Saints and Poets

the weight of an anchor. I am

frayed where it would be highly useful – 

and this I feel perpetually — to make a point.

I think if I can concentrate I might turn sharp.

Only, I don’t know how to concentrate –

I know only the look of someone concentrating,

indistinguishable from nearsightedness.

Dan Chiasson

It is hard for you to be near me,

my silly intensity shuffling

all the insignia of interiority.

Knowing me never made anyone a needle.

“Thread” by Dan Chiasson The New Yorker December 22 and 29, 2008, p.57

Frayed

Yesterday – Ash Wednesday – marked the beginning of Lent.  During the weeks to come, we are called to reflect on our sins.  But, what is sin?  The Bible doesn’t try to define sin.  Instead, it describes sin with a cluster of metaphors.  Sin is getting lost, missing the mark, turning away.  Dan Chiasson, who teaches poetry at Wellsely College, offers another potential metaphor.  My favorite line of this poem reads:  I am frayed where it would be highly useful … to make a point.  That’s a good description of sin.  Sin leaves us frayed.  And, as Chiasson suggests, we feel this perpetually.  Sin lies at the heart of our discontent.  It is the cause of our restlessness.  As a result, we experience a myriad of feelings rooted in regret, shame and alienation.  Most of all, we experience a general anxiety called guilt.  Guilt is a vague sense that we are “frayed” in precisely the parts of us where it would be most helpful to make a point.

During Lent, we consider this.  We consider those parts of us that have become too frayed to pass through the needle’s eye.  Such somber reflection is never fun but it is to use Chiasson’s words highly useful.  It is necessary for all those who long to have their lives concentrated into a specific point — the image of Christ.

There would be persuasion need, with assurances made all around, how Rhonda would be the one doing them the favor.  Which was perfectly true.  There are times when a family needs an orphan.                                                                     

The Year We Left Home, 2011
Jean Thompson, p. 247.

In Thompson’s engaging novel, we follow one family – the Erickson’s of Iowa – over a span of thirty years.  We meet the siblings as teens in 1973 and then keep pace with them well into the joys and disappointments of middle age.  One of the siblings is enduring a difficult marriage and doing her best to raise kids of her own.  That’s Rhonda comes into her life.  The victim of domestic abuse, Rhonda really needs a safe place.  What I love about this passage is the awareness that Rhonda is not the only one in need.  “There are times when a family needs an orphan.”

Too often when Christians think of serving the poor we focus entirely on their benefit.  We assume we are helping them out and fail to recognize how they are fulfilling our need.

In his blog, Ministry with the Poor, Bishop Ken Carder that of all the spiritual disciplines that John Wesley insisted that Methodists observe, the most neglected is friendship with the poor.  Carder reminds us that Wesley viewed Bible reading, worship attendance, prayer incomplete without friendship with the poor.  Too often, he says, Methodist churches settle for almsgiving – (writing checks to charities) rather than cultivating intentional relationships with the economically disadvantaged.

My former congregation – Asbury First UMC in Rochester NY — had two remarkable ministries that occurred on the campus of the church – the Dining and Caring Center which served meals and the Storehouse which provided clothing.  I was once asked by the confirmation class how serving as pastor of their church had changed me.  It was an easy question.  I described those two ministries and the friendships that I experienced through them.  I told them how much I regretted all those previous years in ministry when I neglected the spiritual discipline of friendship with the poor.  I told them that my regret was not just what I had failed to do for them, but that I had gone without the wisdom and the witness that they have to share with me.   I remember saying, “I always assumed folks who were struggling needed me.  Now I know that I’m the one who needs them.”

When I read this passage from The Year We Left Home, I thought of these confirmands and their perceptive question.  There are times when a family needs an orphan.  It’s just as true that every church – every community of Christians – needs the poor.  Both are “perfectly true.”

She looks for wiggly fishes,

At least so it appears,

To stuff inside the suitcase

That’s swinging from her ears.

And though she’s very graceful

When flying round and round,

How does she get that faceful

Of luggage off the ground?

     J. Patrick Lewis, “The Beak of the Pelican”
     Hippopotamusn’t, The Dial Press, 1990.

I like this poem because it is childlike and fun.  Most of the poetry I read seems so serious, but this one appears to aim at nothing more than a smile or a chuckle.  And yet my favorite line – she’s very graceful – also gives a hint of something profound.

This summer, Jennifer and I spent a week at Dafauskie Island off the coast of Savannah.  If you want to experience nature, it would be hard to find a better beach than Dafauskie.  On one morning walk, the beach was deserted.  Not another soul, save one–a pelican.   I saw him in the distance and gave a little prayer of thanks that I remembered to bring along Jennifer’s camera.  I hoped to get close enough for a shot.

