HAUNTING LINES FROM EMILY

EXCEPT the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’T is lost, and lost to me.

I don't begin to understand what dear Emily Dickinson meant by these lines and I can't find any interpretation, so I'll take a stab.

It is well known that Emily resisted conversion during a revival when she was enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Of those converted, she wrote, "They seem so very tranquil, and their voices are kind, and gentle, and the tears fill their eyes so often, I really think I envy them."

I wonder if the above poem speaks to this kind of revival that came so close to home ("seemed to choose my door"). Is she saying that God's distance, in light of this new closeness, haunts (or hurts) her? Did she have hope on this occasion that she had never hoped before? Did God's grace depart once the revival was over? She implies this elsewhere. Is the loss double because the grace (perhaps meaning the revival) has ended and her opportunity to accept the grace has passed her by?

Here's another poem that may have a similar theme:

JUST lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.

Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal,—
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.

Jim Harrison, SAVING DAYLIGHT

This morning I'm reading some poems from Harrison's 2006 book of poetry. Here are some lines worth pondering.







I can freely tie myself up without rope.
This talent is in the realm of antimagic
and many people have it. . . . (p. 10)

He's [God] so tired of hearing about this ditzy Irishman,
Bishop Ussher, who spread the rumor that creation
only took six thousand years when it required twelve billion.
Man Shrunk himself with the biological hysteria
of clocks, the machinery of dread. You spend twelve billion
years inventing ninety billion galaxies and who appreciates
your work except children, birds and dogs, and a few
other genius strokes like otters and porpoises, those humans
who kiss joy as it flies, who see though not with the eye. (72)

The church says God is spy
who keeps track of how we misues
our genitals. . . . (115)

Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW

John, in his wonderful down-home Kentucky accent, just finished reading Jayber Crow this morning. I had read it years ago, but it's well worth reading a second time. Here is a quote (p. 321) that's worth pondering. Jaber, after more than thirty years, has been pushed out of his barber shop by government inspectors and has moved to a little shack on the river:

I kept on as janitor of the church, which is scheduled work. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don't attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don't want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn't want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I'm a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

A Thought-Provoking Poem

John read some poetry to me last night and began reading The Picture of Dorian Gray all from an anthology of Oscar Wilde (1854-1099), born in Dublin. Here is a cartoon drawing of him. He was a most controversial character and often made the news. He was also a profound writer. Below is a poem that we both thought to be most profound.





"On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria"

Christ, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!

Reasons A Reverend Resists Church Attendance

"One reason I don't [go to church] is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. They're not telling me anything I haven't heard before. They are not moving my heart. Plus it gives birth in me to the worst of me. I keep thinking how much better I could do it. And what a terrible thing to go to church and come away thinking, "God, I wish I had gotten up there. I could have really told it the way it is." Rev. Frederick Buechner

Can Atheists Worship God?

Ursula Goodenough, who closes this volume [The Faith of Scientists], speaks of the "sacred depths of nature." Goodenough's worldview is shaped by the values of the scientific community. Yet she very much enjoys worship and even sings in a church choir. She is inspired by cathedrals. But she cannot believe in the supernatural: "Such faith is simply not available to me."

I wonder what God thinks of Ursula Goodenough. Can God be worshiped by those who celebrate the Creation without acknowledging the Creator? In conversation, someone once praised one of my books but could not remember the author's name. The praise was strangely more genuine for its inarticulate anonymity. I suspect, as C.S. Lewis once speculated, that God may have more connection with honest atheists than many think. [Karl Giberson in Christianity Today, 12-08, 62]

Who is Dr. Goodenough? She is a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of the bestseller, The Sacred Depths of Nature. She does not believe in God, calls herself a religious naturalist, and wants believers and unbelievers work together to save the earth.

A Failed Conspiracy

Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), known today as one of the all-time meanest imperialistic despots in Africa—raping its land of its mineral wealth—hatched a grand conspiracy in his younger years. [King Leopold II of Belgium probably ranks higher than Rhodes as an evil pariah in Africa.] In his first will, Rhodes specifies his money be used as follows:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire. . . .

LEAVING CHURCH

Excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor, LEAVING CHURCH: A MEMOIR OF FAITH (Harper, 2006)


"By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.

"Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me--that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human--seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that."

