Advent 1: Hope

I have a graceful writing friend, and we have contracted to write for each week of Advent. To see the sister of this post, follow me to Grace’s blog here.

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Lost in the far country, the prodigal son stirs with the memory of home and father. To that country, too, which lies cloaked in mists of minor fears, minor wishes, minor obligations, the great desire comes at times, as a flash; or an overheard parable deposits a half-understood image: coins lost and found, seeds thrown out on windy fields, wedding parties seen from far off. In the same sky he looks at every night, clouds break to show an unconstellated star.

Let the prodigal set over these fragments the name hope. Let him gather up the pieces of his longing until they outweigh all other possessions—for if it is known and claimed, bare hunger for the highest good is better than the fulfillment of every smaller desire. And after he has set out again for his father’s house, when on the way home he has lost all his other luggage and worn his shoes thin—when even faith is fleeing—hope may remain. Hope may then conduct him to the road’s end, to the meeting whose beauty beggars the hope.

So it seems to me at times. Then the wind shifts, the eye flickers, the mind changes, and I am only the same weakness amid the same grayness as before. The glow at the edges of the world was a trick of optics; even my own hopefulness appears illusion: did the spirit really groan in me, then, or was it only that I had too little or too much sleep, or that I was lonely or surrounded by friends, and so felt this pang of what seemed infinite? Well: if my hope is illusion, yet may a piercing illusion be the message truth sends before it—as a bird’s shadow may precede it to the nest.

Versifications

July-August 2015

Psalm 139

Not that, however great
my weariness has grown,
I am alone to feel it.
Whatever is my state
my God has known
it, and may heal it.

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You made yourself familiar with my ways,
and watched me walk on dying grass.
In gray thickets that I could not pass
you saw me lie to sleep. If praise
regardless rang my heart, you heard—
and knew the prayer before the word.

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How you attended me within that brake,
and pricked me sore, and pressed me deeper
into hunted fear; how you my keeper
could become my thorn, and for my sake
be silent, if for me you gave that pain—
but here my mind pursues your thought in vain
and falls back again.

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If I despair
and seek the tomb
I find you there.
There is no room
outside your will
for death to fill;
he must content
himself to rent.

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Shall I creep under darkness for screen,
bear shadow as shield from your sight?
Ah, no less your lackey than light,
Night renders you what she has seen.

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That which you made, you know,
and give it knowledge of itself also.

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You saw me as I formed within the earth,
and, provident, prepared against my birth
the light of many days,
to spill on me at length its level rays.

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I beat at you like a desperate bird
that would pass the window pane
but cannot gain.
Theologies that I have heard
thicken the air around.
You are not found.
But after they lie down, deferred,
in quiet you appear
as ever near.

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My God, who are your foes?
Mine they shall be.
In public I oppose
them, and their hate
boldly await,
if you incline to me.

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For weary years I kept a guard, O God,
to watch myself for evil and for good,
and thought by tired vigilance I could,
perhaps, be just without your rod,
if you were absent. Older then I grew,
and weaker; but I never found the truth,
or knew myself more clearly than in youth.
Accept the fool’s late prayer to you:

I render you your part:
To search and know my heart.

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Psalm 142

My voice I lift to you: my weary eyes
I cannot lift. Let my complaint arise,
and beg your long-due help on my behalf:
my body would be blown away like chaff
were I to stand, so light has it been made
with hunger while I waited for your aid.
But your health has not wasted yet, I trust.
your ear is keen as ever; and it must
receive the echo of my desperate cry,
which, borrowing your strength, may upward fly
and—though I cannot hope that it decrease
your hiddenness—may ruffle heaven’s peace.

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I know only the ground and my feet,
so bowed my back under my load.
But you walked here before, and know the road.
You drank the cup before, to turn it sweet.

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This is what I said in my complaint
to him: you only are my fort.
You are my staff when I am faint,
you I lean on when my breath is short.
As surely as you are all this to me,
be all this to me.

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O God, that you would break me from this cell,
and show me to your peace.
I could endure without your glad release—
but hard it is if I should never tell
a story of deliverance from hell;
hard, if I should never praise you
with the psalms the thankful raise. You
are the God indeed of the oppressed,
and so I long to know you, with the rest.

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Psalm 103

My wind-strewn parts flap weakly toward their aims,
and call out many names.
Combine them, Lord, in single frame,
to love the same.

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Your kindnesses, O Lord, do not let me forget,
(if there be any I have met).

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“But did your body never take its rest
contented, peaceful as a loved child?
Nor once did your heart thrill at the wild
scent of hope that sprang from nothing, blessed
you, and was gone again? Oh, object
that many days yet were empty and dry:
but does a green tree gray and die
without a daily rain? Will it expect
that the gardener owe it a steady river?
No; but still may know and thank rain’s giver.”

