POETRY: "If All is Relative"

This is from the August/September 2009 issue of First Things

If All Is Relative

An interrogative:

If all is relative

And truth (like time and space)

Has no fixed thought or place

Where God has said, "be still,"

Why can't I simply will

That truth be as it seems

In all my ego-schemes?

So, spinning on my heel,

I'll deem this cosmic wheel--

The whole, not some few stars,

But galaxies as far as

Light itself extends

Or human thought ascends--

May be just what I see,

One vast complexity

All orbiting around me!

--N.E. Dunkle

Gloria in Profundis, by GKC

CT has a fine online Advent Calendar, combining both word and image.

This entry, from Day 5, has a penetrating verse by G.K. Chesterton, accompanied by Kim Heung Jong's Christmas Scene.

Gloria In Profundis

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all—
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate—
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Joanna reads Frost

Joanna, our high school junior, has finally finished the Walt Whitman unit in her lit class, after much agony and gnashing of teeth. Today they moved on Robert Frost. Curled on the sofa, she opened her homework packet. "Listen to this," she called to me. "'Frost describes freedom as moving easily in harness. That's like what we have in Christianity!"

She settled deeper into the cushions and began reading poetry aloud to me as I worked in the kitchen. "This is good. I can go into Christmas with this," she declared.

Joanna writes a Poem for Lit Class

Joanna had to write a poem for her lit class this afternoon. Her teacher is a practicing Transcendentalist, so it may get her in trouble, but I was thrilled with her effort. The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Psalm 24

3Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD?

And who may stand in His holy place?

4He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

Who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood

And has not sworn deceitfully.

He shall receive a blessing from the LORD

And righteousness from the God of his salvation.

"It's plain that the same thing won't be willing at the same time to do or suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing" --Socrates, The Republic (436B).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Untitled)

As Emerson sat thinking,
He looked up to the sky
And it seemed like the sun was winking
"Oh golly, oh gosh, oh my!

But of course I must be blinking,"
Thought he with a sad sigh,
And just as his heart sat sinking
He leapt up with a happy cry

"Whatever I'm feeling--
Whatever my heart might imply --
I can't get it by appealing,
So I'll just kiss reason good-bye!"

It may be contradicting
But Ralph Waldo cannot deny
He is part of God existing
But God's also up in the sky.

So if the sun isn't blinking
But Emerson's heart says "Try,"
For him it's not just wishful thinking
For the sun to wink way up high.

And although it's three in the morning,
Dear Ralph is still outside,
For even despite my warning
He feels the sun shines wide.

My dear you may be thinking,
"For what write this poem, and why?"
To warn you away from contradicting
For where there's contradicting, there are lies.

A Poem for Economic Collapse

The Slip

by Wendell Berry

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.
Where the great slip gave way in the bank
and an acre disappeared, all human plans
dissolve. An awful clarification occurs
where a place was. Its memory breaks
from what is known now, begins to drift.
Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness
widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.
As before the beginning, nothing is there.
Human wrong is in the cause, human
ruin in the effect--but no matter;
all will be lost, no matter the reason.
Nothing, having arrived, will stay.
The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon
passeth it away. And yet this nothing
is the seed of all--the clear eye
of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.
Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect
begins its struggle to return. The good gift
begins again its descent. The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

Today is the Feastday of St. Thomas

Happy Feastday of St. Thomas! In honor of the Angelic Doctor:

Learn about St. Thomas:

G.K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas, at the Catholic Forum

Think with St. Thomas:

Thomistic Philosophy Page

"Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace."

"Hence we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpasses his natural knowledge."

Laugh with St. Thomas

The Five Ways of Proving Santa Claus
Is God made of Soap?

Get your own St. Thomas Action Figure

Pray with St. Thomas

Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.

Most loving Lord, grant me a steadfast heart which no unworthy desire may drag downards; an unconquered heart which no hardship may wear out; an upright heart which no worthless purpose may ensnare. Impart to me also, O God, the understanding to know you, the diligence to seek you, a way of life to please you, and a faithfulness that may embrace you, through Jesus Christ, my Lord. Amen.

Creator of all things,
true source of Light and Wisdom,
lofty source of all Being,
graciously let a ray of Your Brilliance
penetrate into the darkness of my understanding
and take from me the double darkness in which I have been born,
sin and ignorance.
Give me a sharp sense of understanding,
a retentive memory,
and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations,
and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.
Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
help in the completion.
Through Christ, Our Lord.