I was surprised that the pelican allowed me to come quite close and take this picture as he eyed me with a wary patience.  She – as far as I know she was a she – looked very graceful.  Perhaps not physically graceful but spiritually so.  She seemed peaceful, content, centered.   All those missing attributes I had gone on vacation to re-discover.  She was graceful in the sense of a gracious host, welcoming my presence though I surely looked as odd to her as she did to me.

Graceful is a good word for pelicans.  For in Christian tradition, the pelican is a symbol of grace–a sign of Christ.  Ancient observers of the natural world mistakenly believed that a mother pelican would feed its young in a most peculiar manner.  She would pierce herself with her long beak and nourish her young from the blood of her breast.  Ancients thought this because they often stood with their red-tipped beak resting against their breast.

So the pelican became a symbol of grace – a sign of God in Christ who as Augustine noted “gave us life by his own blood.”  Thus we find pelicans in stained glass and crouching above cathedral doors.  I never really got it.  I always thought they looked out of place in church.

Yet, after my encounter with my gracious host on Dafuaskie beach, I am beginning to see pelicans with new eyes.  When I took one step too close, she decided enough was enough.  She flew away.  And as I snapped this shot she looked grace-full in every way.  She appeared as she was – close to heaven and a fitting image of God, our gracious Host.

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign;
In the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for him, whom Cherubim
Worship night and day
A breast full of milk
And a manger full of hay.
Enough for him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Through the air;
But his mother only,
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
 
What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet, what I can I give Him –
Give my heart.

In the late nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti, responded to a request from Scribner’s Monthly for a Christmas poem.  The verses she supplied beautifully evoked the intimate encounter of heaven and earth touching in Jesus Christ.  They also challenged.  Our grateful response to such mystery is meant to be total and complete.  We must give our hearts.

Perhaps due to the four wonderful years I enjoyed in Rochester, New York, the line that most speaks to me is simply this: snow on snow, snow on snow.

My first experience with a real Rochester snowstorm – though I doubt locals would describe it as such – occurred just weeks before Christmas.  I was driving home from a church meeting and all of a sudden the sky seemed to open – almost as if its outer skin had been punctured – and the snow poured. More than a bit unnerved, I pulled to the side of the road and sat there watching the sky with wonder.  I have never seen such snow!  I felt small (but in a way that left me more thrilled than frightened).  I felt like a tiny figure in a snow globe that had just received a vigorous shake.

It occurs to me now how appropriate these feelings were, not for the storm (even I soon learned that was minor!) but for the miracle of Christmas.   In fact, I think I felt like the shepherds Rossetti portrays at the end of her poem.  Small and insignificant – what can I give him poor as I am? – yet also filled with a wonder is somehow both intimate and inviting, drawing us in and inviting us to give our hearts.

 Just now the earth recalls His stunning visitation.  Now
the earth and scattered habitants attend to what is possible: that He
of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance, and so
relit the fuse igniting life in them, igniting life in all the dim
surround.  And look, the earth adopts a kindly affect.  Look,
we almost see our long estrangement from it overcome.
The air is scented with the prayer of pines, the earth is softened
for our brief embrace, the fuse continues bearing to all elements
a curative despite the grave, and here within our winter this,
the rising pulse, bears still the promise of our quickening.

Scott Cairns.  Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Brewster, Mass: Paraclete Press, 2006 pp.136.)

The greatest Christmas text – at least according to me – is the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1: 1-18).  Here, John describes the birth of Jesus as light – the light which is coming into the world and the light that shines in the darkness. 

SCOTT CAIRNS provides a view from the other side, from the side of fallen human existence: that He of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance … igniting life in all the dim surround.

Who can argue that life as we know it is but a “meagered circumstance”?  And isn’t it also true that the presence of Christ in our lives changes how we see the world and ourselves.  Our perspective is not free from shadows after Christ comes that is true but it is also true that we find life and light even in the dark places because the Messiah has come.  In this life, we may see dimly – as the Apostle Paul says (1 Corinthians 13) but we do see.  And for this gift, we can thank Jesus Christ for he is morning light that shines in our meagered circumstance … igniting both light and life in all that remains dim around us.

At the Cat’s Table they were discussing Italian art.  Miss Lasqueti, who had lived in Italy for a few years, was speaking.  “The thing with Madonnas is, they have that look on their faces – because they know He is going to die when young … in spite of all the hovering angels surrounding the child…. Somewhere in the Madonna’s given wisdom, she can see the finished map, the end of His life.  No matter that the local girl the artist is using cannot attempt that knowledgeable look.  Perhaps even the artist cannot portray it.  So it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face as someone who knows the future…. The recognition of that woe comes from the viewer. (p. 200).

Michael Ondjaatje, 2011, The Cat’s Table, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 269 pp.
 

