Poetics of Prayer

Mary Townsend:

One perennial human obstacle to virtue, Aristotle observes, is that most of us think rather less of ourselves than we ought – a surprising sentiment to hear from the otherwise solidly self-loving pagan world. For if the pagans can’t appreciate themselves, how on earth will we? We are capable of more than we give ourselves credit for, he says, and when we decide with much grinding of soul to stand aside from the sorts of projects and honors we are more than capable of carrying off, we are, as he puts it, small-souled. Of course, people who overestimate what they can do or have done are vain. But there are those who are capable of great things and know it, and it would be wiser of humanity, flirting not so much with proper humility but with self-humiliation, to aim toward something more like this state of greatness, toward largeness, toward expansiveness of being. To do so is to have megalopsychia – to have, literally, a large soul.

Now, who ever ran across a person more capable of great things, and who knew this capability, than Dolly Parton? Here is goodness that one could never accuse of being pedestrian. Her very hair is explicable on these grounds. Larger than life, it announces her before she arrives, and signals that someone has at last understood the proper task of the human, to reach out with all our hearts toward the divine in the ways that we humanly can.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade:

God’s order and his divine will is the life of all souls who either seek or obey it. In whatever way this divine will may benefit the mind, it nourishes the soul. These blessed results are not produced by any particular circumstance but by what God ordains for the present moment. What was best a moment ago is so no longer because it is removed from the divine will which has passed on to be changed to form the duty to the next. And it is that duty, whatever it may be, that is now most sanctifying for the soul.

· · ·

The divine will is the wholeness, the good and the true in all things. Like God, the universal Being, it is manifest in everything. It is not necessary to look to the benefits received by the mind and body to judge their virtue. These are of no significance. It is the will of God that gives everything, whatever it may be, the power to form Jesus Christ in the center of our being. This will knows no limits.

· · ·

Divine action does not distinguish between creatures, whether they are useless or useful. Without it everything is nothing, with it nothing is everything. Whether contemplation, meditation, prayer, inward silence, intuition, quietude, or activity are what we wish for ourselves, the best is God’s purpose for us at the present moment. Souls must look upon everything as though it were a matter of complete indifference, and, seeing only him in all things, must take or leave them as he wishes so as to live, be nourished by, and hope in him alone and not by any power or virtue which does not come from him. Every moment, and in respect of everything, they must say, like St. Paul, ​“Lord what should I do?” Let me do everything you wish. The Spirit wants one thing, the body another, but Lord, I wish only to do your divine will. Supplication, intercession, mental or vocal prayer, action or silence, faith or wisdom, particular sacraments or general grace, all these, Lord, are nothing, for your purpose is the true and only virtue in all things. It alone, and nothing else, however sublime or exalted, is the object of my devotion since the purpose of grace is the perfection of the heart, not of the mind.

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry — “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

— Malin, in The Age of Anxiety

Father Zossima:

…be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.

I snapped this photo during my first retreat to Laity Lodge. I hope to return there soon.

Here are five things I've learned from Kyle Strobel after listening to a smattering of podcasts with him. Two of my favorites were:

• A breakout session published on the Gospel Coalition Podcast AND
• Gravity Leadership Podcast
  • Wherein the interviewer mentions an article by Kyle's mentor and colleague, John Coe titled, "Resisting the Temptation of Moral Formation."

1. "When you are in the presence of God and your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart." I John 3
2. Because the Spirit prays our reality to the Father, Strobel says, God hears us "In stereo".
   • Me: "Everything's great here, God...I hope you're doing will. It's all super."
   • Spirit in me: "uuuuggghhh"
3. We come to the father, in Christ, by the Spirit.
4. Contemplation: "Being with God in his temple," setting the mind on things above.
5. Use the method of prayer that the Psalmist does. The Puritans prayed this way and called it soliloquy.
   • Psalm 42, "Why be downcast, O my soul, hope in God..."

J.R.R. Tolkien:¹

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Some time ago I snagged this quote from the blog of professor Richard Beck. Today, after learning the name Paul Farmer thru news of his death, the phrase "long defeat" resurfaced. The medical anthropologist was known for using it to describe the work he did with the poorest of the poor. Here he is in his own words:

I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background — like you, like most PIH-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.²

From Alan Jacobs:

Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Some 20th-century thinkers who have been vital for me over the years:

Explainers: Charles Taylor, Mary Midgely, Freeman Dyson
Illuminators: Mikhail Bakhtin, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott
Provokers: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Simone Weil

Jacobs later claims that one makes a vital error mistaking one roll for another. For example, he says of Rousseau the Provoker, "God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously." In thinking of this potential mix-up, one general, Rousseauian principle comes to mind.

Because he thought that everything was good the nearer it was to the "hand of the Maker", Rousseau generally left his children to be taught by nature itself. He once neglected, with one group of his children, to record their dates of birth or genders upon their birth. This led to all sorts of problems that he later detailed in a letter, saying that the oversight would kill him.

According to Kyle Strobel's reading of Jonathan Edwards and Puritan spirituality, there is a vital difference between Contemplation and meditation (31:07 min mark in podcast).

