes Were Watching God would ever argue that point!

The following is from one of her anthropological trips in the south. I appreciate her careful rendition of the dialect in which Robert Williams first told this tale to her.

"Man sent his daughter off tuh school fur seven years. Den she come home all finished up. So he said tuh her: "Daughter, git you things an' write me uh letter tuh mah brother." So she did.

He says: "Head it up," an' she done so. "Dear brother, our chile is done come home from school all finished up, an' we is very proud of her." (To daughter): "You got dat?"

She tole 'im, "Yeah."

"Our dog is dead an' our mule is dead, but I got anuther mule, and when I say (the clucking tongue and teeth sound used to urge mules), he moves from de word . . . Is you got dat?" She told him, "Naw." He waited a while and he ast her again, "Is you got dat down yit?"

"Naw sir, I ain't got it yit."

"How come you ain't got it?"

"Cause I can't spell (clucking sound)."

"You mean tuh tell me you been off tuh school seven years and can't spell (clucking sound)? Well, I could almost spell dat myself. Well, jest say (sound) and go on."

I find it wonderful that a culture to whom written speech was new took the time to notice and mock the limitations that it places on us, while most people who grew up with the written word have never even noticed how much of their everyday language can not be put down on paper.

Upon Nothing

2009-07-06T04:58:00.000-07:00

Aphra Behn based some of the most baudy characters in her plays on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, whom she knew because they were both among the most notable figures of the court of Charles II. Wilmot was, in a court of outrageous hooligans, perhaps the most perverse of them all.

Yet, I am reminded of Salieri's complaint, that God should have chosen to give such talent to such a childish reprehensible fool as Mozart. (At least such a rephrehensible fool as the movie version of Mozart.) For Wilmot's talent as a wordsmith is great, and although most of his poetry will not find its way into this blog for reasons of taste, the ease with which he worked his ideas into verse is astonishing. It clearly was a gift from God, an ill used gift from God most of the time, but still a gift.

I think he was (at least sporadically) aware both of the source of his gift and also of the incongruous use he made of it. The following is a lovely piece of metaphysics, with slight hints at theological undertones. I love the satyric way that he has Nothing and Something interacting. Much was made of his deathbed conversion; it provided a text for evangelistic writing for at least two hundred years. And yet it is not entirely clear that it was anything more than another game that Wilmot played. That we won't know for sure until we meet him, if we do.

UPON NOTHING

Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade,
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixt) art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united--What.

Something the general attribute of all,
Sever'd from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguish'd fall.

Yet something did thy mighty pow'r command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness's hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air and land.

Matter, the wickedest off-spring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace,
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with thee did leagues combine,
To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line.

But turn-coat Time assists the foe in vain,
And, bribed by thee, asists thy short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Didst thou not stand to point their dull philosophies?

The great man's gratitude to his best friend,
King's promises, whore's vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee never end.

Love In Fantastic Triumph Sate

2009-07-05T04:20:00.000-07:00

Aphra Behn wrote in the days just after Shakespeare. She was, by all accounts, not your average woman.

As a Tory she staunchly defended the King, against the Parliament. She believed in kings in the abstract sense. Which king it happened to be made little difference. He could be a good king or a bad king, a wise king or a foolish king. In fact this particular king was neither good nor wise, as Aphra Behn would learn. Charles II perfectly fit his epitaph, written by his close friend John Wilmot the Earl of Rochester:

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

The fact that Rochester wrote and passed this "epitaph" around the court long before Charles II actually died is evidence of how little even his closest friends thought of him.

But Aphra Behn was a Tory.

At nineteen she married a Dutch man, thus gaining her name and probably some of the language. When she was 26 her husband died. At that time England was in a war with the Dutch, and Charles II sent Behn to Belgium to act as a military spy. Men tend to spy in one way, women in another. She became the mistress of one of the royal family, one who was working on the military strategy. Thus she became privy to all of the Dutch military secrets, which she then passed along to the court of Charles II. To be blunt, Charles II made her a prostitute in order to gain an advantage in the war.

To add insult to that injury, he never bothered to pay her. She had to borrow money to return to England, and when he still refused to pay her she was thrown into debtor's prison. Rochester had been right, Charles II was a king "Whose word no man relies on."

SONG

Love in fantastic triumph sate
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed
For whom fresh pains he did create
And strange tyrannic power showed.
From thy bright eyes he took his fires,
Which round about in sport he hurled;
But 'twas from mine he took desires
Enough to undo the amorous world.

From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his pride and cruelty;
From me his languishments and fears,
And every killing dart from thee.
Thus thou and I the god have armed
And set him up a deity;
But my poor heart alone is harmed
Whilst thine the victore is, and free.

O Captain! My Captain! Rise Up And Hear The Bells!

2009-07-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Revolution was fought to procure "freedom" for the inhabitants of America. But it was eighty years before that freedom was extended to a very large segment of the American population.

Somehow much of the white population was content to live in the freedom that we had gained, but felt no need to see that freedom made universal. Really that isn't much different than the Church, is it? Don't we all to often get comfortable in our own freedom but feel little need to see that freedom made universal? If the apathy of the majority of Americans in our first eighty years seems pathetic (and it does!) then what of our own apathy?

One man and one woman were unable to get comfortable with that apathy. Abraham Lincoln spent the greatest part of his life working for the abolition of slavery. (I know textbooks today gloss over this.) Fearing that their "freedom" to own slaves was in jeopardy, seven states seceded when Lincoln was elected. Within a month of his entering office there were eleven states in the Confederacy. They were fighting for their "freedom." But Lincoln and the north had a different vision of what "freedom" really means.

That vision had come in large part from a remarkable book written in tiny chapters and published serially in a magazine. In UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, Harriet Beecher Stowe taught the imagination of the nation to feel the evil of American slavery from the inside. Without her monumental work, it is doubtful that Abraham Lincoln could have been elected. Everyone knew that electing Lincoln would mean war, and few wanted that! But Uncle Tom's Cabin electrified such a great portion of the voting public that he was. And when the war started, Stowe's book pressed countless Union men into volunteering for the army.

Without her book, the war would likely not have happened. And given that it began, without her book the north would very likely have lost. The United States would no longer be united; we would now be at least two separate countries. And slavery would have persisted in America indefinitely. Just as Thomas Paine was the "Father Of The Revolution," Harriet Beecher Stowe was the "Mother Of The Civil War." Each of them accomplished these enormous feats through their words! Through their words they altered the imaginations of a whole nation. They made us what we are.

When he met her Abraham Lincoln greeted her with the words, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Had she not known the righteousness of her cause those words could have drowned her!

But unlike Thomas Paine's diatribes, Stowe's book led to sincere contemplation, to soul searching on the part of the nation. He sought to engender overarching pride; she to humble us to repentance. He enflamed selfish rage; she indignation at injustice.

The war proceeded. Over 600,000 died. Slavery was abolished. The union was preserved and the Confederacy disbanded. But four weeks before the war ended, Abraham Lincoln was shot. The end was well in sight. It was all but certain. But he never saw it.

Suddenly this great nation, newly restored to wholeness, far from healed of the evils of slavery, full of anger and resentment on both sides; suddenly this great nation was without its leader. Could the union be preserved without him? Would the south in fact become in reality what it already was by fiat, a group of free states among all the other free states? The thought that the war she had caused might have been for nothing must have terrified Stowe!

Walt Whitman well captures the lostness that both the north and the south must have felt at hearing of Lincoln's death.

O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red.
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up−for you the flag is hung−for you the bugle trills,
For you the bouquets and ribboned wreaths−for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

.

The Sunshine Patriot

2009-07-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

In the year leading up to the American Revolution there were many opinions among the people as to what the status of the colonies should be. A slowly growing number favored independence, but at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence it was far from unanimous. In fact loyalty to the English Crown was still high in many people's hearts. So many had been born there, or their parents had. To be loyal to the Crown was to be a patriot. To be disloyal was to be a traitor. And nobody wants to be a traitor.

And this was a religious land. To fight against the king whom God had placed over us was not only traitorous, many thought it blasphemous.

In order for the revolutionary conspirators to gain the public sympathy, and the public rifles, they had to wage a war of words before and during the Revolution. This war of words was not intended to defeat the Red Coats, but rather to win over the colonists themselves. Before you can win a war, you need to enlist an army. And to do that, they needed to convince the people that it was not treasonous or blasphemous to fight against the king. They had to flip the moral tables that existed in people's minds; they had to redefine everything: authority, rights, despotism, treason, Providence and liberty all had to be reworked in the people's minds.

In his famous series of pamphlets, The Crisis, Thomas Paine undertook this project. By the end of the series the American understanding of itself and its world and its God had radically changed. It has been said that Thomas Paine started the Revolution. It could also be said that he won it.

America won her independence. But what did she lose in the process? After the war we were never inclined to look back, to ask ourselves if freedom and liberty and brotherhood truly were what the propagandists had told us they were. We only knew we had won. Suddenly there were no more loyalists to the crown. Everyone was on the same side now. It was the winning side. We had the ball and we were going to run with it, no looking back.

I sometimes wonder how wise that was.

Below is the beginning of Thomas Paine's first pamphlet in the series, The Crisis. The first word he works to redefine in the public imagination is the word "Patriot."

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated."

.

The Shot Heard Round The World

2009-07-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

Sixty-three years after the signing of the Declaration, sixty-four years after the Revolution began, a monument was put up near a bridge that Paul Revere had ridden over on his historic messenger ride. His ride began in the evening of the 18th of April; Emerson's poem commemorates the events that it caused on the 19th.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
--Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee

Accepts, But Does Not Clutch The Crown

2009-07-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

As Americans we are not really big on dates. There are only two that we really tend to remember.

One is coming up in a few days. We all know that on the fourth of July, in 1776, our forefathers signed a document that declared our land to be free from the rule of England. It took another seven years of war to make that declaration of independence accepted by England and the rest of the world.

But that document did not begin the war. The Revolution as we call it. In fact that war began more than a year earlier. And whether we all recognize it or not, all Americans know the date that war started. We don't always think of it as the beginning our our separation from England, we don't always think of it as the beginning of a war, but that is what it was.

We don't necessarily remember it from history class in high school. We remember it from a poem.

"Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the _______________ in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year."

Every American knows that date. I don't even have to print it for Americans. But for the rest of the world, the blank line in the verse above should read: "On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;".

We remember it far less for the sake of Paul Revere, who rode forth on that date, than we do for the sake of the poem that made that silversmith/messenger/political radical famous.

We all know the poem that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to commemorate Paul Revere's ride far better than we know Paul Revere himself.

But how many of us know that "Paul Revere's Ride" was not a poem by itself? It was in fact originally entitled "The Landlord's Tale"? It was actually the first tale in a series of tales that Longfellow wrote in imitation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Longfellow hoped to become the "Chaucer" of the American language. He was, he hoped, writing America's Iliad, her Canterbury Tales, her Pentateuch. He saw a new world dawning, and he wanted to be remembered in one hundred centuries who had first given this new world its voice.

