Sermon Worcester College 17^th February 2013, Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold

Luke 18: 9-14 and East Coker V from The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century and, in contrast to the atheism of Larkin and the ambiguous faith of Rilke as we have recently heard, he was a devout believer. An American who moved to the England in 1914 at the age 25 he became naturalised as a British citizen in 1927, the same year as his baptism by the Chaplain of Worcester College, William Force Stead. I am indebted to our Fellow in English, Dr. David Bradshaw for this information from his fascinating article on Yeats, Eliot and Stead, published in the College Record last year. When Stead arrived in Oxford in 1927 to become College Chaplain, he was already a friend of Yeats and Eliot. It was at the beginning of February 1927 that Eliot asked Stead for his `advice, information & [his] practical assistance in getting Confirmation with the Anglican Church.’ But Eliot was also keen for it to be kept secret for, as he wrote to Stead: ‘I hate spectacular “conversions”’.[i] Eliot was finally baptised (by Stead) and confirmed (by the Bishop of Oxford) at the end of June 1927.[ii] The Chaplain reminisced of the process in this way:

 

I can claim no credit for his conversion. But I did set up one milestone along his way — I baptised him…We had been having tea in London, and when I was leaving he said, after a moment’s hesitation,

`By the way, there is something you might do for me.’

He paused, with a suggestion of shyness.

After a few days he wrote to me, saying he would like to know how he could be `confirmed into the Church of England,’ a quaint phrase, not exactly ecclesiastical. He had been brought up a Unitarian, so the first step was baptism. I was living then at Finstock, a small village far away in the country, with Wychwood Forest stretching off to the north, and the lonely Cotswold hills all round. Eliot came down from London for a day or two, and I summoned from Oxford Canon B. H. Streeter, Fellow and later Provost of Queen’s College, and Vere Somerset, History Tutor and Fellow of Worcester College. These were his Godfathers. It seemed odd to have such a large though infant Christian at the baptismal font, so, to avoid embarrassment, we locked the front door of the little parish church and posted the verger on guard in the vestry.[iii]

Soon after, perhaps as a mark of gratitude, Eliot spoke at Worcester College to undergraduates of the `The Philistines’ Society, perhaps a precursor of the Woodroffe Society that we have now, although it was more of a literary society. Stead recalled this occasion too:

[Eliot] announced on arriving that he must have lost his notes on the train from London, perhaps a polite way of saying he had not prepared any; however, he would read us The Waste Land. The poem was not widely appreciated at that time and called forth some very foolish remarks. A few remain in my memory; one youth rose at the end and said,

`Mr. Eliot, did you write all that?’

`Yes.’

`Well, I thought some of those words about the barge she sat in came from something else.’

Eliot responded with a pleasant smile that he was glad the point had been raised, and that as the speaker had recognized the passage, so he was sure others would understand these and some other well known lines as quotations used for the purpose of association. The reply was framed with such tact that the young man’s vanity would not be wounded if he was merely an honest dunce, yet if he was trying to be facetious, he would be quietly silenced. A discussion dragged along for some time until a round-faced youth bounced up and said,

`Mr. Eliot, may I ask a question?’

`Certainly.’

`Er–did you mean that poem seriously?’

Eliot looked non-plussed for a moment, and then said quietly,

`Well, if you think I did not mean it seriously, I have failed utterly.’

 

David Bradshaw writes that ‘In future years, many of Eliot’s non-religious friends and admirers would hold Stead accountable for what they regarded as Eliot’s post-conversion decline, and when he `visited Ezra Pound many years later, the poet told Stead that he had been responsible for “corrupting” Eliot’.[iv] The truth, however, is that culturally and ideologically Eliot and Stead had a great deal in common and their respective attraction to and profession of High Anglicanism simply drew them together even more closely.’[v]

 

If The Waste Land, written in 1922 is one of Eliot’s most famous poems, then the Four Quartets (of 1945) led to his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The four long poems were published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each has five sections and each includes reflections on the nature of time in some important respect, be it theological, historical or physical, with constant references to Christian thought and traditions. He employs theology, art, symbolism and language of writers like Dante, St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

 

Tonight we heard the fifth section of the second poem, East Coker, which takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, that was the home of Eliot’s ancestors and where he is buried. The poem concerns humanity, the natural order and the idea of renewal. It is the most explicitly Christian of the quartets and it also refers to the horror of war, so that the fourth section describes a hospital staffed by a “wounded surgeon” and a “dying nurse” where patients are not healed but are led through painful illness to death and a tenuous salvation. The section ends with a reference to Good Friday, a reminder that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and deferral to a higher authority. The final section of the poem again focuses on Eliot’s failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life is a struggle to “recover what has been lost.” Finally, he settles for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of darkness and death, in which he will finally find that “[i]n my end is my beginning.”