MICHAEL ODAATJE’s new novel takes place on a ship bound from Sri Lanka to England in the final days of World War II.  The Cat’s Table refers to the place where those unfortunate passengers – whose social status is so low – that they must dine every meal as far away from the captain’s table as it possible.  They dine at the Cat’s Table.  And since London is a long way from Sri Lanka, they have plenty of time for conversation.

In one of these conversations, Miss Lasqueti attempts to explain the haunting beauty of paintings of Madonna and child.  In many, if not most, Madonna’s, Mary’s gaze is aimed directly at the viewer of the painting.  It is as though she wants us to meet her eyes and ponder.  We are being invited into the story.  And, as Miss Lasqueti notes, this story has its tragic elements.  In includes a cross.   While the cross is a symbol of our redemption, it is also a sign of Mary’s heartbreak.  The son that she cradles in her arms is born to save and – thus in a sense – born to die.  To truly see these paintings, says Miss Lasqueti, is thus to experience “a recognition of woe.”

Often Mary is tenderly brushing her cheek along the cheek of her son.  This wordless gesture of affection reminds me of a mother dog nuzzling her pup.  It is a gesture of intimacy and love.  And along with it of course are those sad eyes of the Madonna as if she knows her child is not long for this world.        

A few years ago, I was leading a tour of the Holy Land.  We were visiting the Church of the Sepulchre which tradition says is the very spot where Jesus died on his cross.  On the wall was a huge mosaic.  And at its center, I noticed the same cheek-to-cheek gesture – the nuzzle – shared between Mary and Jesus.  I was so taken with it that I zoomed in close with my camera and snapped this photo.

I’m struck by how old Mary looks almost ancient as if the grief of seeing her son die on the cross has aged her well beyond her years.  I’m also drawn to the  faces – the disciples perhaps – of those standing around Mary and her dying son.  Their hands are drawn to their faces as if to express, “How can this be?

All this is to say that Miss Lasqueti makes a fine point.  Whenever we see a painting of Madonna and child or perhaps a nativity scene, we are not just to think to ourselves, “what a cute little baby!”  We are to imagine the person this child becomes and the unique, holy work – work that ultimately involved the cross.  We see the child with “a recognition of woe.”

And yet Miss Lasqueti is only half right for the story of Jesus does not end with the cross.  It ends at Easter – or more precisely forty days after with his Ascension.  The Gospel is no mere tragedy.  It is the story of new life and hope beyond even the bounds of death.       

So as Christmas approaches and Madonnas and nativity scenes multiply around us, we are invited to see the whole story within the single frame.  We see not only cross but resurrection.  Ours is not just a “recognition of woe” but an acknowledgement of redemption.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories…. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life….  One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

                                      Tea Obreht, (2011), The Tiger’s Wife,

                                         Random House, New York, 338 pp. 

A few weeks ago, my old college friend, Hunter Lambeth, was in town.  He was speaking to the local chapter of the New Canaan Society.  Hunter is initiating a new mission area for Young Life in the West Bank of Palestine.  Having been asked to share with us some of the events of his life that has led to such a remarkable sense of calling, Hunter began in this way.  I grateful, he said, to have this opportunity to tell my story, but my story is really His story.

As Hunter spoke to us, I kept going back to this first statement.  The more I considered it, the more profound I realized it to be.  On a superficial level, it is of course contradictory.  How could the story of a twenty-first century southerner also be the story of a first century Palestinian named Jesus?  Yet, on a deeper level – the level of faith – what Hunter said was no mere contradiction.  It was a paradox.

For one who has given his life to Christ, it makes perfect sense – even if stretches the bounds of the imagination – to think of the story of our lives being somehow enfolded in – or perhaps a mere extension of – the life of our savior.  Hunter was speaking a paradox – a truth that contradicts on the surface but somehow coheres (or makes sense) on a deeper level.  The Apostle Paul said something equally paradoxical when he wrote in the Book of Galatians, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.

Put another way, Hunter was giving testimony.  He wasn’t engaging in speculative theology but narrative theology.  As H. Richard Niebuhr once noted that when the earliest theologians of the church were asked what they meant by God, salvation, and revelation, they didn’t espouse philosophical definitions.  Instead they turned to the story of their life.  They said, What we mean is this event [the life, death and resurrection of Christ] which happened to him also happened among us and to us.  (H. Richard Niebuhr, (1941), The Meaning of Revelation, Macmillan, New York, 34).  That’s narrative theology.  Niebuhr’s point was the same as Hunter’s.  To be a follower of Jesus is to allow His story to be so deeply woven into our own that we begin to lose sight of where one story begins and the other ends.