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Endure, beleaguered heart, endure;
for if his rescue, like his wrath, comes late,
yet sturdy is your hope as he is great,
and certain as his love is sure.

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Who can ask of God a debt’s return?
Even if we give offense, we cannot earn
repayment in its kind.
No sinner’s debt will bind
his arm, nor war declared restrict his choice
to deal with us at peace, with gentle voice.

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He threw to earth’s far bounds your continent of sin
and turned from it his face;
but built a world of grace
for you to live within.

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Dust we are, and would have blown away
but that your hands embraced us where we lay
and in compassion fashioned living shape,
and hold us still until the dust escape.

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If we may be remembered yet
beyond the breaking of death’s squalls
it must be your unmeasured mind recalls
us; when the finite flower falls
all other finite will forget.

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If there are powers indescribable above
who use no speech, no matter, know no time,
foreigners to weakness and to sin,
let them bless the Lord with me still:
we will rhyme in love.

 

Patience, hard thing

May-June 2015

When you have eaten your fill, nothing in nature or in morals prevents you from setting down your fork and pushing back your chair, and no one resents you for declining a second helping. But if you have a small stomach for innocuous conversation, for visiting, it often happens that the only polite thing to do is to go on stuffing yourself to the point of nausea.

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Say I become a tired middle-aged man of no use to anyone, even himself. It may still be that while I am out for a long run I see a dog exactly like the one who loved me for fifteen years, and teary-eyed tell my story to his owner—as a man did to me today. And that would be a grace, which weariness would not collapse.

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There were eyes that looked in mine, voices I rested by. To me, too, you were gracious.

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I have not thought enough of you, O Holy Spirit, wind scouring the desert, wind searching the deep things of unknown Godhead. But you are the companion I the lonesome one need, and the love that might melt pale despondency. Let me not forget you, sinner’s friend, God who makes God known. With whatever breath you give I will invoke you.

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If I am not slow of speech and tongue, still I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips: my tongue tuned for wit and flash and for the turn of phrase too little knows the mode of thankful praise; the quick mind for invention and evasion—slow, though, for a humble worship.

There is no new prayer for this, since already we confess our failings to the love that owns no merit. Only: sanctify me in your truth; your word is truth.

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My eyes are less earnest than they once were, as surely as they are less fearful. Faith I have not learned; love grows in beauty and at the same time slips beyond the horizon, and I do not know what I am allowed to hope.

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We knew that we were to be towers on the ridge, light in the house of the world. Yet we had not caught the vision of holiness in its severity, holiness as the medievals knew it; and so we believed or desperately hoped that decency would be enough for this—for decency we could teach. We hoped our sons and daughters would draw the nations to them, that the heathen would cling to the hems of their garments, because they basically told the truth (if it hurt no one’s feelings) and gave their work sufficient effort, and also perhaps had a strange halo of not swearing. And since moderate good will and honesty were to be our hallmarks, we had to think that the world lacked them, and had to feel threatened if they did not. Which is how we came to hope that our neighbors were bad people and eye them hungrily for signs of badness.

What if, instead of being the people of the sidelong glance, the people who find the faults in every unbelieving act, we were known as the ones who abandon our own justification but are zealous to name the neighbor’s good?

 

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All that can be seen can be seen through. There is nothing so real and true that the one who possesses it cannot come to see it as cheap and tawdry.

But when in my mind this happens to you, my neighbor, when you seem only a tired cliché to me, I make this promise: to remember that I too am dust; to believe that you too are mystery.

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On Lamentations 3:25

It is good to wait in patient quiet
for God, and calmly beg his Spirit.
His Word may be lost in the desperate’s sigh; it
is heard by those who in quiet hear it.

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Communion prayer

Merciful Jesus, we praise and bless you, remembering how you emptied yourself on our account. For we were naked, and you clothed us. We were in prison, we were sick, and you visited us and tended to us. We were strangers, and you took us in. We were hungry and thirsty, but you gave us true food, true drink.
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Not yet by joy do I thank you, God of all mercies, not yet with lively prayers. But here in the patience that is your gift, I accept the reminder that is your gift, and thank you with words which you, again, gave: Bless the Lord, O my soul.

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Ah, and now while I can let me pray thanks for the green grass in the world, even in mine; for the still waters I myself know; for the mountains which, when I called on them to fall on me, you held up.

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And the tinge of sadness seeps through again. But if only you ask me to know it, my Lord, I will be joyful sad.

Mostly on the virtues

April-May 2015

Homing prayer

You, faithful God, who accompany all things to their appointed ends, you have brought us to the fading light. The work we have done will prosper if you prosper it, who sustain heaven and earth. Then as in our labor we shared in your unceasing action, let us find you now in holy rest, and greet the love that calls us home.