 

I chose this section because it speaks to me of the themes of Lent: a sense of our own inadequacies. Eliot does not emphasize Easter Sunday but Good Friday, for which humans bear responsibility. The hospital imagery and the emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European war raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent his realization that human folly and the inability to see the larger designs behind history doom any human endeavors to failure. This applies particularly to his attempts at poetry, as set out in the last section:

 

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

 

I like this sentiment, which emphasises the impossible task of articulating anything meaningful in art:

 

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

 

Eliot acknowledges that

 

As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

 

However, as the world becomes more baffling the more we experience of it, the more need there is for what Eliot calls, ‘a deeper communion’

 

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

Eliot lived through a time of two wars when the capacity of human beings to produce unimaginable suffering was revealed. Some commentators have thought that Eliot comes close to despair in his poem East Coker, but rather I believe, he acknowledges his own weakness, imperfection and fallibility as a human being, even in his own area of articulating words. It is in that state of realisation that he reminds me of the tax collector in our Gospel reading tonight: ‘the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

 

Lent is a time for self examination, of our thoughts, our behaviour, our relationships, our habits, and our faith. Acknowledgement of our weakness, or in religious language, our sin, is an opportunity to stand before God, just as we are, baffled, perplexed and failing, but in the knowledge that, in God’s economy, it is those who are most aware of their need of God’s help, forgiveness and salvation, who will find him.  Amen.

 

Sermon 1^st week Hilary Term 2013, Mark 1: 4-11; R.S. Thomas

 

This term we are focussing upon exploring Christianity through the arts in several different ways. On Sunday 10 February there will be a morning service broadcast live on BBC Radio 4, centred upon faith and the Arts. Ben Quash will be preaching, Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College, London. That event starts a whole week of talks, lectured, drama and music entitled Heaven sent: The Beauty of Holiness – A week exploring Christianity through the Arts hosted by the Oxford University Chaplains, and all based at the University Church. It includes the poets Nicola Slee and Michael Symmons-Roberts on ‘The Poetry of Faith’; music and discussion with composer James MacMillan; the play Two Planks and a Passion by Anthony Minghella, directed by Elisabeth Dutton; and an illustrated talk with the artists Nicholas Mynheer and Roger Wagner discussing, ‘Can Christian Art be Modern?’ Just pick up one of these cards at the back of chapel to find out all about that.

 

And in this series of sermons this term, we will be drawing about that deep and ancient relationship between poetry and faith, how words of art have been able to express our deepest spiritual longings and complexity. Our own Provost, will be speaking on that great poet, preacher and Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne; Ronald Hawkes from the Wykham benefice in Oxfordshire will be preaching on that religious sceptic Philip Larkin; Carla Grosch-Müller from Oxford’s United Reformed Church will be here to talk about the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Alison Milbank, from Nottingham is an expert on Dante and will be here in seventh week and the series finishes with an examination of the relationship between theology and poetry by Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow in Theology here. But to start the series I have chosen a poet who, as the Guardian obituary wrote of him, was ‘Riddled with contradictions, and charted the decline of modern life and his native Wales in bleak poetry, tinged with faint sunlight.’

 

By all acounts R.S. Thomas, the Welsh clergyman and poet who died in the year 2000 at the age of 87, was a miserable old so-and-so and full of paradoxes. He was a fierce defender of Wales and the Welsh language and yet wrote his poems in English. Like Wordsworth, he was inspired by nature and the land and yet hated the people who lived and worked on it. He married and English woman and sent his son to an English boarding school and when he wrote his autobiography in Welsh, entitled Neb, nobody and referred to himself in the third person as the boy or the rector.

So this ‘cantankerous clergyman,’ and ‘fiery poet-priest’ was acclaimed late in his life by the likes of Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman as one of the best poets living at that time. Perhaps one of the most paradoxical of his characteristics was his love of God and seemingly at other times hate for God. What emerged in the poetry from this situation was a kind of ruthless honesty evident in poems such as Folk Tale, a touchingly honest poem about prayer:

 

Prayers like gravel

Flung at the sky’s

window, hoping to attract

the loved one’s

attention. But without

visible plaits to let

down for the believer

to climb up,

to what purpose open

that far casement?

I would

have refrained long since

but that peering once

through my locked fingers

I thought that I detected

the movement of a curtain.