So he wrote "Tales Of A Wayside Inn." Like the Canterbury Tales, many people meet in an inn and agree to swap tales. The inkeeper is forced to go first, and his is the famous "Paul Revere's Ride." Many others follow, and like Chaucer there are interludes between orators. It is a great sequence. Not Chaucer; not the voice of a new world. But still a great sequence.

I love the introduction to the poet, one of the cast of characters in the inn's tale swapping that evening.

This is from "The Prologue," and anyone who has read Chaucer will immediately recognize how much even this little fragment is an immitation of the Canterbury Tales. Yet it is new and fresh in Longfellow's voice.

A Poet, too, was there, whose verse
Was tender, musical, and terse;
The inspiration, the delight,
The gleam, the glory, the swift flight,
Of thoughts so sudden, that they seem
The revelations of a dream,
All these were his; but with them came
No envy of another's fame;
He did not find his sleep less sweet
For music in some neighboring street,
Nor rustling hear in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.
Honour and blessings on his head
While living, good report when dead,
Who, not too eager for renown,
Accepts, but does not clutch, the crown!

Fly To Some Lone Lovely Dell

2009-06-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

Having read a great deal of the poetry of Harley Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, I have been eager to read some of the poetry of Derwent Coleridge, the third of the three children of STC who lived. (There was another, a brother, who died very young.)

A friend is looking for his poems on my behalf, hopefully saved somewhere sometime. Some few were published in newspapers, but they do not seem ever to have been collected. Likely there are many more that were never published. And were those newspapers saved? I don't yet know.

Here is the first that I have found. It is a youthful venture, a pining for that one true love who would make his world complete. It comes from Derwent's scrapbook, called a commonplace book. Being there, in a commonplace book, there is little reason to think it original. He may have written it from his mother-wit. It seems more likely that it was his own translation of another poem. It could also be a poem one of his friends wrote, that struck a chord in Derwent, thus he wrote it down. His comment after the poem, leads me to think that it was not an original composition; if it had been his he would likely have incorporated the comment into the poem itself. I lean toward the likelihood that it is his own translation of an older poem. After all, he loved languages and translation; by the end of his life he had mastered 14 different languages.

Yet, whether his own original work or a translation, it has a ring to it remeniscent of his father's work. And in it we hear a voice that very likely is Derwent's own. To me (and perhaps only to me) it is exciting to hear that voice.

What is that darling wish, that fondest theme
My daily vision and my nightly dream?
A Maid who free from Interest’s sordid rules
(Pride’s selfish mandates, kept by gaping fools)
Would seek for naught in me but me myself
Careless of rank, or rank’s supporter pelf,
Guileless her soul, and beautiful her face
Her form all elegance, her motions grace,
Soothing her love, for sorrow’s wounds a cure,
Warm as mine own, as smiling infants pure.
With her to fly to some lone lovely dell
The world forsake and there forever dwell . . .

. . . I never saw a Mary (Oh! shall I ever see a Mary) who combining intellect, mildness and beauty, might be my companion, my soother and my love−No−In my imagination I have pictured such a being and in my imagination alone must she exist.

.

Unwritable Words

2009-06-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

In keeping with the idea of yesterdays post, here is a tidbit that strikes me as humorous.

English speakers have long used a sort of clicking sound that we make by putting the tip of our tongues to the roof of our mouths just behind our front teeth. Then we suck in our breath ever so slightly, making a longer version of a click.

In the singular (one click) it can express exasperation or dissappointment. In the double, it means dissaproval. In this sense (double) we often use it ironically, signalling mock dissaproval.

Well, we use it so often that authors have had to invent a way to spell it. At some point, someone decided that it sounds kind of like a mixture of the letters "t," "s," and "k." I think the "k" should have been a "ch," but nobody asked me.

So, we see sometimes in the conversation in books, that somebody says, "tsk." Or, "tsk, tsk."

Great, so we are finding ways to write unwritable words. If only it stopped there.

But readers try to sound out what they see on paper. And when they see "tsk" some have been rather at a loss as to how to pronounce this word. After all, we are all told that all English words have vowels. So some vowel must be missing.

So readers (rather a lot of them) have invented a vowel to put in the word. And enough of them have independently chosen to insert an "i" that we have now a new word. "Tisk." Or, "tisk, tisk." And then they go and use that word in ordinary speech. "John just won't listen to his mother. Tisk, tisk."

Thus, through trying to spell unspellable words, and then trying to read them back, English has gained a new word that never was.

Our language is really out of our control. That is not bad, it is merely amusing.

.

Ain't You Learnt Them Letters?

2009-06-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

Help me, help me, help me!

I am looking for a story that I used when I was teaching American Literature. I'm 98% sure that it was by Zora Neale Hurston. But I can't remember the name.

Unfortunately I read it to the class; I didn't assign them to read it. If I had assigned it, then I would have the record of the assignment in the handouts I prepared for each class. But no, I didn't assign it. I read it to them. No record. Bah!

I'm 94% sure that it is from her anthropology days, travelling the south. 6% chance it is a purely fictional short story. At least I'm positive it is short, else I wouldn't have read it in class.

The gist of the story is that a girl goes to school to learn her letters. Her papa is none too impressed. One day he asks her to take dictation as he narrates a letter. He gets a few sentences in and she is writing. Then he says something like "And then (here he makes a popping sound with his tongue). . . " He waits for her to write it down. She doesn't. "Well, aren't you going to write that down?" "I can't." "You can't? Ain't you learnt them letters yet?"

You get the idea. He wants her to write what he says, but she can only write things that fit into 26 letters. Tongue clicking just don't fit nowhere. And when you think about it, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct tongue and/or lip clicks and vibrations that have clear meanings and even subtle inferences. They are words by any definition, just not writable ones in English.

I love the story because it is so true. Far more of our language (as used, not as given in the dictionary) is unwritable in our 26 letters than most of us take time to realize. And yet few of us take the time to be dissatisfied with it.

So, if anyone remembers the name of the story, I'd be most obliged. I had intended to post it today, but it isn't on my bookshelf.

Consanguinity: Just Call Them A Blessing

2009-06-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

I have a linguistic question for anyone who can help.

Any decent language has special terms for all the members of one's family. In English we recognize only a very few of these. Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. So far so good.

Cousin (Is that a boy cousin or a girl cousin? Is it on the mother's side or the father's? Is it your father's sister's child, or your father's brother's child?) Cousin is not much of a word. Too ambiguous. To differentiate these necessary distinctions would require eight different words for cousin. And we need them. As soon as you say, "So and so is my cousin," someone will ask, "On which side?"

So the word cousin is pretty weak, but that is as far as English will go. After that we just get into the muddle of kinds of cousin. My cousin's children are my cousins-once-removed. To my children they are second-cousins. OK, so they are second cousins on which-which side?

English is a little lacking in consanguinity language. One would think that we would have cared, at some point, to come up with words for our relatives. But we only cared to the extent of cousins, because we weren't allowed to marry them. Unless we wanted to, and then it was alright. Our Anglo/American history is full of cousin marriages, both in royalty and in the ghetto. But that is a different subject.

I just want linguistic differentiation to make clear who is who in relation to whom.

And in these days of mulitple marriages, no amount of linguistics can keep up. Now we hear, "He is my step-cousin's mother's second husband's step son by his third wife." I don't want special words for that!

But this question is not merely linguistic. As of fifteen minutes ago I find that my ex-wife (I've had only one too many) is pregnant by her second husband after me. So, her previous kids are mine (some by genetics, some by my adoption of them). Now I want to know, what will her new children be to me? Not my children, granted. Not even second-step-twice-removed-on-the-mother's-ex-husband's-side type children. Then what?

One thing I do know. If a new child will keep her distracted long enough to let my children grow up in peace, then I'll call all the new children she can bear a blessing from the Lord!

Why Can Children Understand?

2009-06-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

"Why can children understand stories so much earlier than logic?" Jerome Bruner, quoted by John Deely .

A History Of Your True Loves

2009-06-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

Jim Carroll, a New York poet and rock singer, sang in one of his songs: "It must be a great thing to be a cashier in a bookstore and to be surrounded by a history of your true loves." I've always thought he was right, although a librarian friend confided that it is frustating too, to be surrounded by all those true loves and have no time to read them.

No one would have read this blog for long who did not love poetry. I seem to stick pretty close to poetry and poets, more so than I intended when I began blogging. I had intended to include more polemical theological discussion, of which there has been little.

But poetry it has been.

And one wonderful thing about the blogging world that I have found is that I have come into contact with a great number of people who share similar taste in poetry. Never in my life have I met anyone face to face who absolutely adores Christina Rossetti. I can't imagine why, because her poetry and her life story are so adorable. But via this little blog I've met many. Same goes for Gerard Manley Hopkins, although with him I have been in correspondence with others even before I knew what a blog was.

Anyway, I notice that today is my hundredth post under the label of "poetry." So I thought this an apropos time to do something different. I always tell you what I am reading and what I love in poetry. Now I'd like you to tell me. Who are your favorite poets, and why?

Some of you I can already guess. John will put Milton first, and I can guess at a few others who would be in his first five favorite. But he may surprise me with some. Rosa, I can't put them in order, but I think I know at least three who would appear on your top ten list. Mary Rae, you lay them out in black and white on your site, but still I am curious about what exactly you love about each one. Badger, we have discussed poets, and you turned me on to Mary Oliver, but still I can't even guess at your very favorites. Cynthia, number one I think I know, number two I can guess at, but after that I have little clue.

But the vast majority of those who come by here never post comments. I can guess that you all are not quite in the mainstream of current poetic trends, for my posts I know to be somewhat archaic. As I have said elsewhere, I intentionally ignore most of the twentieth century, thinking it in general to have strayed from the poetic goal of the pursuit of beauty. But even I can find numerous recent poems that have bucked that trend.

So I am very curious about you all. Who do you love?

So what I am asking is for as many of you as care to, to tell me and tell us all who are your very favorite poets, and WHY. What is it that you love about that person's poetry? Is it the poetic music? The message? The poet's biography? Something nameless? A combination of many factors?

Please list as many or as few as you like. You may put them in order or not, as you like. I'm not sure I could put mine into order, at least not an order that I would still hold to next week.

And by the way, I have not yet posted anything from some of my favorites. I don't recall posting any Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Have I posted from Robert Bridges? Or Auden? Richard Crashaw? Francis Quarles? Even Robert Browning I think I've omitted, in order to emphasize that I think his wife to have been an eternal poet, and he only a great one. Perhaps that is unfair. I'll try to post a Robert Browning soon.