If this all sounds a bit too mystical, maybe this quote from Tea Obreht’s novel can help.  In The Tiger’s Wife, a young woman of the Balkans idolizes her grandfather.  She follows in his footsteps by becoming a physician, and when he dies she becomes consumed with discovering the meaning of his life.  She discovers that two stories – the story of the deathless man, the story of the tiger’s wife – opened the portals of his scientific mind to mystery.  Through one, he matured into a person of wisdom.  Because of the other, he never surrendered his childlike sense of wonder.

What I think Hunter was saying is something like this.  He was sharing with us that one story – the story of Jesus – has so captured his imagination that he has given his heart to the Author of this story.  He now understands himself – his life story – in light of this greater story.  It runs through Hunter’s life like a river branching out its tributaries.  In fact, it has so shaped the landscape of my old friend’s existence that it no longer makes sense to speak of it as some external influence.  It – the story of Jesus and His love – has become part of who he is.  Or better still, he has become part of what it will forever be.  My story, said Hunter, is really His story.  I like that.  Even though it defies explanation, I think that’s a fine way to live your life and mine.  May it become true of us all.  May the story of our lives – whether we’re called to go to Palestine or to stay where we are – be enveloped by the story of Jesus and His love.

That we have to breathe    exhale in the world   to live in the world

That we eat the world     its plants and flesh    digest the world

That we build here    name localities   congregate the world

That we have imagined it   speak it   in all languages

That we have designs   world blueprints   books of the world

That we library world   shelf it   consult it

That now and here   set as it is   we must turn it

                                             Terry Jones, “Trinities,”

                                          Poetry Review, vol. 101, 3 (Autumn 2011), p.41

It is more than odd that throughout most of Christian history, followers of Jesus have seemed determined to drive a wedge between divine love and the world.  The latter term is often used as theological shorthand for what must be left behind in pursuit of individual salvation.   And in our devotional lives, we often act as though God can only reside in cathedrals sequestered from what John Muir called “the Cathedrals of Nature.”  What makes this so strange is that the passage of scripture that most Christians call their favorite begins, “God so loved the world…” 

This beautiful poem by Terry Jones makes me wonder if this disconnect resides in our failure to fully comprehend when we say the word “world.”  We forget that we cannot separate our world – what we breathe, eat, name and know — from our life.  This is what John 3:16 tells us: that God, love and world are intimately connected.

St. Francis

Thus, St. Francis of Assisi sought to live his whole life as a prayer of thanksgiving for Creation.   He instructed his friars to sleep – not in cloistered spaces – but under the stars.  And when he died, he asked his brothers to strip him naked and lay him down on the dirt floor of a cow-shed.  After reading Jones’ “Trinities,” such peculiar behavior seems less odd to me than the course of much Christian history.

A brick wall surrounded the cotton mill, which could have been a prison or a large church without a steeple. … The houses in the village lay close together in rows, like stalks of corn…. Jon Sealy, (2011), “Carolina Mill, 1932″ The Sun, Issue 426, June, 21.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph of my grandfather.  He stands with his family in a single row, “close together like stalks of corn.”  The photograph was taken around 1925, the day his family left their home in the mountains of Tennessee for the South Carolina where Sealy’s story is set.  Like the family in Carolina Mill, 1932, my grandfather’s family was part of an economic system that feels foreign to me.

Sealy describes it as the family labor system of the Carolina textile industry.  In this system, mills hired whole families, the men working in the weave rooms or as card hands, single girls and old women in the draw-in rooms, their children as sweepers.

 The suspense of Sealy’s story gravitates around the failing health of the grandfather.  This sadness is compounded by a harsh economic reality.  Without his weekly paycheck the family fears it may not be able to survive.

This story helped me understand my grandfather a bit better, how he could at once be stoic and kind, frugal and generous.  He relied on all these attributes to send four children to college while providing support to his parents and on occasion his four siblings.  It was an extraordinary accomplishment but also in a sense an ordinary set of expectations for one whose family stood close together … like rows of corn.

 The family labor system — harsh as it was — cultivated virtues that I fear are largely absent from the middle class of my generation.  We’re all so independent, so self-sufficient.  That’s what makes my grandfather’s life — as I imagine it being — feel so foreign.

This story also helps me understand the first Christians of the Book of Acts.  They held all things in common and shared with all those in need. I hate to admit it but it is hard to imagine selling my house for a fellow church member.  It would require a measure of both frugality and generosity that is beyond me.

Sealy’s story suggests to me how such radical stewardship was possible.  The first Christians — like the family of this story and my own family — were part of a family labor system.  Each person was crucial to the survival of the system. There were no individuals in our miserly sense of the word.  They shared deeply and freely. As the implicit connection between the words kindness and kin suggests, it is only natural.

What was extraordinary is that baptism changed their notion of family.  They began to recognize in each other a connection that went deeper than bloodlines.  They were part of a single family — the family of God.  They discovered what many long to experience – that we are something more than isolated individuals.  We are one in Christ, and we really can stand together … as close as stalks of corn.