 

For Thomas the image of the cross was crucial. Indeed he has said that the reason he is content to call himself a Christian is because the Christian belief that God has taken suffering into himself is the most profound and satisfactory answer to the great problem of suffering. The image of the cross occurs in a number of poems. It was a conviction he expressed in his poem ‘The Coming’:

 

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

 

But even though his theology of the cross was central, Thomas was acutely aware of only knowing God at all by his seeming absence. That is, by what we don’t know about God. A notion which reaches back to apophatic theology and the English mystical writings such as the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing. Richard Harries, in his lecture on Thomas at Gresham College wrote that: ‘What he [Thomas] wants to keep as an eternal possibility is God as God, not simply preserve a hallowed image which we can control. The title of Simone Weil’s best know book is Waiting on God, which is the theme of one of the essays in it. The image of waiting is also central to one of Thomas’s best loved poems:

 

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

 

‘This brings out well the fact that all words purportedly from God come to us through human words, and as such will inevitably be limited, that is in some way distorting: ‘something is lost’. We can only speak of God at all through our human metaphors, and every metaphor of image we use is as untrue as it is true. So our human images that try to reach up and refer to God have continually to be made, and broken and remade. One image has constantly to be set against another, which contradicts and corrects it, and then this image in its turn has to be qualified in a new way.’ [Richard Harries]

 

So you may think that the poem we heard this evening, The Kingdom, is one of R.S. Thomas’ more positive and upbeat poems, telling us how simple it is to find the kingdom of God. And that when we do find the Kingdom of God it has much to offer

Kneeling before an altar

Of wood in a stone church

In summer, waiting for the God

To speak; the air a staircase

For silence; the sun’s light

Ringing me, as though I acted

A great rôle. And the audiences

Still; all that close throng

Of spirits waiting, as I,

For the message.

Prompt me, God;

But not yet. When I speak,

Though it be you who speak

Through me, something is lost.

The meaning is in the waiting.

 

Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life.

 

Here R.S.Thomas holds over the conclusion of each sentence deliberately disrupting the reading of each line. The effect is to underline the paradox of the Christian life: we await the coming of the Kingdom, dreaming of it, but not yet seeing it fully. But if we only dare, it is easy, he says to get there:

 

… [it] takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

 

Thomas invites the reader or listener to offer themselves green as a leaf but there is also an underlying notion that this might be impossible to achieve. ‘All you have to do is …’ this, but there is a wry smile in the poem that knows how we are not simple or green. The garden of Eden has gone.

 

The need for Christ, therefore, becomes more apparent and his Cross. The poem is perfectly apt for the paradox of todays’ new testament reading. Today we celebrate the baptism of Christ and many this morning renewed their baptism vows in churches. Baptism is the symbol of initiation into the Kingdom and of rebirth, but how hard it is even when we know that the kingdom is there for us, to live as if it is a reality. John Baptises and calls for repentance, Christ comes and is baptised, his authority as the son of God is acknowledged from on high, but, in the next passage of Mark’s gospel, Christ immediately goes into the wilderness where he is starved almost to the point of death and undergoes the mental torment of satanic temptation before his ministry can begin.

 

R.S. Thomas may have been dark in mood, but he was honest. The paradox of and his poetry, bleak with moments of sunlight, highlights the paradoxes that exist between the world and God, between faith and humanity, within ourselves and our spiritual lives. The words of poetry, just as the notes of music, can express something of the ineffable in us and the inexpressible God, and of the relationship of each to the other. I hope, as we journey together this term into the interwoven tapestries of poetry and of faith, that we can go deeper into our own realties and find, in our complex humanity, the divine spark which urges us on to seek again the creative and life-giving domain of the kingdom of God.

Worcester College Chapel, Week 8 Hilary Term 2013

 

Poetry and Theology

 

This term we have had a rich feast in our sermon series on the ‘Poetry of Faith’.  The Chaplain introduced to us the poems of R.S. Thomas, and, later, to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and his links with Worcester College. We have considered the poetry of John Donne, of Philip Larkin, of Rainer Maria Rilke, and of Dante Alighieri.    One of the clearest appreciations of poetry  I remember came from a visiting preacher, a parish priest from a Worcester Living, who said ‘ I read poetry because it paints pictures in my mind; it makes me laugh, and think, and cry. I know not very much about poetry except I would say that poets put into words the deepest emotions and thoughts that any of us have.’

My task tonight is to try to bring this sermon series together.  Rather than doing so through one single poet, I am going to reflect on how  Poetry and Theology  relate to one another.  However,  before we even begin to think about poetry,  we need to consider, briefly, the other side of the equation:  theology.  At some point many of us have tried out skills at writing poetry,  but who can ‘do’ theology?  Just as anyone can be a poet, can anyone be a theologian?   Or is Theology to be reserved for the experts and the professionals, whether in the Church or the Academy?

Recently our Theology Faculty has been transforming its syllabus;  the  new name ‘Theology and Religion’, and the eighty or more papers which can be chosen over a student’s three years,  tell us something about how rich and diverse the subject of Theology can be.  It  encompasses  the study of philosophy, but also anthropology; of history,  yet also spirituality; of Christianity, but of Buddhism as well;  of the language and literature of the Bible and also  of the Koran .  ‘Theology’:   it comprises two words, and its etymology can be traced back through Middle English and Norman French to Latin and so to Greek:  theos, which means ‘God’,  and ‘logia’,  which means words.  Theology simply means words about God:  discourses about God; or, indeed,  a study of God.