If We But Knew What We Do

2009-06-19T20:02:00.000-07:00

When I was small I lived in the far north country of Minnesota. A twenty minutes walk could bring me to a dozen lakes, or to two houses. Besides that it was all forest, glorious forest that had not been touched in thousands of years. That was my land, my playplace, my sanctuary, my kingdom. I roamed those forests from sun-up to sun-down, getting to know the trees, the shrubs, each lady-slipper and violet that grew in their shade. Long before I could read I knew dozens of trees by their bark or their leaves; I recognized countless types of mushrooms and knew which we ate and which we didn't. The soft moss and centuries of fallen leaves beneath me, the sticky pine sap and curling birch bark around me, the countless needles and leaves above me, and everywhere hundreds of types of bird songs, fluttering wings, flying squirels and porcupines. It was a magical land, as holy and enchanted as anything this side of the grave will be to me.

Recently while I was telling my youngest daughter about life in those woods, we got on the internet and found that land. I showed her (from the vantage of a satelite photo) the house that I had lived in, the church nearby, and my forests. Many of the forests remain, but I also saw vast tracts of land that have been clear cut. Mile after mile of ancient forest removed to the dirt. Not a tree, not a shrub left. Now there is dirt where I remember walking with my brother, following tracks of we knew not what. Moose we said, but they may have been elk or deer. We fancied ourselves the first humans to walk those paths. Possibly we were.

But now those paths lead not among forests that were ancient before Abraham was born. Now those paths, if they can be found at all, lead between clumps of dirt and rotting stumps. Now with every rain the furtile soil that had been built up from falling leaves and kept in place by antique root structures is being washed away. Every spring the melting snow drags deeper and deeper ravines into the dirt that had been carefully tended by Providence ever since Adam began tending his garden.

As I told my daughter beautiful tales of life in those woods, inside I wept. I wept for the grandeur that I had known, for the life that is becoming impossible, for what my world and the whole world is losing in the loss of such forests.

BINSEY POPLARS
felled 1879

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
Weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew--
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

The World Is Heartsick . . . Or Is It?

2009-06-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

Ever notice how sometimes it seems that when you listen to one person, you agree; you listen to someone else arguing with them and agree with that person too?

It reminds me of the scene in Fiddler On The Roof when there is an argument between a young radical student and an old villager. The men of the village stand around enjoying the spectacle.

The boy makes a good point, to which Tevye heartily chimes in, "He is right."

Then the elder absolutely rebuffs the boy, scoring a point in their impromptu debate. Tevye can't help himself, "He is right."

The village logician turns to Tevye. "He's right, and he's right? They can't both be right."

Tevye doesn't miss a lick. "You know? You also are right"
(quoted from recolection; probably not quite accurate quotes)

This was somewhat my reaction to reading the following poem by Hartley Coleridge. The poem struck a chord in me. I felt and agreed. The world is weary. While in the poem he is speaking to November (thus we can look forward to a May coming soon) I think he has in mind not only a November that comes once a year but also a long slow November of the Earth, the cosmos, God's patience, the naturalness of comforts in life. He is thinking, I believe, that all of the good creation is winding down, not just for a short winter, but perhaps for a very long one, a permanent one.

WRITTEN ON THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER
1820

Hail, dark November ! spurious progeny
Of Phoebus and old Night,--thou sable mourner
That lead'st the funeral pageant of the year,--
Thou Winter's herald, sent before thy lord
To bid the earth prepare for his dread presence,--
I gladly wish thee welcome, for thou wear'st
No flaunting smile to mock pale Melancholy,
Which ever loves its likeness, and derives
From most discomfort, truest consolation.

The world is heartsick, and o'erwearied Nature
Bears, in her lost abandonment, the mark
Of ills expected, and of pleasures past,
And, like a late-repenting prodigal,
Deals out with thrift enforc'd the scant remains
Of lavish'd wealth, sighing to think upon
The riotous days, that left no joy unrifled,
No store reserv'd, to comfort poor old age:
The tip-toe levity of Spring, flower-deck'd,
And Summer's pride, and Autumn's hospitality
Have eat up all.

And now her festal robes
Are worn to rags,--poor rents of tatter'd state,
Telling a tale of mad, luxurious waste,
Yet not enough to cover nakedness,--
A garb of many hues, and wretched all.
There is a desperate patience in her look,
And straggling smiles, or rather ghosts of smiles,
Display the sadness of her wrinkled visage.
Anon, with gusty rage, she casts away
Her motley weeds, and tears her thin grey locks,
And treads her squalid splendor in the mire;
Then weeps amain to think what she has done,
Doom'd to cold penance in a sheet of snow.

That phrase, "the mark of ills expected" makes me think a friend I had when I was young. He had been beaten far too often, and he would flinch every time his father moved. Animals do that too. They run away from us. They bear the mark of ills expected. Deer run when they see us. They rarely let us get very close. But once when I was on horseback I rode right up to a deer. It neither flinched nor moved away. In fact it hardly glanced at us. I got the impression that the deer only noticed a horse, and had no idea of a human rider. Had it noticed me I've no doubt that it would have flinched just like my friend. Paul said that all of creation is constantly groaning--waiting to be released from the bondage that our sin has placed it in. In a sense the whole cosmos resents us, it is weary of bearing us and our curse. That is why God said it would "produce thorns and thistles" for us.

So I can feel and agree with what I hear in Hartley Coleridge's poem. But when I first read it I felt like Tevye, because I knew that I also heartily agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

GOD'S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

So I ask myself, "He's right, and he's right? They can't both be right."
And I reply to myself, "You know? You also are right."

.

A Perfect And Absolute Blank

2009-06-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

A dear old friend and I have been arguing for more than a decade now. I will give you first his side and his reasons.

He is the pastor of a small church. Intentionally he has created in the church a very non-churchy atmosphere, and he has succeeded in attracting a good group of the down and out of our society. As he desired, he is building a church almost entirely composed from people who did not grow up in church and have very little knowledge of the Bible.

Mike, for that is his name, is doing a great work and I am proud to call him my friend.

Mike has always been passionately in search of the bare minimum that might be required in order for someone to be a Christian. What is the very bare bones of what a person must believe and cling to, for them to have a solid hope of eternal life.

Mike is trinitarian, that is, he believes God to exist in the persons of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Mike understands these three to be not merely different names of the same person, but in fact to be different persons who exist eternally in relation to each other. And at the same time Mike understands there to be but one God. Three who are God, but one God. That is the Trinity.

But, Mike reasons, it is possible for a person to be saved (that is to have hope of eternal life) without having any concept of the Trinity. For evidence in favor of this we need look no farther than the Old Testament, in which we assume that most of God's people did not have much understanding of diversity within the one God.

So, Mike does not want to burden his flock with what he considers the non-essential and confusing question of the Trinity. Such doctrines often lead to controversies, to dispute, and to hurt feelings. Mike would spare his congregation all of this, so he skirts around what seems to him to be a dangerous topic.

He does likewise with all other biblical topics that he deems to be non-essential: and by non-essential he always means that it is possible to be eternally saved without an understanding of the question.

Jesus, you will recall, had no kind words for those who "tie up heavy burdents, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders." (Matt 23) Mike is being scrupulously careful not to do this with his teaching.

*****

My question is: What then is he offering to them? What is he providing?

While it is not "essential" that we ever eat beans or fish, are we not healthier if we do? And do we not find that we enjoy them once we've tried them? Yet we could subsist entirely on a diet of Wonderbread and margarine, at least for a while. But ACCKKK!!!!! We would grow tired of it. It would be like when God force fed the Israelites quail "until it was coming out of their nose." We could not be healthy, and I think we could be little happy. But true, for at least a while we could be kept alive.

Mike's approach seems admirably caricatured in this little piece from THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK, written by the Reverend Charles Dodson (aka Lewis Carol). To set the scene, a misfit crew is on an ocean voyage.

from THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--
Such carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--
A perfect and absolute blank!"

****

But of course this does not settle our debate. It will go on, I'm sure, for another decade or two. And I'm twice as sure that we will still be dear friends throughout it.

.

She Is Breeding Again!

2009-06-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago Mary Rae posted a great poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that he wrote to his eldest son, Hartley. Please take a look at it before you read the following.

Take a moment, having read that poem, to wish that your father had written something like it to you when you were but a diapered doll. If he did, please tell us about it! We would love to hear!

****

That poem shows Samuel Taylor Coleridge at his parental best! He is a loving father delighting in his child!

But six years later when he began to suspect that his wife, Sara, was pregnant with a fourth child, he spoke in a decidedly different tone. "Mrs. Coleridge is indisposed, and I have too much reason to suspect that she is breeding again." After the birth of his fourth child, a daughter, we would surely have hoped to hear his tone changed. Instead we hear: "I had never thought of a Girl as a possible event--the words child and man-child were perfect Synonimes in my feelings--however I bore the sex with great Fortitude, and she shall be called Sara."

Unfortunately I cannot relate that his love for Sara grew with her years. Biographers all seem to agree with the assessment of Sara, that she never in her life spent more than a couple of weeks at a time in his company.

She was his daughter, yet they were practical strangers.

So now, my question is this: Did this distance from her father make her more (or did it make her less) eager to imitate his style of poetry?

Hartley, who seems to have been STC's favorite child, his very pet, seems to have little imitated his father, either in life or in the manner of his poetry.

But the eagerness to earn a parent's love can work just as strongly as the gratitude for getting such love. So, did Sara Coleridge write in a similar voice in an attempt to gain that intimacy that he had denied her?

Would withholding love gain him the successor that overflowing love (and doting) had not been able to produce?

To this I don't yet have an answer, but it is the question with which I am now beginning to read the poetry of Sara Coleridge. I will begin with her long work, PHANTASMION. Then I will read the other poems that she wrote over the years.

PHANTASMION is not published as a poem, but I can tell from the outset that she wrote it poetically. Indeed it seems to have been written in the same line structure as Milton's PARADISE LOST; but then it was typeset to look like simple prose. It is only when reading it aloud that one realizes that it is all written in blank verse. The main deviations from blank verse (so far, for I've only begun it) are when Sara inserts individual poems in the flow of the story.

But my big question as I read it (aside from hoping to enjoy the story) is whether or not I hear echoes of her father in her writing.

The STC quotes above are here quoted from Johnathan Wordsworth's introduction to PHANTASMION.

Playing The Part Of Poet

2009-06-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

Garbage can be literature. The voice is all. That is the main concept that I always strove to leave with my literature students. The filth on bathroom walls might be literature, albeit a low form of it. And eloquence might fall short.

To qualify as literature, a group of words (usually but not always written) must leave us access to the real voice of the author or authors. We must be able to make real and authentic contact with the composer of the words before we call it literature. That is what elevates the comics in Bazooka Bubble Gum above the instructions on how to put that tricycle together Christmas morning. In Bazooka we get some (though very small) concept of the author. Not in the instructions.

The difference is always in the totally subjective question, "Do I, as a reader/listener find that I have made contact with a separate mind that wrote/spoke the words?"