Stephen Mitchell on Thomas Aquinas

Stephen Mitchell, Meetings with the Archangel, pp. 122-123:

During the three weeks when I submitted myself to the discipline of inhabiting Aquinas' thought, of seeing with his eyes and breathing through his nostrils, I came to understand how comfortable the world view of the Church could be. "Just give your assent to a few little preliminary ideas," the Summa whispered, "and I will take care of everything else; I will settle all your questions, even the questions you don't know how to ask; I will order the world into a total structure, a magnificent architecture of hierarchically interconnecting ideas. Everything will be decided forever. Let me do it for you. Trust me." I could feel the satisfaction this kind of system provided; at least, for several pages I could feel it. There I was, standing in the downtown of Christian culture, with the great emporiums of belief lining the granite boulevards. Reason and Revelation strolled arm in arm beside me on a spring afternoon, window-shopping. All the floor-managers and salespeople patiently displayed their wares and answered us in the politest newspaper Latin. Somewhere, on some top floor, the Holy Spirit occupied His revolving chairmanship, on the lookout for safe investments. In every president's office of every building, God the Father leaned back in a leather chair, His ankles crossed on the desk, while in the room with the bare lightbulb His Son added up figures for the final inventory.

I SMOKE MY PIPE AND WORSHIP GOD

A POEM BY J.S. BACH

Whene’er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away,
My thoughts as I sit and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey.
It teaches me that very like
Am I myself unto my pipe.

Like me, this pipe so fragrant burning
Is made of naught but earth and clay;
To earth I too shall be returning,
It falls and, ere I’d think to say,
It breaks in two before my eyes,
In store for me a like fate lies.

No stain the pipe’s hue yet doth darken;
It remains white. Thus do I know
That when to death’s call I must hearken
My body, too, all pale wilt grow.
To black beneath the sod ’twill turn,
Likewise, the pipe, if oft it burn.
Or when the pipe is fairly glowing,
Behold then instantaneously,
The smoke off into thin air going,
Till naught but ash is left to see.
Man’s frame likewise will burn
And unto dust his body turn.

How oft it happens when one’s smoking:
The stopper’s missing from its shelf,
And one goes with one’s finger poking
Into the bowl and burns oneself.
If in the pipe such pain doth dwell,
How hot must be the pains of Hell.

Thus o’er my pipe, in contemplation
Of such things, I can constantly
Indulge in fruitful meditation,
And so, puffing contentedly,
On land, on sea, at home, abroad,
I smoke my pipe and worship God.
- Johann Sebastian Bach

[Found in Drinking With Calvin And Luther! A History of Alcohol In The Church]

A GREAT POEM

"Slum Lords"

by John Updike, from Americana: and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)




The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They're never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don't let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.

MY DEAR FRIEND EMILY

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

JOHN ADAMS

Here's a wonderfully warm and thoughtful quote from that crusty and cranky old curmudgeon of an American Founding Father, John Adams. To his son (and later President) John Quincy, he wrote: "I have been called lately to weep in the chamber of my birth over the remains of a beautiful baby of your brother's, less than a year old. . . . Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask."

Jerome and Giovanni Bellini

Here is old Saint Jerome studying near his monastery in Bethlehem--a real sexy guy. Word is that there was a scandalous relationship between him and Paula a very smart lady who worked alongside him in his scholarly pursuits. He of course got all the credit.



Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430 – 1516), whose work this is, is an interesting character in his own right--and a fantastic artist. He was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style. Here at the age of 85, he has depicted Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror.



Another painting produced in old age also departs from traditional Christian themes. Here is his absolutely wonderful Feast of the gods.

TERTULLIAN: CHURCH FATHER, 160-235

Tertullian’s perspective on women is most interesting. He was married and he became part of a movement where women in leadership outnumbered the man by a ratio of two to one. Yet his scurrilous statements about womanhood are shocking. Women, he charged, are the “devil’s gateway. . . . You destroyed so easily God’s image (man).” In his icy denigration of heretical groups, he marshaled forth proof: “The very women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures—it may be even to baptize.” Women, he argued are daughters of Eve: “Every woman should be . . . walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve—the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium . . . of human perdition.”

Yet, Tertullian stands out in the early church in his profound understanding of the potential beauty of Christian marriage—a quote appropriate for a wedding program in the twenty-first century:

"How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice. They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master. Nothing divides them, either in flesh or in spirit. They are, in very truth, two in one flesh; and where there is but one flesh there is also but one spirit. They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake of God's Banquet; side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts."

HIGH WATER MARK by David Shumate

With flooding in the forecast here along the Grand River on Abrigador Trail, I have a special appreciation for this poem.