‘Words about God’  not only crowd out our undergraduate and graduate syllabi;  they also fill thousands of shelves in our libraries and supply a vast  number of websites. It seems we cannot say enough about who God is and what he is not. To cite Hamlet’s response to Lord Polonius, all we read are ‘words, words, words’.  Yet, in my view, using words to describe God is only a small part of what ‘doing theology’ is really about:  most of you will agree that theology should be as much about action as discourse, as much about loving our neighbour as about erudite speech.   And even if we narrow theology down to being mainly ‘a study of God’,  it need not be only ‘talk about God’:  in a believing context, Theology is also about talking to God and listening to God speaking to us; furthermore,  at its most profound, it is not about using words at all, but about being silent and ‘mindful’ of the presence of God who is not only found through words but who is also known beyond the medium of speech alone.

Human relationships might offer a somewhat imperfect  analogy here.  We all know  that at the beginning of a friendship conversation and communication are vital if we are to discover mutual interests- and indeed, our differences.  But as a friendship  develops there is less need to talk as we start  to enjoy doing things together, although discussion and exchange of ideas are still important. Our companionship is complete when we are able to sit, unselfconsciously,  in silence, mindful of their company, but without the need to voice anything  in words.  There is a sense in which  Theology encompasses these three phases as well –  it is undoubtedly a discourse about God, but it is also possible that this can progress to a mutual conversation, in prayer;  another stage is silence,  when we realize that both the mind and the heart need to be quietened in the awesome presence of God.

So we cannot ‘do’ Theology without using words, but there is more to Theology than words alone.   This is where Poetry has such an important relationship with Theology,  because it enables us to move from an exercise  which entails a more rational, propositional discourse about God to a different practice which is as much about listening and imagining and intuiting as about speaking and reasoning and explaining.  Poetry can even help us to move on to the third and most profound of all,  where we are ‘lost for words’.

One of my favourite poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe  (U.A. Fanthorpe)  is Rising Damp,  which starts by describing about the ‘little fervent underground Rivers of London’.  It’s not an overtly theological poem: but it moves from the observations of these innocent underground streams which ‘chew(ed) the clay to the basin that London nestles in’;  which, having once  ‘chiselled the city, (that) washed the clothes and turned the mills, where children drank and salmon swam’  disappear underground into the depths of London:   ‘Boxed, like the magician’s assistant. Buried alive in the earth. Forgotten, like the dead.’  But, after heavy rains,  they  burst through again, to ‘deluge cellars, detonate manholes, plant effluent on our faces, Sink the city.’  What starts as an innocent image ends as a chaotic one.    The poem’s final verse,  however, is particularly interesting:

‘It is the other rivers that lie

Lower, that touch us only in dreams

That never surface.  We feel their tug

As a dowser’s rod bends to the surface below’.

 

The skill of a poet is to create an effect whereby an image both reaches the depths of our consciousness  (where words are often hard to find) but also emerges at the surface where we are able to articulate what we read or hear.      I once wrote a book on reading the Old Testament and gave it the title The Image, the Depths and the Surface: I  took the idea from Fanthorpe, and its cover has an image of a stone being thrown into the water where refraction on the surface prevents us seeing where it has gone but the ripples on the water reveal its continuing effects.  I’m fairly sure most of my colleagues had no clue what I was  on about:  but I was trying to say something about the power of words, in theology as in poetry,  both  to reveal and conceal what we really mean.  Those well-known lines from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam V’,  put it better:

‘For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.’

 

This means that poetry, like theology,  can be appreciated, even when it is imperfectly understood.  This is encouraging, because the Bible actually  has a huge amount of poetry,  particularly in the Old Testament, and it is often very difficult to comprehend it.  It is not only found in the Psalms and the Prophets, but in many narrative  parts as well.  The reading  from Genesis 1, which we heard tonight, which of course is a translation of the Hebrew, could easily be set in poetic form in its description of God as Creator,  with the poet playing  on the idea of ‘the word’ which brings hidden things to birth.   So God addresses the watery chaos and deep darkness: ‘ “Let there be light”.  And there was light’.  He then addresses the heavens: ‘ “Let there be a firmament.. to separate the waters”.  And it was so’.   Seven times this ‘word from God’  is pronounced,  and each time it brings order out of chaos – light out of darkness, land out of the waters, vegetation out of  the earth, and so on.  It is a dramatic illustration of an ancient poet using  words about God to describe God using words to bring mysterious hidden things to birth.