With this question in my mind I am reading the poetry of Hartley Coleridge. He is well versed in all of the skills that one needs to make verse. He has, as his brother Derwent testifies, a natural ability with rhymes and meters. In fact his rhymes seem skillful, but not individual. His meters seem enough to earn him a passing grade in composition class, yet they are not playful; they do not say to me: "This is Harley Coleridge working out from all that he has seen before."

I am reading his poetry, all that I can find of it, in the effort to hear HIS voice. I want to hear Harley Coleridge! I want it so that I can listen to hear echoes (or the lack of echoes) of his father. I have become uncharacteristically fascinated by the question of how STColeridge's children felt about him when they were adults.

But I'm having a very hard time finding Hartley Coleridge's voice!

In the following wonderful poem I hear a mimic of his father's orchestration of the music of speach and it also seems to mimic his father's reach from the world of THINGS to the world of IDEAS. In some ways (rhythm and to some extent musical quality) it seems also a forerunner of the later work of Francis Thompson.

OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD

In stature perfect and with every gift
Which God would on his favourite work bestow,
Did our great Parent his pure form uplift,
And sprang from earth, the Lord of all below.

But Adam fell before a child was born,
And want and weakness with his fall began;
So his first offspring was a thing forlorn,
In human shape, without the strength of man:

So, Heaven has doom'd that all of Adam's race,
Naked and helpless, shall their course begin,
E'en at their birth confess their need of grace,
And weeping, wail the penalty of sin.

Yet sure the babe is in the cradle blest,
Since God himself a baby deign'd to be,
And slept upon a mortal mother's breast,
And steep'd in baby tears--his Deity.

O sleep, sweet infant, for we all must sleep,
And wake like babes, that we may wake with Him.
Who watches still his own from harm to keep.
And o'er them spreads the wings of cherubim.

But both when it seems an echo of Hartley's father and when it seems a forerunner of Francis Thompson, I have to say that I think it not Hartley's voice. Even to the extent that he has moved the poetic medium forward, I don't think that we are hearing here the VOICE OF HARTLEY COLERIDGE. That is a subjective conclusion, based both on my own idea of how Hartley's voice will sound and my idea of how Hartley will sound when he is playing a part.

To my own satisfaction I am convinced that he is playing here, sincere as he is and devout as the verse is, the poem itself is not entirely the voice of Hartley Coleridge himeslf. This, as I have said, comes down to a totally subjective understanding. We, the hearers/readers, must decide for ourselves whether we are satisfied that we have heard the individual poet speak.

The more I read of Hartley Coleridge the more I hear the voices of others.

"In the faery pinnance gaily flashing,
through the white foam proudly dashing."

Listen to how every syllable, save only "Through the," the voice must (or should) be raised into a steady high tense tone. It is a highstrung monotone, yet one that denies its monotonous quality through its rushing energy. This is EA Poe's voice. True, Hartley wrote before Edgar Allan Poe, yet the voice fits much better with the themes and ideas of Poe. Indeed it fits better with the person of Poe than it seems to fit with Hartley. Again this is subjective, yet I don't believe that I have heard Hartley here.

Or when we read:

"For ne'er the earth was sound of mirth
So like to melancholy."

In these lines I hear the rhythm of the wilderness voice of Robert Service. And I have to say that the voice sounds at home in Service while it sounds borrowed in Hartley Coleridge. Never mind that Hartley came first. The time is irrelevant. In the mouth (or pen) of Robert Service the voice sounds at home; in the voice and pen of Hartley Coleridge it sounds quaint. It sounds to me like an affectation.

At other times he speaks in the voice William Cowper. Sometimes I hear a minor preview of Gerard Manley Hopkins (tomorrow's post). The one I hear least is the one that I would have expected to prevail. How little I hear the voice of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poetry of this his son!

It is easier to hear echoes of William Wordsworth than of Samuel Taylor Coleridge here.

And this is what I have found so far in the poetry of Hartley Coleridge. While many of his poems are excellent and worth reading, I don't yet feel that I have heard Hartley Coleridge speak for himself. He seems to be performing. He seems to be playing the part of "poet" and I don't think that he has yet decided what poet he is to play!

Having now read half (only half) of his published poetry, the most striking conclusion so far is that he did indeed (not only as a child, but throughout his life) "make a mock apparel" of his words.

So I ask myself, by the definition that I pressed into my students: Is Hartley Coleridge literature?

I can't yet answer for sure. Some very good writing. But literature?

It's a little disheartening, but I am still hoping to hear what I will recognize to be the voice of Hartley.

And yet perhaps we find him; hear him; see him in that very reluctance to show himself. Perhaps we see him best in his need to be heard coupled with his impulse to hide. Perhaps his voice, his real voice, is in each of these poems; perhaps it is hiding between the sounds where it can watch us but we can never quite see it.

Young Lamb's Heart Among The Full-Grown Flocks

2009-06-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

William Blake was fond of reminding anyone who would listen that in the Bible poets and prophets were but two ways of looking at the same role. Poets were prophets and prophets were poets. These days we tend to draw a firmer line between the two, but even now the lines will blur at times.

The Coleridge children had the unusual opportunity of growing up with many of the greatest poets of the time being their neighbors and friends. When Hartley Coleridge was six, William Wordsworth wrote the following poem for him, which every page of his memoir bears out as having been amazingly prophetic (or at least uncannily insightful).

I can't help but think that it was a somewhat unkind thing to do, to hang such a foreboding poem over a small child's future. And as a father, I think I would not have been the least bit grateful to Wordsworth had he written it about my children!

TO H. C.
Six Years Old

O THOU! whose fancies from afar are brought;
Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel,
And fittest to unutterable thought
The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol;
Thou fairy voyager! that dost float
In such clear water, that thy Boat
May rather seem
To brood on air than on an earthly stream;
Suspended in a stream as clear as sky,
Where earth and heaven do make one imagery;
O blessed Vision! happy Child!
Thou art so exquisitely wild,
I think of thee with many fears
For what may be thy lot in future years.
I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,
Lord of thy house and hospitality;
And Grief, uneasy lover! never rest,
But when she sat within the touch of thee.
O too industrious folly
O vain and causeless melancholy
Nature will either end thee quite
Or, lengthening out thy season of delight,
Preserve for thee, by individual right,
A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks.
What hast thou to do with sorrow,
Or the injuries of to-morrow?
Thou art a Dew-drop, which the morn brings forth,
Ill fitted to sustain unkindly shocks,
Or to be trailed along the soiling earth;
A gem that glitters while it lives,
And no forewarning gives;
But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife
Slips in a moment out of life.

While the line "A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks" may sound inviting, especially to fans of Peter Pan, it foretells a failure of maturity in this growing child who "of his words dost make a mock apparel." I won't go line by line to match image to Harley Coleridge's life, but it could almost be done. When the child was six William Wordsworth drew a rough and accurate outline of his coming life.

From the other end of his life Hartley Coleridge wrote the following sonnet. In his experience it was no joyful laughing matter to forever carry a "young lamb's heart" in his breast.

Long time a child, and still a child, when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,--
For yet I lived like one not born to die;
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears,
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,
I waked to sleep no more, at once o'ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran:
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, tho' I be old,
Time is my debtor for my years untold.

.

We Grappled Like Two Wrestlers

2009-06-09T06:25:00.000-07:00

Two brothers, intimate companions in their early years, had hardly seen each other for twenty years. One, Derwent Coleridge, had grown into a stalwart pastor, a teacher of the eternal truths of Scripture. The other, Hartley Coleridge, had become something of a recluse, though not at all an outcast, from society. He kept himself, of his own volition, apart from the crowd. Derwent, the prosaic teacher, and Hartley, the poetic mystic: polar opposites except that they shared a common ideological and biological heritage. When they met at last, Hartley "was at once excited and embarrassed." (Derwent's description) It was both a joyous reunion, and also an awkward one, for Hartley felt overwhelmingly that he had let their parents down in their hopes for him. This guilt had oppressed him for many years.

After the meeting Hartley composed the following verses, which he sent to Derwent.

We grappled like two wrestlers, long and hard,
With many a strain and many a wily turn;
The deep divine, the quaint fantastic bard,
From night to nitght we did the strife adjourn.

The one was stiff as any bending reed
Is stiff with ice, with frosty mail emboss'd,
By nature flaccid as the lank sea-weed,
But seeming stanch--by might of brittle frost.

The other, like a pine, was like to yeild,
But upward sprang, and heavenward pointed still:
The reed and the pine to every blast reveal'd
How weak is wilfulness, how strong is will.

Thou wert the pine, and I, with woeful ruth,
Confess myself the reed: ah ! woe is me,
If such be all the banded hosts of Truth,
Of Justice, Freedom, and Humanity.

I borrowed this from Derwent's memoir of his brother. It is an exceptional read for anyone interested in the gospel, in psychology, in interpersonal relations, or in poetry. Beyond that it is a delightful and heavy piece of biography that any reader would enjoy. Derwent writes such lucid and inciteful prose that I would have liked to post a quote from almost every page, but that I could not pause to make the entry here.

Why Should I Move My Tongue?

2009-06-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

I have been considering the curiosity of tonal languages lately. My mother's native tongue is Sango, which has three tones. Mandarine has four. Attic Greek had, I think, three.

Tonal languages are those in which the tone of the voice has as much to do with the meaning of a word or phrase as does the pronunciation of the vowels and consonants. Thus, in the Mandarin language, the word "ba," if pronounced in a steady normally pitched voice, means the number eight. However, if it is pronounced with a falling and then a rising in the tone it becomes the verb "to hold."

English is generally considered a non-tonal language. For the most part I think it is. The same written sounds do not mean different things depending on the tone. Consider, however, the many tone differentiations with which we can say, "Yeah, I think you're right." There could be a great many different meanings to this simple phrase simply based on the tone (or for English we could consider it an emotional element) that is superimposed over the phrase. Tones mean as much in English as do the words themselves.

But that does not make it a tonal language. The differences in meaning in that phrase are not yet entirely new words. They may take on opposite meanings depending on the tone, but yet the tone only tells us with what attitude the speaker is saying the words. It may be straightforward, it may be sarcastic, it may be hesitant, etc. But it is the same words that are understood. We always understand the words themselves as "Yeah, I think you're right," no matter what slant is put on them by the tones and attitudes of the speaker.

Still, there seems to be the hint of tonality in English speach.

At least in my region of the English speaking world, we do not finish all of our words with the letters that are written down.

Take for example the phrase "I went to the store." When speaking this in common usage I, and my neighbors, not only ignore the "t" in went, but we don't even quite pronounce the "n" that came before it. Yet we don't totally ignore the "n." Instead we say something like "I we to the store" in which there is actually a sound (though not an "n" sound) after the "we." We do not totally drop the "n." Instead we vowalize it, causing the voice to rise just a bit after the short "e" sound. So our "went" comes out as a "we" (not like the word "we" with a long "e" sound) with a rise in tone that comes late after the initial pronunciation of the short "e" sound, and then an abrupt glottal stop.