Sing with St. Thomas

Pange Lingua

Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory,
of His flesh the mystery sing;
of the Blood, all price exceeding,
shed by our immortal King,
destined, for the world's redemption,
from a noble womb to spring.
Of a pure and spotless Virgin
born for us on earth below,
He, as Man, with man conversing,
stayed, the seeds of truth to sow;
then He closed in solemn order
wondrously His life of woe.
On the night of that Last Supper,
seated with His chosen band,
He the Pascal victim eating,
first fulfills the Law's command;
then as Food to His Apostles
gives Himself with His own hand.
Word-made-Flesh, the bread of nature
by His word to Flesh He turns;
wine into His Blood He changes;
what though sense no change discerns?
Only be the heart in earnest,
faith her lesson quickly learns.

Tantum Ergo

Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the sacred Host we hail;
Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,
newer rites of grace prevail;
faith for all defects supplying,
where the feeble senses fail.
To the everlasting Father,
and the Son who reigns on high,
with the Holy Ghost proceeding
forth from Each eternally,
be salvation, honor, blessing,
might and endless majesty.
Amen. Alleluia.

Postmodern Gnostics: (a meditation on the Incarnation)

What do Alasdair MacIntyre, Wendell Berry and Richard Wilbur have in common? Read Roger Lundin's "Postmodern Gnostics" to find out.

Steve was listening to a Mars Hill CD the other day and afterwards laid a copy of Lundin's article in my lap. It made for quite a Christmas devotional.

"With the breaking of the bond between the self and truth in the late 19th century...the postromantic poet was left with no justifications for imaginative activity beyond those of preference and desire. With the losss of a belief in the psiritual and ethical significance of creation and the human body, the contemporary aesthetic temperament has found an easy justification for license. If nature and the human body are essentially amoral mechanisms to be used as a means to whatever private ends we have, then the human will is free to do with them what it will, confident that any activity may be sanctified as a legitimate manifestation of desire.

The doctrine of the incarnation challenges the amoral and utilitarian orientation of the modern gnostic self. It affirms that nature and the body are significant, not because they are the useful tools of imaginative, willful human activity, but because God has taken on human form and dwelt among us. Because "the Word became flesh," Christians may affirm the significance of creation and wait in hope for its transformation. The incarnation of Christ, in the words of Langdon Gilkey, "was of such a character that it established a new relation between eternity and time which...flattened the cycles of time out to become the linear stage of God's purposes."

In the work of theology, as in all cultural labor, it is essential to maintain a difficult balance--a balance between the demands of the present and the claims of the past and between the power of the human will and the ordered limits of creation. In Western culture since Descartes, there have been more than enough weighty forces siding with the mind against the body, with the creative power of the intellect against nature, and with the promises of the future against the authority of the past. THe works of MacIntyre, Berry and Wilbur are part of a growing minority tradition in contemporary intellectual life. Contrary to Coleridge and the poets and theorists who followed in his wake, these authors tell us that we do indeed receive far more than we give. For that very reason, these minortiy voices need to be heard as they seek to strike a balance by speaking of what is, in actuality a gift--a gift of grace in the given.

Without question, there are many elements in the given world that constitute burdens to be discarded, wounds to be healed, and wrongs to be righted. But there are also in that world gifts to be received. As we will see in the following chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most powerful of romantic voices, those who cannot discern grace in the given are unable to express gratitude for what they have received. This ingratitude, and its attendent resentment, are the distinguishing attributes of much of contemporary literary and cultural theory."

from "The Victory of the Cross"

Exalted and glorious God of patriarchs and infants
the shame you freely accepted has become our pride.
Let all of us be lifted on high by your cross.

Let us string our hearts on its pegs
so we can tune the lyres of our lives to it
and sing to you, Lord of the Universe, the odes of Zion.

The Bible says a wooden ship from Tarshish
once supplied gold to Solomon every three years.
Now every day and hour, the wood of your cross
gives us riches beyond measure,
For it is the cross guides all of us
on the return to Paradise.

--"The Victory of the Cross" by Romanos the Melodist, 6th century

Susan alerted us to this wonderful hymn/poem, found in
R.J. Schork, Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit: Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1995. The entire poem is worth reading. It is a dialogue between Hades and Belial (the Devil) at the point of Christ's crucifixion. Romanos uses lots of interesting wood/tree imagery throughout, with many references to the OT. Isn't find this final image of the cross as a lyre amazing? Right now I can appreciate the "stretching"metaphor of heartstrings, and the idea that it is our lives which are to be tuned to the instrument.

"Seven Stanzas at Easter"

by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc.

"East Coker," by T.S. Eliot

I love the Four Quartets. "East Coker" provides rich material for meditation on Good Friday:

III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good