The New Testament reading from John 1, which is a translation of the Greek, could also be set in poetic form, as another writer plays with the idea of ‘the Word’  to show the Creator’s greatest ‘fiat’  was the Word which was made flesh – Christ, His only Son who dwells among us.  There are so many echoes here of Genesis 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’  The light shines out of darkness;  order is brought of out chaos.  This is another dramatic illustration of  a poet using  words about God to describe God calling out ‘the Word-made-flesh’ to live and work among us. There are many places in the Hebrew and Greek Bibles where the writers adapt a poetic medium as they seek to use words  to capture the indescribable. Poetry is a vital medium in the biblical tradition to speak of the mystery of God working the world.

But can we really classify Genesis chapter 1 as Poetry?  It is certainly not poetry as we might traditionally understand it.    In Hebrew,  ‘Poetry’  is not so much about the sound (it has little metre, rhythm, and rhyme, for example) as about the balance of  sense, whereby the same idea is repeated in two successive lines.  A good example is in Psalm 33,  which was sung  for us earlier:  again,  we may note the psalmist’s use of words to describe the  ‘Word of the Lord’  which is again a creative act.  (I quote from Psalm 33 verses 4 and 6 – do feel free to look at it  on pages 175-6 in your  green prayer books)

‘For the word of the Lord is true:

And all his works are faithful…

 

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made:

And all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth’

 

In the first verse above, the ‘word of the Lord’ is parallel with  ‘his works’; and the word ‘true’ corresponds with ‘faithful’.   In the second verse,  the ‘word of the Lord’ is parallel with ‘the breath of his mouth’, and ‘the heavens’ in the first line corresponds with ‘the hosts of them’ in the second. (It is common in Hebrew poetry to omit a verb in the second line.)  The translation by Coverdale, which the choir used, had a colon after each of these ideas to make the parallelism clear, and they sung the chant by pausing between the two parts of each verse. This is Hebrew poetry:  by repetition it is able ‘paint several similar pictures in our mind’.

 

Why is  all this important?  Because it shows us  that although Hebrew poetry  is unfamiliar to us, because it conforms to  such different ancient conventions, it still has a capacity to stir our imagination  with things which are  both familiar and unknown.  We are back to the ‘tug of the dowser’s rod’ as it ‘bends to the surface below’.   The very fact we still use the psalms and gain something from reading and even praying  them is testimony to this.    Marianne Moore expresses this rather more sardonically in her  poem ‘The Past is the Present’ when she considers the mysteries of the Hebrew poetry of the prophet Habakkuk:

 

If external action is effete

and rhyme is outmoded,

I shall revert to you,

Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class

the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.

He said – and I think I repeat his exact words,

“Hebrew poetry is prose

With a sort of heightened consciousness.”   Ecstasy affords

the occasion and expediency determines the form.

 

 

So a good deal of poetry,  whether translated from the ancient Hebrew or Greek  or contemporised in English,  throws light on both the possibilities and limitations of what ‘doing’ theology is all about.   The image does touch the surface as well as plumb the depths;  the concealed is also revealed.   But, conversely, the image also remains in the  depths; and the revealed is also concealed.

 

I was much struck by this paradox when, for the Chaplain’s sermon some three weeks ago,  I read  in Chapel some of East Coker Part V.  Here  we find a similar struggle in T.S. Eliot’s  poetry, for he is

 

‘trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate…’

 

 

It is this ‘raid on the inarticulate’ which I have been trying to emphasise this evening, for it is at this point that both the poet and  the theologian face a similar challenge and encounter a similar paradox.   Each is constrained by words, and tries  to articulate that which, in words, is a most inadequate expression of what they actually wish to say.

 

I began with offering insights into the etymology of the word ‘Theology’:  I end with an attempt to define, similarly, the word ‘Poetry’.   ‘Poetry’  also  traces its roots  through  the Middle English word ‘poetrie’ to the Latin ‘poētria’ and so to the Greek ‘poetica’,  where the verb  poiein means ‘to create’  or ‘to make’.   So the poet is one who ‘creates’ with words:  the best term might be ‘wordsmith’.   The theologian, as we have seen, is the one who also has to use words in seeking  to understand God:  sometimes she or he might also be called a ‘wordsmith’.  I say  ‘sometimes’:   whereas the poet can only  use words, the theologian has to learn from the limitation of words that theology has a point of reference which, although initially dependent upon words, is also more than this.    Thank God for expressions of Theology in music and the arts!  For these remind us that our encounter with the numinous, and our encounter with God-in-Christ, is more than being good ‘wordsmiths’.  That encounter cannot be contained in volumes of theological tomes,  nor constrained by statements set as creeds and articles of faith; it cannot even  be encapsulated in a compendium of prayers  – even the prayers of the psalms.  It is  undoubtedly greater than all the words and the translated words  preserved in our sacred books. Theology needs words, as poetry needs words: but theology, perhaps at its most profound,  moves from an articulation using  words to speechless   ‘mindfulness’ which is about resting in the presence of God in complete silence.    Our Benedictine forebears understood this so clearly in accepting the vows of silence, according to Chapter 6 of their Rule. ‘For God alone my soul waits in silence’ (Ps. 62.1,5).