Thus, at least where I live, the word "went" is really used and pronounced more as a tonal word than as a phonetic word. If I were to say "I we to the store" with no tonal indication of the "n" that is missing, people would not only think I was daft, they may not even understand me. At least it would take them a moment to reconstruct what I had said. But with the rising of the tone on the very tip end of the word, no one even realizes that I left off two sounds from the end of the word. That slight raising of the voice hints at what sounds it has omitted, just as an apostophe hints at the omitted letters.

While English is not yet really a tonal language (at least not here where I live), it has the beginnings of becoming such a language. The mystery of how tonal languages get started is not really a mystery. It is all part of the natural inclination to make our languages as efficient as we can. Why should I move my tongue more than I need in order to get my ideas across?

We Are Called By His Name

2009-06-07T03:11:00.000-07:00

Two by William Blake, a matched pair although they originally appeared in different books:

THE LAMB

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee;
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek and He is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.

THE TYGER

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Shadow Of Oblivion

2009-06-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

"The shadow of oblivion follows close upon our steps, covering up our path as we proceed. If we do not keep an eye behind us, we soon lose sight of our past selves; a loss, I suppose, and a grief to most of us, if only as scanting our tribute of grateful remembrance to the Giver of all good. For myself, I look back on the vacant spaces of memory with a sort of shame, regarding them as lost links in the chain of natural piety."

Derwent Coleridge, from his memoir of his brother Hartley

Such A Vile Short Plumpness

2009-06-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

From the very beginning Samuel Taylor Coleridge was obsessed with the sounds of words.

"From my earliest years I have had a feeling of Dislike & Disgust connected with my own Christian Names: such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first Syllable, & this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity & indefiniteness of the syllable Vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid, with which it ends--the wabble it makes, & staggering betweeen a di--& a tri-syllable--& the whole name sounding as if you were abeeceeing S.M.U.L.--altogether it is perhaps the worst combination, of which vowels & consonants are susceptible."

Quoted from http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/descriptions/His_name.html

While he developed many other criterion for judging his own poetry or the work of others (he was one of the great literary critics and theorists of his time) it was still sounds more than anything else that ruled his heart. Were it not for the sounds, his unfinished poem KUBLA KHAN would be merely an unfinished work, and would be unlikely to get published, let alone remembered. But the sounds, the sounds are incredible, glorious, perfect. The sense of it all is insignificant; it is unfinished anyway, but even were it finished the sense would play a secondary part in the glory of the poem. The sound is all.

KUBLA KHAN

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Such Thought Possessed The Nameless Artist's Mind

2009-06-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

Paul the appostle once looked at an altar dedicated TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. This unknown god, he told a group of philosophers and religious speculators, was not unknown to Paul. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everthing else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth: and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'"

Hartley Coleridge, one of the sons of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, once looked at a statue of the infant Hercules wrestling with some serpents, and he saw an example of what Paul had said about men reaching out and seeking after God. There seem to me to be many points of comparison between Hartley Coleridge's poem below and the ideas that Paul was working with in his evangelism before the Areopagus.

LINES SUGGESTED BY A CAST FROM AN ANCIENT STATUE
OF THE INFANT HERCULES STRANGLING THE SERPENTS
by Hartley Coleridge

BEHOLD Art’s triumph! Yea, but what is Art?
Is it the Iris sent from mind to heart?
Or a bright exhalation, raised, refined,
And organized with various hues of mind?
Nay, let the min and heart, as nature meant,
Unite to work their Maker’s great intent;
As light and heat, diffused by the same sun,
To sense are diverse, but in essence one.
The poet’s craft in rosy breath transpires,
And the quick music of a thousand lyres,
That wake to ecstasy the slumbering air,
Dies into nought, or flits we know not where.
The patient sculptor views, from day to day,
An image that can never pass away;
With resolute faith, which nothing can surprise,
Beholds the type of true proportions rise:
His progress slow, and every touch as slight
As dawn encroaching on a summer night;
His purpose sure, for consummated beauty
To him is love, religion, law and duty.
Long ere our God vouchsafed himself to be
A baby God, a human Deity,
The vast prophetic impulse of the earth
Foretold, and shadow’d forth the mystic birth;
Nor all the art of sacerdotal lies,
Nor the world’s state, could so incarnalise
The strong idea, but that men, set free
By pure imagination’s liberty,
Conceived the fancy of a boy divine.
Some fables fashion’d a fierce God of wine,
Abortive issue of intense desire,
Begot by Thunder and brought forth by Fire.
Some milder spirits cull’d two twinkling lights
From the throng’d brilliance of their Grecian nights,
And gave them names, and deem’d them great to save
The wandering mariner on the weltering wave.
Some, wiser still, believed the sun on high
A deathless offspring of the empyreal sky,
A personal power that could all truths reveal,
Mighty to slay, and merciful to heal.
Some feign’d−and they came nearest truth−
A destined husband of eternal youth,
Born of a mortal mother, and, ere born,
Doom’d to the pilgrim’s houseless lot forlorn,
To fight and conquer, a victorious slave,
Strong in subjection, by obedience brave.
Such thought possess’d the nameless artist’s mind
When he the God, the baby God, design’d,
That perfect symbol of awaken’d will,
Matching its might against predestinate ill.
The serpent writhing round his lower part,
His infant arm defies to reach his heart.
One mighty act is all the wondrous boy,
Line, limb, and feature, all are strength and joy.
Yet half an hour ago that infant slept,
Smiled at his mother’s breast, and haply wept:
And when his task is done, the serpent slain,
Soft in his cradle-sheild may sleep again.

Barrage Of Calculated Effects

2009-06-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

When Packer uses the word "should" in the following, he means it in the sense of "would."

"If we regarded it as our job, not simply to present Christ, but actually to produce converts--to evangelize, not only faithfully, but also successfully--our approach to evangelism would become pragmatic and calculating. We should conclude that our basic equipment, both for personal dealing and for public preaching, must be twofold. We must have, not merely a clear grasp of the meaning and application of the gospel, but also an irresistible technique for inducing a response. We should, therefore, make it our business to try and develop such a technique. And we should evaluate all evangelism, our own and other people's, by the criterion, not only of the message preached, but also of visible results. If our own efforts were not bearing fruit, we should conclude that our technique still needed improving. If they were bearing fruit, we should conclude that this justified the technique we had been using. We should regard evangelism as an activity involving a battle of wills between ourselves and those to whom we go, a battle in which victory depends on our firing off a heavy enough barrage of calculated effects. Thus our philosophy of evangelism would become terrifyingly similar to the philosophy of brainwashing. And we would no longer be able to argue, when such a similarity is asserted to be a fact, that this is not a proper conception of evangelism. For it would be a proper conception of evangelism, if the production of converts was really our responsibility."

J. I. Packer, from EVANGELISM AND THE SOVERIEGNTY OF GOD

Time To Dance Is Not To Woo

2009-06-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

The feminism that I hear in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems seems to me to be both much more honest and infinitely more appealing than the brand of feminism that rules the world these days. It is in fact feminine, for it exalts the feminine; today's variety seems intent on destroying the whole concept of the feminine.

THE LADY'S 'YES'

'Yes,' I answered you last night;
'No,' this morning, sir, I say:
Colors seen by candle-light
Will not look the same by day.

When the viols played their best,
Lamps above and laughs below,
Love me sounded like a jest,
Fit for yes or fit for no.

Call me false or call me free,
Vow, whatever light may shine,--
No man on your face shall see
Any grief for change on mine.

Yet the sin is on us both;
Time to dance is not to woo;
Wooing light makes fickle troth,
Scorn of me recoils on you.

Learn to win a lady's faith
Nobly, as the thing is high,
Bravely, as for life and death,
With a loyal gravity.

Lead her from the festive boards,
Point her to th starry skies;
Guard her, by your truthful words,
Pure from coutrship's flatteries.

By your truth she shall be true,
Ever true, as wives of yore;
And her yes, once said to you,
SHALL be Yes for evermore.

Your Love Was Writ In Sand

2009-06-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

One doesn't have to look very far to find massive amounts of literary criticism claiming Christina Rossetti as a forerunner of the feminist movement. I have even seen articles touting Goblin Market as Rossetti's lesbian manifesto.

I agree that she was a very strong woman, impressively so. Yes, I would call her a feminist. The trouble is that while she was a feminist, the movement that now bears that name is something entirely different than anything that Rossetti ever contemplated.

In Cousin Kate we hear a strong, angry, almost a violent call for women to protect each other from men who fail or refuse to protect them. Her anger is directed more against "Cousin Kate" for her spinelessness than against the man who wronged her. This seems to me to be truly feminist.

But how many feminists these days share her assumption that it was the man's duty to protect her in the first place? How many believe in shame? How many hold her ideal of a woman as a dove? And how many even consider children a gift anymore?

Perhaps the feminists who claim her should not ask whether she might be in their camp, perhaps they should ask whether they are in hers.

Cousin Kate

I was a cottage maiden
Hardened by sun and air,
Contented with my cottage mates,
Not mindful I was fair.
Why did a great lord find me out,
Why did he praise my flaxen hair?
Why did a great lord find me out,
To fill my heart with care?

He lured me to his palace home--
Woe's me for joy thereof--
To lead a shameless shameful life,
His plaything and his love.
He wore me like a silken knot,
He changed my like a glove;
So now I moan, an unclean thing,
Who might have been a dove.

O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate,
You grew more fair than I:
He saw you at your father's gate,
Chose you, and cast me by.
He watched your steps along the lane,
Your work among the rye;
He lifted you from mean estate
To sit with him on high.

Because you were so good and pure
He bound you with his ring:
The neighbors call you good and pure,
Call me an outcast thing.
Even so I sit and howl in dust,
You sit in gold and sing:
Now which of us has tenderer heart?
You had the stronger wing.

O cousin Kate, my love was true,
Your love was writ in sand:
If he had fooled not me but you,
If you stood where I stand,
He'd not have won me with his love
Nor bought me with his land;
I would have spit into his face
And not have taken his hand.

Yet I've a gift you have not got,
And seem not like to get:
For all your clothes and wedding-ring
I've little doubt you fret.
My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride,
Cling closer, closer yet:
Your father would give lands for one
To wear his coronet.

Decaying More And More

2009-06-01T01:35:00.000-07:00

Although many, maybe even most, poets occasionally experiment with non-standard meters, a few have made such experimentation a major focus of their work. Among them, George Herbert stands at the top, both because he was one of the first to do extensive experimentation in English meter and because his experiments went further than most before or since.

Despite the appearance of some of his outlandishly styled poems, he did not throw out the rules. He wrote according to the same understanding of meter that other poets have generally used. But he saw the rules of verse not as a limitation but rather as a playground in which there was ample room to romp and play.