"High Water Mark"

It's hard to believe, but at one point the water rose to this
level. No one had seen anything like it. People on rooftops.
Cows and coffins floating through the streets. Prisoners
carrying invalids from their rooms. The barkeeper consoling
the preacher. A coon hound who showed up a month later
forty miles downstream. And all that mud it left behind. You
never forget times like those. They become part of who you
are. You describe them to your grandchildren. But they think
it's just another tale in which animals talk and people live
forever. I know it's not the kind of thing you ought to say...
But I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die.
It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and
drift downstream and see where I end up.

"Snow" by Anne Sexton

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don’t bite till you know
if it’s bread or stone.
What I bit is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

DOROTHY SAYERS

Dorothy Sayers (1893 – 1957) was a well-known British author, translator, and Christian humanist. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories--and also her songs. Here is one of them.



Christ walks the world again, His lute upon His back,
His red robe rent to tatters, his riches gone to rack,
The wind that wakes the morning blows His hair about His face,
His hands and feet are ragged with the ragged briar’s embrace,
For the hunt is up behind Him and His sword is at His side,…
Christ the bonny outlaw walks the whole world wide,
Singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me,
Lie among the bracken and break the barley bread?
We will see new suns arise in golden, far-off skies,
For the Son of God and Woman hath not where to lay His head.”

-Dorothy Sayers, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

For full text go here

FASCINATING BOOK ON PLAGIARISM

For anyone interesting in protecting words, here's a great book: WORDS FOR THE TAKING: THE HUNT FOR A PLAGIARIST by Neal Bowers.

Neal Bowers has published three volumes of poetry (most recently Night Vision), two scholarly books, and a nonfiction memoir, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and other journals. He lives in Ames, Iowa with his wife, Nancy (also a writer), and their five cats.

Amazon.com
In Words for the Taking author Neal Bowers takes the reader on an unusual hunt for a literary stalker. A poet and teacher by profession, Bowers became a detective out of necessity when he discovered one of his poems had been plagiarized and repeatedly published by someone calling himself David Sumner. Later, he learned Sumner had stolen more of his work and the poems of other writers as well. Here he describes his almost surreal search for the plagiarist and its surprising aftermath.

For Neal Bowers, David Sumner--a.k.a. David Jones--became an almost mythic adversary, and Bowers's quest for justice a kind of heroic quest. The character of the plagiarist is at the heart of this story: who was "David Sumner" and why did he steal another man's words? The answers to these questions prove as troubling as they are startling.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1991 Bowers, an obscure poet, discovers that someone is stealing his work from the pages of Poetry magazine and republishing it in smaller journals across the country. Terrified that posterity will confuse him with the thief, he writes letters to dozens of poetry journal editors, retains a lawyer, even hires a private eye. After a long search, the detective identifies the plagiarist, an ex-con and one-time school teacher from Oregon, who strikes up a correspondence with the poet, even writes a letter to Bowers's wife. Bowers finds himself lifted out of obscurity, when the New York Times reprints his American Scholar essay on the ordeal. By the finale of this book he's famous?because of a plagiarist he never met and a few stolen poems that few will likely ever read. Imagine Pale Fire as written by Kinbote, or The Trial written by K., and you'll have a sense of Bowers's weakness as a narrator: he's too aggrieved to see his story's irony. And he never explains why he is bitter at what others consider a kooky kind of flattery. Bowers's tendency to cast himself as the guardian of the Text seems misguided. In the end it's the sheer bathos of the narrator's obsession?not his (quite competent) poems or (less competent) reflections on the state of American scholarship?that lends the book its chief interest and charm.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Christ Entering into Brussels

Here is James Ensor's most famous painting.




James Ensor was born to an English father and a Flemish mother, shopkeepers in the coastal town of Ostend. They kept a store or market stall there which catered to the tastes of holidaymakers, selling bricabrac, toys, beach articles and the grotesque carnival masks which were traditionally worn in the local Shrove Tuesday processions. These parades and the masks were to figure prominently in Ensor's work, notably his monumental painting, Christ Entering into Brussels, monumental not only for its size but for its merciless depiction of the cruelty, vanity, hypocrisy and fatuousness which the artist perceived all around him in mid-19th-century Belgian society.

But the young artist, an acknowleged master in his 20's, did not silence his disgust. He expressed it in some of the most scathing and original works of art ever created. His reviled and renowned Christ Entering... is only the most famous, but the whole body of his work, which includes more than 160 etchings as well as hundreds of paintings and drawings, is a brilliant denunciation, not only of the morally bankrupt Belgian--and by extension European--society of his day, but also an advance on the homicidal folly which was to ensue in the 20th century.