 

This sermon may contain  a subconscious word-weariness –  a reaction to having written and read  and spoken far too much throughout this Hilary Term.  Nevertheless,  I would propose that a good Lenten discipline might be the  occasional quest for silence as well as the pursuit of ‘words, words, words’.  For if we can discover God in silence this Lent,  we will certainly appreciate even more our rediscovery of Him in the rich articulation of our Easter faith.

 

 

Lent 2 Worcester College Oxford: Dante and the lure of beauty

Recently, you have heard about Rilke and Larkin, two poets with some nostalgia for the numinous but without religious faith but today I bring you a medieval Catholic Italian poet, who makes theology and the search for God the subject of his verse – though he had no time for bad popes! For the child Dante, his poetic and spiritual life began when he was nine years old and met a little girl in a crimson dress at a party. He hardly knew her, and in adulthood her greeting in the street was the height of happiness to him and the nearest he came to know her. On your sheet you have a famous painting by Henry Holiday, designer of this chapel’s stained glass, showing the time Beatrice refused her greeting because she had heard something to Dante’s discredit.

She married and died young, but for Dante she was the way into a new form of poetry and the way to salvation. The new form of poetry sought to wrestle self-obsessed courtly love poetry away from casting the woman as pretext for self-analysis towards poetry of pure praise, in which she is loved and wondered at for the miracle of her existence – her thisness, her radiant being; the way of salvation was to see her as an opening to the transcendent, with a beauty that is not self-contained but leads into the heart of God himself.

After the death of Beatrice however, Dante’s life goes all astray. He is exiled from his beloved birthplace, Florence, by his political enemies, and he loses this image of Beatrice that leads to virtue. And so his journey in the Divine Comedy is a penitential one, which takes him through Hell to see his own lostness, and to understand how poetry can deceive and foster violent hatred, before he can slowly climb the mountain of Purgatory and achieve reconciliation. In the Earthly Paradise he meets and confesses to Beatrice, who leads him through the heavenly spheres.

I could, as befits Lent, have used the Inferno, beginning in the wood of error, ‘Midway upon this journey of our life’ – and might have done had I realized about Worcester’s own ‘midway’ rite of passage. But Oxford calls the Lent term, ‘Hilary’ from hilaios, meaning cheerful or gracious, and our Lenten fasting is not life-denying but equally cheerful, and is performed out of love for our blessed Lord. Christ’s beauty on the cross or resurrected walking in the dewy garden is the lure that draws us into prayer and fasting. At one point Dante has to walk through the – purely mental – heat of the fire of purgation of lust, and is terrified. The poet Virgil, his guide at that point, encourages him by using Beatrice as a lure, saying, ‘Beatrice is the other side of that fire. I think I can see her eyes already’. To see true beauty requires purgation not just physical fasting but purgation of the desire to own, to master, to degrade, just as true faith requires the reorientation of our whole being.

To stress the importance of the lure of beauty, we heard a passage not from Inferno but from Paradiso, not long before Beatrice leaves Dante to take her own place among the blessed, where he may be part of her prayer but where she has her own destiny. She cannot be a mere idealization. And I chose a point where Dante gives up his attempt to write about her beauty, a beauty which opens to a reality beyond her through her eyes and smile. Dante follows neo-platonic thought in allying goodness, truth and beauty together, just as the fairy-tales of the ordinary people do when they make Cinderella as beautiful as the day. Like Socrates, reporting Diotima’s view of love in Plato’s Symposium, for Dante earthly desire opens the way into heavenly love. Beatrice is a window that lets the light through, ‘light not of the earthly sun but of God himself: ‘light of the intellect, light full of love,/ love of the true good, full of ecstasy,/ ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy’. This love draws Dante out of himself and launches him on a journey into the reality of God, a journey that begins where words end. Dante’s importance to contemporary poets lies precisely in the way in which he uses poetry to describe the limits of words. When he finally sees the Trinity as rainbows and fiery circle, his imagination fails as he is unable to work out how the human figure he also discerns there relates to the Divine circling. It is, however, that very difficulty – that laborious activity of thought – that brings him into the life of God, so that the poem ends:

At that point vision failed high fantasy

But, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,

I felt my will and my desire impelled

By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

True desire leads us out of ourselves on a journey that will never end but is always full of delight. It is like a book, C. S. Lewis suggests, in which each chapter is better than the one before.

