Poetics of Prayer

I think, almost daily, of this passage from Robert Jenson:

The truly necessary qualification is not that the City’s streets will not be paved with real gold, but that gold as we know it is not real gold, such as the City will be paved with. What is the matter with gold anyway? Will goldsmiths who gain the Kingdom have nothing to do there? To stay with this one little piece of the vision, our discourse must learn again to revel in the beauty and flexibility and integrity of gold, of the City’s true gold, and to say exactly why the world the risen Jesus will make must of course be golden, must be and will be beautiful and flexible and integral as is no earthly city. And so on and on.

“Cleansing the Temple” Malcolm Guite

Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

From the last lines of “On Fairy Stories” (PDFs of the article are easily unearthed), JRR Tolkien:

But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the happy ending. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Mark Sebanc’s article makes the case that Tolkien deployed the serious and learned device of play in his fantastic, or what Tolkien called ‘Enchanted,’ stories. Sebanc:

It seems to me that of all the ways of looking at Tolkien’s mythopoetic genius, at the truths that he breathes with praeternatural elvish craft through silver, the most comprehensive and overarching way would be to see it as falling into the category of a game-something that the ancients saw as being far from shallow and sophomoric, merely a children’sthing, as we might be tempted to see it. Plato links play with culture, denominating these two ideas as the things he deems most serious. These two words, “play” and “culture,” are, moreover, closely cognate in the original Greek. This is no accident of etymology. There are untold and fascinating intellectual depths to this idea of play, which Huizinga’s magisterial work, Homo Ludens, goes far towards explicating. It strikes me as being one of modern intellectual history’s idkes mnitresses, a superb interpretive tool with the help of which we may arriveat a better understanding of Tolkien’s achievement and, adver- satively, a keener insight into the poverty of thought and form that blankets modern literature like a miasmic counterpane of marsh gas.

It occurs to me that a profound sense of play requires the work of improvosation. What seems to link play together with improvisation is the element of surprise. Surprise unfurls reality with a sense of ‘all-of-the-sudden-ness’. All of the sudden, something concealed is revealed; yet, in being revealed, the reality is simultaniously uncovered and made strange.

The juxtaposed paradox of coming to know and being left wondering leaves the knower with a sense of delight. The surprise and delight of play and improvisation act something like the lowest common denominator of that allusive quality we term humor. Steve Wilkens: pulls some of these threads together:

It is hard to define humor itself. A dictionary definition such as ‘something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing” hardly seems to capture the richness and variety of humor. Instead of attempting to define humor, it seems more helpful to focus on how it works. Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation, juxtaposition of seeming incommensurate things, challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices…Doesn’t it seem possible that these incongruities and surprises share common ground with humor, and isn’t the delight we should feel at the oddity of these stories akin to the delight we experience in a good joke?

Nick Cave’s Sacred Space. Joseph Campbell spoke of the sacred place as that place where:

…a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there.

By Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

After listening to a reading of Mark Sebanc’s article on the Logos in Tolkien on Mars Hill Audio, I set to some reseach on the author. Alongside a brief interview, I found a blog of his centered around his sci-fi series which he coauthors with a friend. With promo and process blogs, Sebanc also includes some personal notes on the work of writing. I enjoyed this post on the “ten commandments of writing” from John C. Wright. Here are rules one and seven which I found helpful.

1. In order to be a writer, you must write.

2. If your manuscript is good or bad, send out your manuscript again. Genius does not count. Only persistence counts. The world will not recognize your genius until after you are dead. But the world can recognize your persistence now.

To reinterpret into Austin Kleon’s (Kleonees) jargon:

1. Forget the noun, do the verb
2. There is no genius, there is social genius that abides thru the persistance of individuals in community.