The following poems are often credited as being the first "concrete verse." (This is not accurate, for the ancient Greeks sometimes applied the same idea in using poems as visual art. In fact they created poems in both the shapes of wings and of altars, which are the shapes of the two Herbert poems below. George Herbert was likely the first to create such poems in English.) However, much that is called concrete poetry today is written simply for appearance on the page, ignoring meter and most other tools in the poet's tool chest. George Herbert ignored nothing, the layout is simply a bonus.

In Easter Wings it is impressive to see how many kinds of symmetry Herbert employed. There is of course the appearance; there is a rhythmic symmetry, a partial symmetry in the rhyme schemes, and a careful thematic symmetry to the two wings of each pair. There are possibly others that I haven't yet noticed.

EASTER WINGS

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more,

Till he became

Most poor:

With Thee

O let me rise,

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day Thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

And still with sicknesses and shame

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thin.

With Thee

Let me combine,

And feel this day Thy victory;

For, if I imp my wing on Thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

THE ALTAR

A broken Altar, Lord, Thy servant reares,

Made of a heart, and cemented with teares,

Whose parts are as Thy hand did frame;

No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.

A heart alone

Is such a stone

As nothing but

Thy power doth cut.

Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart

Meets in this frame,

To praise Thy name:

That, if I chance to hold my peace,

These stones to praise Thee may not cease.

O, let Thy blessed Sacrifice be mine,

And sanctifie this Altar to be Thine!

OK, so this second doesn't really look like an altar. That is the fault of my lack of computer skills. When he originally published it the typesetting was carefully adjusted so that there were three distinct line lengths, causing it to resemble the altar at the front of his church. I highlighted the text simply because it seemed to accentuate the shapes a little.

Like A Rhythmic Fate Sublime

2009-05-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

In the final stanza of the prologue to the Rhyme of the Dutchess May, Elizabeth Barrett Browning explains exactly what she is doing with the rhymic interlude in the midst of each stanza. This is a longish poem, and the short line, "Toll slowly," disrupts the otherwise standard rhythm of all 112 verses.

The scene is that she is reading a very sad tale, a tale of death, in a churchyard, while the church bell continuously tolls for a funeral. As Browning explains in the prologue, "The solemn knell fell in with the tale of life and sin, like a rhythmic fate sublime."

So, as we read the whole poem, and as we continually hear the words "Toll slowly" in the middle of each stanza, we hear the tolling of the funeral bell. The funeral sounds permeate the poem, "like a rhythmic fate sublime."

The Cambridge Edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems contains the following note right before the poem: "Despite the irritating iteration of the refrain Toll slowly--which most people omit in reading--the 'Rhyme of the Duchess May' has generally been accounted much the best of Mrs. Browning's longer ballads." Iritating iteration? Yes! But it is meant to be irritating, it is the constant breaking in of death on our thoughts as we read, it is death refusing to be ignored. It is the tolling of the inevitable toward which the poem is rushing us. Thus the word "slowly" doesn't only describe the bell, it pleads with it: "Please toll slowly, don't rush us to the funeral." The words must not be omitted. Or at the very least they could perhaps be replaced with the slow tolling of a churchbell. But that would be quite as irritating.

I will post only the prologue, though the whole poem is intensely beautiful.

Prologue to RHYME OF THE DUCHESS MAY
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,
Toll slowly,
And the oldest ringer said, 'Ours is music for the dead
When the rebecks are all done.'

Six abeles i' the chruchyard grow on the north side in a row,
Toll slowly,
And the shadows of their tops rock across the little slopes
Of the grassy graves below.

On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,
Toll slowly,
And, between the river flowing and the fair green trees a-growing,
Do the dead lie at their rest.

On the east I sate that day, up against a willow gray:
Toll slowly,
Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill-ranges
And the river on its way.

There I sate beneath that tree, and the bell tolled solemnly,
Toll slowly,
While the trees' and river's voices flowed between the solemn noises,--
Yet death seemed more loud to me.

There I read this ancient rhyme while the bell did all the time
Toll slowly,
And the solemn knell fell in with the tale of life and sin,
Like a rhythmic fate sublime.

Among Crags In Its Flurry

2009-05-30T04:30:00.000-07:00

Robert Southey was a bigwig by anyone's standards. He was the poet laureate of Great Brittain for almost half his life. He wrote scholarly works on some of the great poets, including one on William Cowper. He married Coleridge's sister and was pals with Walter Landor Savage and William Wordsworth. He was a poet, a scholar, a role model to poets and a statesman. No small resume!

But he was not a distant father, as some who pursue a name in such fields tend to be. He played with his children and didn't want them to be excluded from his other work. So, to amuse them he wrote the poem that has kept his name alive for a century and a half.

For a man who was so much in his right place and in his right time--he was as well fitted to the poetic and political climate of the early 1800's as a man could be--it is remarkable that he wrote a poem so utterly before its time. Mind you he was a Romantic (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake) and the use he here makes of rhythm was utterly foreign to all else in his world. It would be 117 years before Dr. Seuss would follow his lead and play such light-hearted games with the rhythmic quality of words and lines.

THE CATARCT OF LODORE

"How does the Water
Come down at Lodore?"
My little boy asked me
Thus, once on a time;
And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.
Anon at the word,
There first came one daughter
And then came another,
To second and third
The request of their brother,
And to hear how the water
Comes down at Lodore,
With its rush and it roar,
As many a time
They had seen it before.
So I told them in rhyme,
For of rhymes I had store:
And 'twas in my vocation
For their recreation
That so I should sing;
Because I was Laureate
To them and the King.

From its sources which well
In the Tarn on the fell;
From its fountains
In the mountains,
Its rills and its gills;
Through moss and through brake,
It runs and it creeps
For awhile, till it sleeps
In its own little lake.
And thence at departing,
Awakening and starting,
It runs through the reeds,
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade,
And though the wood-shelter,
Among crags in its flurry,
Helter-skelter,
Hurry-scurry.
Here it comes sparkling,
And there it lies darkling;
Now smoking and frothing
Its tumult and wrath in,
Till in this rapid race
On which it is bent,
It reaches the place
Of its steep descent.
The Cataract strong
Then plunges along,
Striking and raging
As if a war waging
Its caverns and rocks among:
Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around,
With endless rebound!
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.
Collecting, projecting,
Receding and speeding,
And shocking and rocking,
And darting and parting,
And threading and spreading,
And whizzing and hissing,
And dripping and skipping,
And hitting and splitting,
And shining and twining,
And rattling and battling,
And shaking and quaking,
And pouring and roaring,
And waving and raving,
And tossing and crossing,
And flowing and going,
And running and stunning,
And foaming and roaming,
And dinning and spinning,
And dropping and hopping,
And working and jerking,
And guggling and struggling,
And heaving and cleaving,
And moaning and groaning;
And glittering and frittering,
And gathering and feathering,
And whitening and brightening,
And quivering and shivering,
And hurrying and scurrying,
And thundering and floundering;
Dividing and gliding and sliding,
And falling and brawling and sprawling,
And driving and riving and striving,
And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling,
And sounding and bounding and rounding,
And bubbling and troubling and doubling,
And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling,
And clattering and battering and shattering;
Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting,
Delaying and straying and playing and spraying,
Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,
Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling,
And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming,
And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing,
And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping,
And curling and whirling and purling and twirling,
And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping,
And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing;
And so never ending, but always descending,
Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending,
All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar,
And this way the Water comes down at Lodore.

By the way, I took this text from the edition published by Henry Holt and Co., with some of the best illustrations I've seen in any book. David Catrow managed to catch the emotion of the poem and the poet as well as E. H. Shepherd did for the The House at Pooh Corner or Gwynned Hudson did for Alice in Wonderland. It is worth looking through.

Breath And Smell

2009-05-29T03:07:00.000-07:00

I can't get over what a complex effect Langston Hughes creates by mixing just a couple of rhythms together in such a small space. Again, the rhythmic effect on our mouths and our ears is absolutely essential to the overall effect of the poem. I dare say that if you read it silently (without even hearing it in your mind) you won't be able to understand it.

A poem is not a poem on the page or in the eye; a poem only becomes a poem in the mouth and in the ear. Langston Hughes enforces that rule like a poetry cop!

SUBWAY RUSH HOUR

Mingled
breath and smell
so close
mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear.

.

There Shall Be One People

2009-05-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

In THE ANVIL by the great Rudyard Kipling we hear an (I think) unprecedented rhythm. In each of the three stanzas the lines are arranged with six stresses in the first line, five in the second, six in the third and seven(!) in the last. 6-5-6-7! Who else but Kipling would have dared? The miracle of the poem is that the oddity of the line length does not (at least to my ear) intrude on our minds as we read it. It is hardly noticable.

But what it does for us is important. By starting with a long line he sets the standard. Then in the shorter (5 stress) line we feel a release and freedom in reading, thus our voice becomes naturally a couple of notes lower--perfect for a foreshadowing line. Then back to the standard, the six stress before we move in the opposite direction. The final line of each stanza, with its extra syllable that we feel pressed to squeeze into our mouths with an equal amount of breath as we used in what he had set up as the standard, is tense. The effect is that our voice naturally raises a few notes. We feel and hear tension, not only in the thoughts of the poem, but in our own voices! And that happens naturally, whether we are paying attention or not. His variation of line length is not accidental, but integral to the overall effect of the poem.

THE ANVIL

England's on the anvil--hear the hammers ring--
Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne!
Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King--
England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into line!

England's on the anvil! Heavy are the blows!
(But the work will be a marvel when it's done.)
Little bits of Kingdoms cannot stand against their foes.
England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into one!

There shall be one people-- it shall serve one Lord--
(Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape!)
It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword.
England's being hammered, hammered, hammered into shape!

My Soul Round Me Doth Roll

2009-05-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

Even Perfection Craves Diversity

Over the years many poets have played with the meter of their poems, trying out different schemes just for the fun of seeing how they work. Some work well, others don't.

For Milton's Paradise Lost, his celebrated blank verse was indubitably the right choice. Throughout the book he sticks very close to the consistent use of the five stressed line, borrowing what has been called "Marlowe's mighy line." It may be Marlowe's, but Milton used it better. This meter rightly bears the name "heroic," and for Milton's epic he could hardly have chosen better.

Shakespeare also, in his plays and sonnets (although not in the 'songs' that he interspersed throughout many of the plays) wrote with a nearly consistent five beat line.

Consistency has its use, and most great English language poems are written with each line bearing the same number of stresses.

But poets are experimenters; they are playful. They crave diversity and challenge. We all do.

We cannot live on caviar and honey as the young David Bowie longed to do. Occasionally we need a change; if we live only on luxurious food we will find that we begin to crave the simplicity of a baked potato or a ham sandwich.

Likewise poets through the years have found that their ears grow weary even with Milton's mighty line and Shakespeare's glorious sonnets. They find that they crave diversity. So time and again they begin to mix things up, to play around. They are experimenting in the kitchen. Sometimes the result is comparable to pouring chocolate syrup on scrambled eggs, an experiment some of us tried when we were young. The results are interesting, but perhaps not worth repeating. But sometimes, sometimes the experiments really work. Sometimes they yeild glorious results. At the very least they offer a different texture to our ears which is something our ears would come to crave if the whole world were written in blank verse.