All this, you may say, is very attractive, but how does it relate to the Bible? I could have chosen Christ’s words in St John’s gospel, where agape and eros, desire and loving-kindness, are used together, or one of the ecstatic passages from St Paul. But I chose a passage from the book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha, which is also part of our Anglican Bible, containing books written late in Jewish history, because Dante uses it so often in the Comedy. Your sermons on Rilke and Larkin stressed the transformation of the everyday by poetry, while I have been talking about going beyond, about Transcendence. But Dante also learns on his journey how everything in the whole cosmos fits together and is related: he has a vision of the world as a great book, and Beatrice is also an image of the Divine Wisdom: Hagia Sophia, to whom churches in the east are often dedicated and who is illustrated on your sheet.

She is guide and teacher of the beauty of God’s creation. The book of wisdom is narrated as if by Solomon himself, the king who prayed for wisdom as a child. Dante may be comparing himself implicitly to Solomon in the story he tells of meeting Beatrice when he too was a child. Wisdom is both beautiful woman and craftswoman, a mirror of the divine, and Dante’s whole poem is a tribute to a world made radiant by discerning within it a beauty of structure and form: in which we see it as a made thing – God’s work of art. If we truly admire a beautiful object, or even are astounded by the beauty of a person we just glance at in the street, their beauty is not an isolated phenomenon that makes everything else dull but a revelation of how everything truly is: wisdom makes all things new. The dreary Cornmarket is suddenly illumined as if from within. The cup the person drinks from, the ground they tread upon, has a pattern and significance. In the same way, Dante is restored to normal life at the end of his poem, but it is a life now in movement, ‘impelled’ by the Love he encountered, shaped by wisdom.

It is asking a lot more of you to read Dante than pick up a short lyric by Hopkins or Larkin but I hope that once in your life you will read him, perhaps with others because that is the best way to do it. At this very moment there are little groups of people around the world reading Dante together and helping each other with the obscure names. And what I pray may happen in your reading is that the poem may open within you a desire, a longing, for something more: for holy wisdom, holy beauty, for without this divine discontent we will have no transformation, in love or in politics. So let us pray for light intellectual, light full of love, love of the true good, full of ecstasy, that we too may taste the ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy as beauty opens herself to the aching need of our desiring souls.

Amen.

 

2013 Feb 10                        Worcester College Chapel Evensong                       CA Grosch-Miller

Luke 9:28-36; Letters to a Young Poet, RM Rilke

 

Scripture: Luke 9:28-36

Other reading:  From Letters to A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

 

At Worpswede bei Bremen, 16 July 1903

…I have left a letter of yours unanswered for a long time.  It is not that I had forgotten it; on the contrary, it was the kind of letter anyone would read a second time if he chanced on it again among his papers, and I could recognise you in it as if you were standing beside me. …I am sure you remember it.  Reading it as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, I am touched by your wonderful concern for life even more than I was in Paris, for there everything sounds different, smothered by the inordinate din that agitates everything.  Here, in the midst of this enormous landscape and of the great winds that blow across from the sea, I feel that there is no-one who could find answers to those questions of yours, those emotions, which deep within themselves live a life of their own.  Even the best of us cannot quite find words that will truly express things so subtle and virtually unsayable.  Nevertheless I believe that you need not stay unanswered so long as you keep in touch with things resembling those by which my eyes are at this moment refreshed.  If you keep close to Nature, to all that is simple in Nature, to the small things which scarcely anyone notices and which can for that very reason invisibly lead to what is great, what is immeasurable; if you truly possess this love for lesser things and if, by serving them, you can quietly win the trust of things that seem humble – then everything will grow easier for you, more unified, somehow more reconciling, not necessarily in your mind, which may hesitate, amazed, but in your deepest awareness and watchfulness and understanding.  You are still so young, so uncommitted, and I do entreat you as strongly as I can, my dear Sir, to stay patient with all that is still unresolved in your own heart, to try to love the very questions, just as if they were locked-up rooms or as if they were books in an utterly unknown language.  You ought not yet to be searching for answers, for you could not yet live them.  What matters is to live everything.  For just now, live the questions.  Maybe you will little by little, almost without noticing, one distant day live your way into the answers.    

 

 

Becoming

 

We gather in the afterglow of the transfiguration, its radiance transfixing, transforming…to contemplate a poet who caught the radiance of God in the simple things of earth and the ripening of human consciousness: Rainer Maria Rilke.  Like Gerald Manley Hopkins, who wrote the world is charged with the grandeur of God, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Earth’s crammed with heaven…., Rilke found God manifest in the creation, an immanent reality brought to fulfilment in the poet’s grasping of it.  Seeing and cherishing the things of the earth, Rilke resacralised the world. (Barrows & Macy 1996, 153)  Digging deep into his inner being, he discovered the hand of the divine awakening and “ripening” him.  In this way, he is particularly amenable to the postmodern West.  No dualism impeded his spiritual journey; no institution confined his understanding.  His passion was for the content of God emergent in earth and in humanity.