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Breathe on me the breath of peace, deep from the Father’s lungs—O Jesus who keep on saying to us: Peace, peace!

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Surrender yourself to the texts and traditions, devote yourself to them, pour yourself out before them; and even if you come to mistrust them, even if finally you flee at the thought of them, still they’ll flash out golden without notice, and a few lines from Paul will break you apart and build you up again.

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Hope is the thing with feathers; and it can’t be counted on, can’t be scheduled, to remain in the soul. Though it can be invited, and a comfortable nest strawed for it, the will cannot chain it, and in a year, in a day, it may be gone again.

But then—which was the glimpse of health that flashed by me today—it cannot be counted on to stay away, either. If in forty years it still returns to me at odd moments, still struggles in my breast, who can deny it the right?

And in the days or years when hope is absent from this narrow heart, yet all around me the sap will be surging through gray trees, and the gray ocean lapping calmly on a hundred shores; all around stars will burst into piercing light and mountains gather themselves from the depths; the earth without knowing will know the voice of its creator, and the peaceable kingdom will approach without haste.

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One does not become a poet by trying very hard.

For poetry is a form of attention, and attention is a kind of love. If you would grow a healthy poem, you will have to love the earth like a gardener does; or love another heart as the bride does; or, with the tender mystics, love God. (All the best work is one of these: tending, or attending.)

Many deeds that are written down and called great can be done in other ways from other motives. Greed and fear make men and women summit mountains and amass fortunes. Providence, it is true, assumes these actions into its own beauty—but without their knowledge. To know the beauty and to speak it, you must share in God’s own light: which is love.

Because fear had taken deep root in me, my life twisted almost from the beginning, a sapling contorting back toward the dirt. Whatever I achieved was only another rag to drape around myself for small comfort and small warmth; even my virtue was burdensome. In fear one can sweat much, give all, can learn languages or organize protests or, if one is disposed, crank out volumes of rhymes—a clanging cymbal. And, like my life, my writing has been afraid. Only, I think that in the freest moments I have written only about fear, but with love; just as I am now writing about love, fearfully.

One does not attain poetry, does not come into life, by trying very hard. But where there is love, then, is there no hard work? Where there is love, where love is strong, we are sure to find the fitting labor and find it done with gladness. We no more need to worry that it will go undone than that the oaks will tire of growing or the thrush forget a song.

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I was an apt and achieving student for many years and I gathered compliments, I gathered accolades bushel-wise. But fundamentally I was afraid, and so I never believed in any of them or enjoyed them.

I worked hard, even too hard, and did not neglect my duty. But I worked in order to please others, and I pleased them from fear, not love; and so all my work was directed to the goal of ceasing to work, not having to work any more at least for a while. And yet it surprised me to find that I did not enjoy this manner of what really was, in one unimportant sense, success?

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Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you, and do not love.

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The sun and the rain fell down in their turns, and the bare sky swelled green with leaves, or branches burst into purple flower. And all this spoke truly, no less than deserts and vast storms. All this did not deceive, when it offered hope, any more than hard winter deceives.

 

Through Lent

February-April 2015

If I see clearly here, the danger to faith is not that doubts will too much absorb my attention, but that they will be felt only as a cloudy unease and never attended to. Clutch at your doubts vigorously (I should say to myself): be alert to let none of them escape you until they have said their piece, until you have exacted an explanation from them and, indeed, honored them. Honor them by specificity, by clarity. Be a philosopher in truth, and the more rigorous the better—do not rest in feeling philosophical by sensing the nearness of some fashionable misgivings. If something wails in you, “Impossible contradictions! Hope is lost!” seize the speaker by the nape, seat him at a desk, and make him compose a syllogism. Precise doubt will be the habit of the faithful mind. Vagueness here is treachery.

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O generous God: To possess anything without gratitude is to lose it; to use anything without love is to break it. Therefore, we pray, to the limitless number of your gifts add those two that secure and sanctify them all: hearts for praise and compassionate hands.

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Good Lord, I offer myself to you again, though I do not how and every year I am less sure. This remains to me: to say, “I offer myself to you,” and to wish that I might. But gloriously appear, and when I find you I will be yours.

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Easter

At dawn that they would find the awaited secret, but not a pure and new dawn: dawn already soaked in yesterday’s tears, an anguished and nauseated sunrise. And when they came to the place, it was what seemed like the last humiliating blow of misery—that his body was missing and they could not even give the necessary respect, could not have even this one small consolation—that would later be known as their first brush with the new creation. Here in the pit of despair he meets those collapsing hearts and the failing eyes.

The weeping: “They have taken my Lord”—then the angels appear. Then for the first time he faces you straight on, looks at you with unknown love, says your name as it was never heard.