Karl Barth: Epistle to the Romans, iii. 22:

Jesus stands among sinners as a sinner; he sets himself wholly under the judgement under which the world is set; he takes his place where God can be present only in questioning about him; he takes the form of a slave; he moves to the cross and to death; his greatest achievement is a negative achievement. There is no conceivable human possibility of which he did not rid himself. Herein he is recognized as the Christ; for this reason God has exalted him; and consequently he is the light of the Last Things by which all things are illuminated. In him we behold the faithfulness of God in the depths of hell.

A friend of mine is fond of saying, “It’s Jesus’ failure we feast on every week.”

Helmut Thielicke (via Alan Jacobs):

You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, “Who is my neighbor?” The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer’s question around. Then we shall ask not “Who is my neighbor?” but “To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?” This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God’s tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God’s help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

Thielicke’s words on the parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’ bring two things to mind.

1. Some time ago, I wrote on Ivan Illich’s interpretation of this same parable here. Illich makes the point that hospitality is not owed out of obligation, particular to ethnic constraints but is, rather, “A free creation between two people.” The sense of “a free creation” seems to suggest that hospitality is gift, an aspect of the given life. In this way, I find a great connection between how Thielicke talks of “This reversal of the question,” into “To whom am I a neighbor” and Illich’s “free creation”.

2. The second thing might be joined to the first by tracing a theme of improvisation (more on this later). “God’s tasks,” says Thielicke, “Always have about them something surprising and unexpected.” In this way God calls us to improvise. Often we take the opportunity for improvisation as an inturruption to the planned form we fantasize our days to hold. Some time ago, I posted some quotations about ‘time managment’ here. one of those quotes came from CS Lewis who had a lot to say about how the present moment is the place where we make contact with eterninty and encounter the grace sufficient for the time. About work ‘interruptions’ he says this:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Laity Lodge has just published their retreat schedule for this summer! What a thrill. To that end, I’d like to share a bit of poetry from one of the speakers who, one day, I hope to meet.

On being told my poetry was found in a broken photocopier By Malcolm Guite

My poetry is jamming your machine
It broke the photo-copier, I’m to blame,
With pictures copied from a world unseen.

My poem is in the works -I’m on the scene
We free my verse, and I confess my shame,
My poetry is jamming your machine.

Though you berate me with what might have been,
You stop to read the poem, just the same,
And pictures, copied from a world unseen,

Subvert the icons on your mental screen
And open windows with a whispered name;
My poetry is jamming your machine.

For chosen words can change the things they mean
And set the once-familiar world aflame
With pictures copied from a world unseen

The mental props give way, on which you lean
The world you see will never be the same,
My poetry is jamming your machine
With pictures copied from a world unseen

Also: A lovely video from Laity Lodge wherein Guite recites his poem.

Gerard Hopkins, Letters:

‘This mind was in Christ Jesus’—[St. Paul] means as man: being in the form of God—that is, finding, as in the first instant of his incarnation he did, his human nature informed by the Godhead—he thought it no matching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of servant: that is, he could not but see what he was, God, but he would see it as if he did not see it, and be it as if he was not, and instead of snatching at once at what all the time was his, or was himself, he emptied himself so far as that was possible of Godhead and behaved only as God’s slave, as his creature, as man, which also he was, and then being in the guise of man humbled himself to death.

via FPR, Wendell Berry:

Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.

Listening to some interviews with John Swinton, I noticed him, more than once make reference to what he called “The Sacrament of The Present Moment.” After a quick search, I found that the idea seems to come from Jean Pierre de Caussade, a Jesuit who lived in the 17th century.

In this conversation, former nurse and now professor John Swinton mentions the theme of accompaniment. Speaking of the experience of a depressed person, he said that accompaniment might not mean sitting with someone in their depression but rather helping them find the right medication for their condition. Much of the work I did as a chaplain could be characterized as accompaniment.

I found that each room I visited held a new way for me to journey with someone. Never was the company predictable in their need. That might sound obvious; yet, in doing the same thing of “showing up” to hospital rooms, one could easily assume that’s where the job ended. The essence of accompaniment is to move with another for a time.

Toward the city of God or man? Pilgrims paired for a time. “Love has its speed…” as Kosuke Koyama would say.