 

You have already heard some of his wisdom: closeness to Nature, attentive loving observation, patience with all that is unresolved in your heart, love the questions, live them that you may one day live into the answers.  I am most intrigued with Rilke’s poetry of becoming, his understanding and expression of how we become ourselves and that God becomes through us becoming.  The poems I will be sharing with you on this topic come from a collection he called The Book of Hours, a book of three collections: The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Pilgrimage and The Book of Poverty and Death.  He wrote these poems in German.   I will be reading from the 1996 translation Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love poems to God, by poet Anita Barrows and systems thinker and environmental activist Joanna Macy. (NY: Riverhead Books)

 

Rilke had what he called in a letter a completely indescribable passion for experiencing God. (Barrows & Macy 2009, 33)  Born in 1875 in Prague, he was raised Roman Catholic but found his spiritual home at the turn of the century in Russia and the Orthodox Church.  There he found a God who inhabited earth and expressed its divinity in human potential.  [van der Lippe, quoting Andreas-Salomé You Alone at 10]. There, he said, God broke in on me, and for a long time I have lived in the antechamber of his name, on my knees. [You alone, 153-154]

 

The Book of Hours came to him in an outpouring, as though dictated from above.  He wrote at a feverish pace, in three sittings, between Sept 1899 and March 1903.  He wrote as though he were a Russian monk living in a cloister, summoned to the task of seeing and meeting what was most real to him in the world.  He wrote of the ripening of the self through our wrestling with God, and the impenetrability of the holy, whose firm hands hold and free us:

 

From Book I, 25 (p. 70)

I love you, gentlest of Ways,

who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

 

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,

you, the forest that always surrounded us,

 

you, the song we sang in every silence,

you dark net threading through us,

 

On the day you made us you created yourself,

and we grew sturdy in your sunlight….

 

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now

and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

 

He was aware of the desire we have to cling to what we discover in our wrestling, to put the ephemeral in tangible form, like Peter – transfixed by the sight of Jesus, Moses and Elijah shining on the mountaintop – who wanted to build three dwellings.  Rilke did not disdain that very human tendency to concretise and systematise religious feeling, but for him, he knew that the real faithfulness was sensing God and letting God work in us, so that we become living words.

 

From Book II,15 (p. 115):

All who seek you test you.

And those who find you

bind you to image and gesture.

 

I would rather sense you

as the earth senses you.

In my ripening

ripens

what you are.

 

I need from you no tricks

to prove you exist.

Time, I know,

is other than you.

 

No miracles, please.

Just let your laws

become clearer

from generation to generation.

 

Desire is no enemy to Rilke.  Longing features strongly in the poems, as does emotion and embodiment, and silence and solitude.  The whole of human experience is the realm in which we find God and in which we manifest God:

 

Book I, 59 (p. 88)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

 

These are the words we dimly hear:

 

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing. 

Embody me.

 

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

 

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

 

Nearby is a country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

 

Give me your hand.

 

Again from Book I,17 (p. 64):

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

of her life, and weaves them gratefully

into a single cloth—

it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

and clears it for a different celebration

 

where the one guest is you.

In the softness of evening

it’s you she receives.

 

You are the partner of her loneliness,

the unspeaking centre of her monologues. 

With each disclosure you encompass more

and she stretches beyond what limits her,

to hold you.

 

And from Book III,62 (p. 147):

I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can’t make out.

The day’s labour grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

 

Reading the Book of Hours, we are struck by the intimacy of the relationship between God and man, God and woman; and by the earthy tenderness with which God cradles human life and brings it to its fulfilment, which is to manifest the divine.

 

He speaks to God:  Book II, 26 (p. 122)

You too will find your strength.

We who must live in this time

cannot imagine how strong you will become –

how strange, how surprising,

yet familiar as yesterday.

 

We will sense you

like a fragrance from a nearby garden

and watch you move through our days

like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom. 

 

We will not be herded into churches,

for you are not made by the crowd,

you who meet us in our solitude.

 

We are cradled close in your hands –

and lavishly flung forth.

 

Today we remember the Transfiguration – the revelation of radiant Word made flesh, the fulfilment of God’s purpose in creation.  The Transfiguration is the apex of the incarnation, the whole of the promise that God might dwell fully in and through humanity.  Rilke’s Love poems to God reveal the way, in silence and in solitude, through our seeing, our longing and our becoming, the divine comes to life in our flesh.  Hear again:

 

You…go to the limits of your longing. 

Embody me.

 

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

 

May we know God’s tenderness and strength in the things of the earth and the longings of our hearts.  And may we be ripened by our wrestling, by the loving and living of our questions, as we become who we can be in the likeness of Christ.  Amen.