Meditation

A holding of one's attention on scripture and doctrine. "When their mind wandered they would wrestle with themselves, naming the truth." "Being watchful" of your heart.

Contemplation

Here he makes the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation.

a) Natural: Set mind and heart on an object of our attention and desire so that we can be one with it. b) Supernatural: Ps 27, Contemplate: "temple with" To be with God in his temple.

Here is what proves most particularly Puritan: Attending to God. If the heart wanders, bring it back to God. Set your mind on things above.

A second type of contemplation grows out of the quiet, solitude habit and into the practice of the presence of God.

Thomas à Kempis:

Gifts of nature are common to good and bad, but grace or love is the peculiar gift of Thine elect, and they that bear this mark are accounted worthy of eternal life. This grace is so excellent, that neither the gift of prophecy, nor the working of miracles, nor the understanding of deep mysteries, is of any worth without it. But neither faith, nor hope, nor any other virtue is acceptable to Thee without charity and grace.

Robert Farrar Capon:

I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over — until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother. Give us the Workers in the Vineyard, and we will concoct spurious lessons on The Duty of Contentment or The Moral Aspects of Labor Relations.

Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.

Today is the feast day of Isaac the Syrian. Here is one of his works included in a volume compiled by the poet Scott Cairns.

Love’s Purpose
by Saint Isaac of Nineveh

In love did He bring the world
into being, and in love
does He guide its difficult,
slow-seeming journey now
through the arc of time. In love will He
one day bring all the world to a wondrous,
transformed state, and utterly
in love will it be taken wholly up
into the great mystery of the One
who has performed these things — and all of this so that
in love absolutely will the course
and form and governance of all creation
at long last be comprised.

Rowan Williams:

We are used to plaintive cries that not enough students opt for scientific subjects, and related worries about the supposed drift of our culture towards an anti-scientific relativism or, ultimately, a post-truth mentality. But one of the things we have learnt in the past ten months is that we set ourselves up for profound confusion if we talk about “science” as a source of self-evidently clear and effective solutions, as if narratives and values played no role. Bland claims to be “following the science” have acquired an unhappily hollow sound.

[…]

What does it mean to “fail our children” in this broader context? It means backing away from the scale of change that we face, and from the job of resourcing young people to respond with intelligence, imagination and honesty. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there are a few simple restructurings that will achieve this. We need a courageous rethinking of our ingrained assumptions about education. We need to pay some critical and sympathetic attention to those despised and frequently attacked parallel worlds of the Montessori and Steiner systems. We need the issue of resources for the human spirit to be at the heart of educational vision – including craft, drama, sport, exposure to the raw natural world, community service. And anyone who thinks this is somehow in tension with responsible scientific training has not understood either sciences or humanities.

Love’s as Warm as Tears
C.S. Lewis

Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts–Infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.

C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.

Alan Jacobs:

So maybe a “general account” is not what is needed so much as equipment for acting wisely and lovingly — in a Christlike way — this day. A Franciscan-Daoist ethic for a surveillance-capitalist hate-media world. What that might look like is something I plan to think about a lot in the coming year.

I often think of surveillance capitalism as the Eye of Sauron. Maybe the needed equipment would look something like a fellowship. Franciscan-Daoist sounds to me like a hobbit and wizard ethic, earthy and ethereal.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

By Robert Southwell SJ, Martyr at 33

[...]

This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake.
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field;
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall,
The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound,
The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight;
Within his crib is surest ward,
This little babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

From Wendell Berry’s essay “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” (Via A. Jacob’s Article):

Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

AND

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, though, it comes down to seeing that many of us carry around a fantasy of “the uninterrupted life” that does nothing but make real life harder than it needs to be. In any case, the fantasy is usually an impossible one: my finitude means I definitely can’t spend as much time on my work and with my family as I’d like – due to maths – and this wouldn’t change were I magically to acquire the power to dictate how every hour of my day unfolded. C. S. Lewis, writing of course from a Christian perspective, summed things up lucidly:

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.

Advent Sunday
Christian Rossetti

BEHOLD, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye out
With lighted lamps and garlands round about
To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.
It may be at the midnight, black as pitch,
Earth shall cast up her poor, cast up her rich.
It may be at the crowing of the cock
Earth shall upheave her depth, uproot her rock.
For lo, the Bridegroom fetcheth home the Bride:
His Hands are Hands she knows, she knows His Side.
Like pure Rebekah at the appointed place,
Veiled, she unveils her face to meet His Face.
Like great Queen Esther in her triumphing,
She triumphs in the Presence of her King.
His Eyes are as a Dove’s, and she’s Dove-eyed;
He knows His lovely mirror, sister, Bride.
He speaks with Dove-voice of exceeding love,
And she with love-voice of an answering Dove.
Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go we out
With lamps ablaze and garlands round about
To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.

Tish Harrison Warren:

Prayer itself is a kind of work and it sends us into our work in the world.
For the Christian, the postures of prayer and work are interwoven: ora et labora, pray and work. We work as prayer and pray as work. And our prayer and our work transform each other.