For the next few posts I intend to post a few of these experiments-in-meter that in my opinion were exceptionally successful.

Francis Thompson had many reasons for writing the following poem. Among them are love and awe for the Cardinal, fear of hell, the need for a paycheck, etc. But I think that one of his motivations was also just the playful desire to see if he could make this intriguing meter work. You tell me whether he succeeded.

To The Dead Cardinal Of Westminster

I will not perturbate
Thy Paradisal state
With praise
Of thy dead days;

To the new-heavened say,
'Spirit, thou wert fine clay':
This do,
Thy praise who knew.

Therefore my spirit clings
Heaven's porter by the wings,
And holds
Its gated golds

Apart, with thee to press
A private business;--
Whence,
Deign me audience.

Anchorite, who didst dwell
With all the world for cell,
My soul
Round me doth roll

A sequestration bare.
Too far alike we were,
To far
Dissimilar.

For its burning fruitage I
Do climb the tree o' the sky;
Do prize
Some human eyes.

You smelt the Heaven-blossoms,
And all the sweet embosoms
The dear
Uranian year.

Those Eyes my weak gaze shuns,
Which to the suns are Suns,
Did
Not affray your lid.

The carpet was let down
(With golden moultings strown)
For you
Of the angels' blue.

But I, ex-Paradised,
The shoulder of your Christ
Find high
To lean thereby.

So flaps my helpless sail,
Bellying with neither gale,
Of Heaven
Nor Orcus even.

Life is a coquetry
Of Death, which wearies me,
Too sure
Of the amour;

A tiring-room where I
Death's divers garments try,
Till fit
Some fashion sit.

It seemeth me too much
I do rehearse for such
A mean
And single scene.

The sandy glass hence bear-
Antique remembrancer;
My veins
Do spare its pains.

With secret sympathy
My thoughts repeat in me
Infirm
The turn o' the worm

Beneath my appointed sod.
The grave is in by blood;
I shake
To winds that take

Its grasses by the top;
The rains thereon that drop
Perturb
With drip acerb

My subtly answering soul;
The feet across its knoll
Do jar
Me from afar.

As sap foretastes the spring;
As Earth ere blossoming
Thrills
With far daffodils,

And feels her breast turn sweet
With the unconceived wheat;
So doth
My flesh foreloathe

The abhorred spring of Dis,
With seething presciences
Affirm
The preparate worm.

I have no thought that I,
When at the last I die,
Shall reach
To gain your speech.

But you, should that be so,
May very well, I know,
May well
To me in hell

With recognising eyes
Look from your Paradise--
'God bless
Thy hopelessness!'

Call, holy soul, O call
The hosts angelical,
And say,--
'See, far away

'Lies one I saw on earth;
One stricken from his birth
With curse
Of destinate verse.

'What place doth He ye serve
For such sad spirit reserve,--
Given,
In dark lieu of Heaven:--

'The impitiable Daemon,
Beauty, to adore and dream on,
To be
Perpetually

'Hers, but she never his?
He reapeth miseries;
Foreknows
His wages, woes;

'He lives detached days;
He serveth not for praise;
For gold
He is not sold;

'Deaf is he to world's tongue;
He scorneth for his song
The loud
Shouts of the crowd;

'He asketh not world's eyes;
Not to world's ears he cries;
Saith,--"These
Shut, if you please";

'He measureth world's pleasure,
World's ease, as Saints might measure;
For hire
Just love entire

'He asks, not grudging pain;
And knows his asking vain,
And cries--
"Love! Love!" and dies,

'In guerdon of long duty,
Unowned by Love or Beauty;
And goes--
Tell, tell, who knows!

'Aliens from Heaven's worth,
Fine beasts who nose i' the earth,
Do there
Reward prepare.

'But are his great desires
Food but for nether fires?
Ah me,
A mystery!

'Can it be his alone,
To find, when all is known,
That what
He solely sought

'Is lost, and thereto lost
All that its seeking cost?
That he
Must finally,

'Through sacrificial tears,
And anchoretic years,
Tryst
With the sensualist?'

So ask; and if they tell
The secret terrible,
Good friend,
I pray thee send

Some high gold embassage
To teach my unripe age.
Tell!
Lest my feet walk hell.

.

Where Love Is There God Is Also

2009-05-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

This is meant to follow a couple of posts by http://myopicpoets.blogspot.com/ John W. May on the work of Christina Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti's attitude toward the religion that was the very center of her life and her art was highly meditative, one could even say that it was mystical. In this she was emphatically out of step with the Anglican Church of which she was a part, and indeed with all of Western culture in the nineteenth century. It was a time when "progress," "science," and "conquest" were quickly becoming the religion both in and out of the Church. The humble introspective spirit she displayed shines all the more brightly for its being so rare in her day as it is in ours.

"Interuptions are vexations.

Granted. But what is an interuption?

An interuption is something, is anything, which breaks in upon our occupation of the moment. For instance: a frivolous remark when we are absorbed, a selfish call when we are busy, an idle noise out of time, an intrusive sight out of place.

Now our occupations spring? . . . from within: for they are the outcome of our own will.

And interuptions arrive? . . . from without. Obviously from without, otherwise we could and would ward them off.

Our occupation, then, is that which we select. Our interuption is that which is sent us.

But hence it would appear that the occupation may be wilful, while the interuption must be Providential.

A startling view of occupations and interuptions!

. . .

Ah but, that which is frivolous, selfish, idle, intrusive, is clearly not Providential.

As regards the doer, no: as regards the sufferer, yes.

I think we quite often misconceive the genuine appointed occupation of a given moment, perhaps even of our whole lives. We take for granted that we ought to enjoy a pleasure, or complete a task, or execute a work, or serve someone we love: while what we are really then and there called to is to forego a pleasure or break off a task, or leave a cherished work incomplete, or serve someone we find it difficult to love.

Interuptions seem well nigh to form the occupation of some lives.

Not an occupation one would chose; yet none the less profitable on that account . . ."

Christina Rossetti, from Time Flies, A Reading Diary (quoted in Poems and Prose)

She seems to combine the compactly formulated argument style of Augustine with the mystical vision of the Christian life of Leo Tolstoy. Compare the sentiments she expresses here with Tolstoy's Martin the Cobbler. Or compare it to Jesus' words on which Tolstoy's story is based: "I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was naked and you clothed me."

Where Love Is There God Is Also
(Martin the Cobbler, by Leo Tolstoy)

In a certain town there lived a very honest cobbler called Martin. He lived in a tiny basement room. Its only window looked out onto the street. Of the passers-by all he could see was their feet. But since there was hardly a pair of boots or shoes that had not passed through is hands at one time or another for repair, Martin was able to identify the passers-by by looking at their shoes.

But life had been hard on Martin. His wife died, leaving him with a young son. However, no sooner had the son reached the age when he could be of help to his father than he fell ill and died. Martin buried him and gave way to despair, taking to the bottle at the same time. He gave up the practice of his religion. But one day an old friend of his dropped in. Martin poured out his soul to him. At the end of it his friend advised him to do a little reading from the Gospels each day, promising that if he did so, light and hope would come back into his life.

Where Love is, there God is also. Where Love is not, we are called to make the appropriate sacrifices, to go out of our way, to put it there. Martin took his friend's advice. At the end of each day he would take down the gospels from the shelf and read a little. At first he meant only to read on Sundays, but he found it so interesting that he soon read everyday. Slowly his life changed. He gave up drink. The words of Christ created new hope for him and the deeds of Christ were like lights that drove out his darkness.

One night as Martin sat reading he thought he heard someone calling him. He listened and heard clearly: "Martin, Martin, look out into the street tomorrow for I will come to visit you." He looked around the tiny room, and since there was no one to be seen he reckoned it must be the Lord Himself who had spoken to him.

So it was with a great sense of excitement that he sat down to his work the next day. As he worked he kept a close eye on the window. He was looking for something or someone special. But nothing exciting happened. Just the usual people passed by going about their everyday business.

The day wore on and nobody special passed by. In the early afternoon he saw a pair of old boots that were very familiar to him. They belonged to an old soldier called Stephen. Going to the window he looked up and saw the old man hitting his hands together for it was bitterly cold outside. Martin wished that he would move on, for he was afraid he might obstruct his view and that he would not see the Lord when he passed. But old Stephen just stood there by the railing. Finally it occurred to Martin that maybe Stephen had nothing to eat all day. So he tapped on the window and beckoned him to come in. He sat him by the fire and gave him tea and bread. Stephen was most grateful He said he hadn't eaten for two whole days. As he left Martin gave him his second overcoat as a shield against the biting cold.

But all the time Martin was entertaining Stephen he had not forgotten the window. Every time a shadow fell on it he looked up but nobody extraordinary passed . Night fell, Martin finished his work and very reluctantly closed the window shutters. After supper he took down the Gospels and as was his custom he opened the Gospels and read at random. After reading for some time Martin put down the book and reflected. The words of the Lord came to him: "I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was naked and you clothed me." He understood then that Christ had indeed come to him that day in the person of Stephen, and that he had made him welcome. And his heart was filled with a peace he had never before experienced.
(borrowed from http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/16430.htm)

The similarity between her argument and his parable is extensive. Both are highly meditative; both spring from a deeply religious soul; both are whimsical and playful in how they work themselves out. Both express very similar sentiments, a similar way of understanding the Christian life. And to cap it off, they were both written in the same year, 1885.

.

15,000 Days Old

2009-05-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Today I am 15,000 days old. Happy birthday to me!

Of those 15000 days, I've spent approximately:

4000 days sleeping;
3121 days working for pay;
2000 days reading;
840 days in school;
833 days listening to audio sermons and books on tape;
625 days eating;
417 days cooking;
334 days writing and re-writing;
180 days walking in the woods, just looking;
129 days in church;
127 days bicycle riding;
125 days watching tv/movies;
108 days traveling to and from work;
90 days preparing lessons to teach;
70 days traveling in other countries;
63 days waiting at red lights;
57 days on the ocean;
55 days teaching/homework help;
52 days getting dressed;
43 days cleaning fish;
42 days brushing my teeth;
41 days playing soccer;
35 days reading the newspaper;
34 days jogging;
30 days hitch-hiking;
17 days backpacking;
6 days canoeing;
2 days talking on the phone;
2 days in airplanes and helicopters;
1 day watching sports.

Of course these are not all mutually exclusive; most of the audio book time was at work; cleaning fish was also mostly work, etc.

So, what have you all been doing?

On Some Fond Breast The Parting Soul Relies

2009-05-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

Despite its name, the following was not written in a country churchyard, but was painstakingly written and re-written over the course of at least six years, maybe as long as nine years. (Why is it that poets like to create the illusion that poems spring fully formed from their pens?) Just for fun I've added in a stanza that was in the poem for awhile, but that Gray ultimately eliminated before publication. Those of you who already know the poem, can you spot the one that didn't make it past his final re-write?

Ellegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

"Him have we seen the greenwood side along,
While o'er the heath we hied, our labours done,
Oft as the woodlark pip'd her farewell song,
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.

"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove,
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

"One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

"The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne.
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."

THE EPITAPH
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry (all he had) a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

Lived Between You and Me

2009-05-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Martin Buber was one of the greatest philosophers last century. His deceptively short treatise on love, I And Thou, is among the most beautiful books I've ever encountered.

He also wrote extensively of Hasidism, a mystic sect of Judaism that has sprouted among the very poor Jews of Eastern Europe. Besides writing for scholars and learned men, he also collected and composed many stories for children. His Tales of the Hasidim makes both entertaining reading with our kids, and never fails to be thought provoking to me on both religious and literary grounds. And it is a wonderful introduction for children into a world that gets scant attention even in our 'multicultural' society.

But until recently I had read none of his poetry. I find that it requires and provokes much pondering, just as his philosophical writings and stories do, and that it is also couched in a language which even in translation is vibrant. And his passion, as always, is the genuine meeting of two persons.

Do You Still Know It . . . ?

Do you still know, how we in our young years
Traveled together on this sea?
Visions came, great and wonderful,
We beheld them together, you and I.
How image joined itself with images in our hearts!
How a mutual animated describing
Arose out of it and lived between you and me!
we wer there and were yet wholly here
And wholly together, roaming and grounded.
Thus the voice awoke that since then proclaims
And witnesses to old majesty as new,
True to itself and you and to both together.
Take then this witness in your hands,
It is an end and yet has not end,
For something eternal listens to it and listens to us,
How we resound out of it, I and Thou.

.

A Page of Prancing Poetry

2009-05-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any courser like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

Emily Dickinson

God's Self-Revelation

2009-05-11T20:48:00.000-07:00

God’s Image as Self-Revelation

When God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” notice who was taking responsibility for making us in his image. God himself was. This point is very important for a couple of reasons. First, God will not fail in this proposal any more than he fails in any other proposal. Because God decided to make us to be his image, we will finally fulfill that role and become that which we were created to be.

Equally significant to the present discussion is the fact that God is proposing to make us in his own self-image. If God is doing the making and if he says that what he is making is to be his image, the result will be a disclosure not only of God but also of God as he sees himself. Is there a difference? Does God know himself well enough to paint a thorough and accurate self-portrait? The obvious answers are “No” and “Yes.” There is no difference. God’s disclosure of himself will correspond just as well to God in his person (as he really is) as to God in his own eyes (as God sees himself).

Then why bother to mention it? Because every major historical understanding of what it means to be created in God’s image seems to imply that God has myopia and can only see tiny aspects of his own character. One interpretation after another says that in creating humankind in his image God had in mind only his purity, only his mind and ability to be introspective, only his love of relationships, and so on. But if the creation of humankind is an act of self-disclosure on God’s part, why should we not expect that it will encompass the whole of God and his glory? Are we afraid to expect that because we do not see God’s glory in ourselves? Where do we look, to ourselves or to God, to determine how we are to understand God’s image?

Historically theologians have automatically turned from the subject, namely God, to the object, which is us.[i] They consider us as we stand now after the fall versus how we stood before the fall. They consider us with all of the light that each theologian’s anthropology can throw onto this topic.[ii] But we are not the subject or focus of this doctrine: God is. God is his own focus in this proposal to make us and he should remain our focus in interpretation.

Adam was moderately aware of who God is because he and God walked together in the garden. But where do we look to see God? We look to God’s expression of himself in his Word, the Bible, and especially in his incarnate Word, Jesus. God has shown himself to us as he walked in the garden, as he sat under the tree at Abram’s tent, as he spoke from the burning bush, and as he conversed with Moses on Mt. Sinai. He wrestled with Jacob like a man, spoke to Elijah as a gentle whisper, and stood with the three Hebrew children in Nebuchadnezzar’s fire. God has revealed himself in many places and in many ways, but his self-revelation reached its culmination in his Son who is the “reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.”[iii]

If the self-revelation that we see of God in his Word is long and complex, full of questions and impenetrable mystery, then how dare we interpret his self-disclosure in and through us in a reductionist one-dimensional framework? Someone will ask how I would dare to speak of humanity in such a way, as though we were God’s self-disclosure in some way equal to the Bible or to Jesus. I respond simply with the words of our text, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” There is in the words “image” and “likeness” such a fullness of meaning as to leave no room for partial images and skewed likenesses. God has proposed an act of self-expression, a work of self-disclosure, and we are it. With our perspectives lying here in the dust, “what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”[iv]

[i] . Consider God’s words as they appear in the sentence: Us (subject), let make (verb), adam (direct object). Grammatically the subject is the doer of the verb, and God is the doer of this verb. Adam is not the subject of God’s proposal; rather, the plural God is the subject.
[ii]. For a fuller treatment of this idea of how the understanding of God’s image has been shaped by anthropology, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), vol. 3, 1, pp. 192–4.
[iii]. Hebrews 1:3.
[iv]. 1 John 3:2–3.

(Excerpted from ch 6 of Covenant and Community)

This is why God's law to us is always guiding us to live, act, think, speak, relate and feel in a manner that imitates how the three who are God have always lived, acted, thought, spoken, related and felt toward each other within the community of the Trinity. The short version of all of God's law was given even before we were created: we are to be their image and to manifest their likeness within the whole community that Adam has become, and even to be pulled into the intimate fellowship of the three whom we imitate. For that we were created, and to that we are being brought, through Christ Jesus. And that, my dear Hamlet, "is a consumation devoutly to be wished!"

Like A Pressed Flower

2009-05-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

INKSPELL, the second in the INKHEART trilogy, is already fascinating in the first few chapters. Cornelia Funke's THE THIEF LORD is among my very favorites, so I went looking to see what else she has available.

INKSPELL is remarkably set simultaneously in two different worlds. Her debt to CS Lewis is obvious, but she doesn't live their as a burglar. Instead she moves into (what seem to me) completely new realms of imagination. Her first world is ours, more or less modern day Italy. The second world is a land that was created through the writing of a book, but the characters of that book are able to be brought into this world, and the folk of this world sometimes wind up there. It makes for a fascinating (if you enjoy Lewis and Tolkien) intertwining of realms.

Of the many themes that are interlaced throughout, books/words/stories certainly dominates. It is through the oral reading of stories that characters can be brought, and sent, from one realm to the other. Students of the Bible should take special note! Read 2 Kings 22, or the whole book of John which was (I believe) meant to be performed aloud. Throughout the Bible reading and praying aloud is treated as being in a class aside from private silent meditation. Preaching is more volatile than reading. As Hosea says, "Take words." (ch 14:2) In other words, don't go to God silently. (This is not to dis silent prayer, just to say that the Scripture treats it differently than oral, communal prayer.)

Yes, the INKHEART trilogy (as far as I've gotten) lives on the cusp of book worship. But, hey, I live there too! It is an edge to which we come seriously close, and the more we love the Bible the closer we come. In fact that is a charge that the Catholic Bishops leveled against the Reformers many years ago. But the Reformers retorted that they'd rather worship the Bible than the traditions of the Church. (OK, so I paraphrase.) It's an endless and mindless debate.

But books are powerful, and the following quote from INKSPELL shows just one of their many powers.

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said when, on Meggie's last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells . . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . . both strange and familiar."

How many of us book lovers have experienced that!

.

Eavesdropping on Theology Class

2009-05-04T00:44:00.000-07:00

I recently learned that my book, Covenant and Community, has been assigned as required reading for a course on "Theology of the Human" at Trinity College, University of Toronto. The course, as I understand it, is the "what," "how," and "why" of being human, all from a biblical perspective. Thus it perfectly corresponds to the book, which is a study of the "what," "how," and "why" of God's image.

I would be curious to eavesdrop on the class and read the papers as students wrestle with trying to fathom why an eternally happy God (as we all seem to assume) would trouble himself with creating such troublesome and painful creatures as ourselves. They (the three who are God) didn't have to make us, you know. It would have spared them all more pain than we can comprehend if they would have stopped the creation halfway through the sixth day. So why did they do it?

That is a question that seems to me to be a very weak point in many people's theologies. I have by now read a couple hundred books purporting to delve into the subject of God's image, but most are terribly weak when it comes to asking about God's motive for Creation. But it is a vital question, one that plagued me since I was four or five years old. In Covenant and Community I think a more thorough and focussed answer is drawn out; whether it is also a more adequate and satisfying answer remains for others to decide.

That is why I'd love to eavesdrop as students struggle with such questions.

Believing in the Universe

2009-05-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Terribly irreverant, mocks a version of end time events that no one I've ever come across holds to. To be truly sacreligious they would have needed to do their homework.

But it is sprinkled with little gems such as the following. To set the stage, Newt has been trying to believe in something, anything, because he thinks it will give his life meaning. Other things have failed, so:

Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.

.

Heal The Earth's Wounds

2009-05-02T11:56:00.001-07:00

I just returned from a glorious week at the Overseas Mission Study Center in New Haven, CT. Together with God's people from all corners of the globe, representing many languages and cultures, I had the joy of studying a portion of Isaiah (my favorite biblical author) that stressed the international and multicultural nature of the Kingdom of our God.

Invigorated and refreshed, I came home and opened a book of my favorite Russian poet, Nika Turbina, and found her echoing much of what had gone through my mind during this week. She wrote this when she was 8 years old.

TELLING FORTUNES

Nowadays people tell fortunes
with time,
cards are history now.
Getting a black one means
getting bombed.
Not a deck of cards,
but people are scattered
over the poor
globe,
everyone afraid of picking
a blood-stained country.
What a shame that
I'm not a fortune teller.
I would tell fortunes
only with flowers
and I would heal
the earth's wounds
with a rainbow.

.

How Can I Bear It; Buried Here?

2009-04-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

RENASCENCE
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These things were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And--sure enough--I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and--lo!--Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,--nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.--Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,--
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,--then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore though my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was not room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,--there is not weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, mulit-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, dow-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and--crash!
Before the wild wind's whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell frm the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everthing,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,--
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchar-breath, and with the smell,--
I know not how such things can be!--
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught firecely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,--
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat--the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

.

Before the Law

2009-04-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

Does God love us and save us because we obey him, or do we obey him because he loves and saves us?

It's an ancient question, to which we all know the answer, but I think the following quote is both concise and potent. Perhaps it is so potent because it is so concise.

"The Old Testament is often caricatured as the testament of law. Of course, there is law in the Old Testament. But before there is law, there is God's grace. What precedes the first commandment? An affirmation that Israel has reached Sinai due entirely to the saving grace of God: 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.'

The law of God presupposes the grace of God."

from The Image of God by Mark Mangano