Reflection for November 20th, 2011

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility. Wallace Stevens 1942

In the days before television the trends of current events were presented to the public at the movie theater in a 20 to 30 minute documentary called The March of Time. The title must have been taken from that old saying, “Time marches on.” And so it does until whatever events were shown in that documentary have long since been swallowed up by time – indeed, even Time Magazine is getting slimmer and slimmer and may one day disappear like the people and events narrated in its contents.

You will hear Time’s relentless pace tolled out every day on our obituary pages – as in John Donne’s famous line: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And this relentlessness, this seeming inevitability of change, nothing holding firm, tends to get people down – so much so that in his Sonnet 65 Shakespeare can speak of Time as a kind of raging force which neither brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor . . . sea can withstand. And if that be the case, he asks, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower? / . . . how shall summer’s honey breath hold out / against the wrackful siege of battering days, / When rocks impregnable are not so stout / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

And yet thanks to our Christian heritage, we defy Time’s rage even as St. Paul defies it in today’s second reading where he says of the risen Christ: For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. As Christians we believe that time need no longer be synonymous with death but experienced as a crescendo, as an overture to our living forever – somehow! And as such, each day becomes – no longer a roadblock – but a gateway to wider horizons. Time is redeemed. Indeed, if we are true Christians, really moved from the depths of our Scripture, we should confront the so-called rage of Time with a rage of our own. Or as the poet Wallace Stevens has written, we must confront the violence of meaningless Time with our own violence from within – which he defines as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality”. Translate “imagination” as creative faith, hope and love.

And so to Shakespeare’s complaint how with this rage of time can beauty hold a plea Stevens looks to art, poetry, and I might add the beauty of today’s Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Specifically Stevens refers us to the rage evident in the watercolors of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose flowers “make no pretence to fragility. They shout, explode all over the picture space and generally oppose the rage of the world with such a rage of form and color as no flower in nature or pigment has done since Van Gogh.” (Look up Epstein’s flower images on Google.com.)

As Christians we are often encouraged to be gentle, sweet, calm, pious amid the storms of life. But maybe rage should be the better expression of what we believe (as it was in subtle ways in the writings of Flannery O’Connor). Like Christ (whom we honor as so much more noble than monarchs of old, whose noble rage was shown when he chased the money changers from the Temple) we ourselves should live nobly, defiantly in the face of all that would reduce us to timid souls, cringing within an ominous universe. We should affirm life and beauty, stand up to all that has made of Time a dead end against which beauty cannot hold a plea, being so fragile. But what was Christ raised upon the cross but someone fragile – and yet he rose again as someone of whom the Book of Revelation says: His eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. Like an Epstein dahlia?

Reflection for November 13th, 2011

“I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.” Matthew 13:35

I never did enjoy John Fowles’ novel: The French Lieutenant’s Woman. You follow the story looking forward to its conclusion and what happens? Fowles offers us a choice of three endings: 1. the hero marries his fiancée and not “the other woman” and the marriage falls flat; 2. the hero drops his fiancée and goes for “the other woman” who then takes off and disappears; 3. the hero finds “the other woman” again but things turn sour, so off he goes to America.

As passive readers we don’t like to have to choose between such alternatives and especially when each leaves one hanging! We expect the author to finish the job. We feel he owes us an ending without our having to work at it. We expect stories to end in a standard pattern - with the good guys winning and the bad guys losing as exemplified in last week’s parable of the ten virgins and this week’s parable of the talents.

Both live up to what we expect of a story. In the one the five wise virgins retain a supply of oil for their lamps and gain access to the wedding feast while the other five, foolish enough to have no reserve, end up outside. In the other, those who increased their talents are promoted while the fellow who buried his ends up gnashing his teeth. Nicely symmetrical, wisdom rewarded, stupidity punished!

But then I wonder! Are we to read these parables passively or does Jesus (and the Church) challenge us to come up with alternative endings to each, even as John Fowles does for his story? I mean, may we not rewrite the parable of the ten virgins so that we, as the wise virgins, share whatever surplus of oil, of luminosity we have with those who for whatever reason have exhausted their fervor, their capacity to brighten the world around them with faith, hope and love? Must those whose souls are empty have doors shut in their faces, never to share in the wedding feast of the Eucharist?

Or to switch to the parable of the talents – must it end with the poor fellow who buried his talent left to wail and grind his teeth in an anguish of crippled self-esteem? I mean, why can’t we change that, to intervene, to say to him, “We know that you are an anxious fellow when it comes to responsibility; that you impose on your master a stern visage even though he has already shown you confidence enough to bestow upon you a worth that’s meant to grow. So snap out of it! Step out of your intimidation; trust that whatever spiritual initiatives you may undertake will widen and deepen your experience of life. So here! We now give you two talents, as evidence of our faith in you and in the Holy Spirit to inspire you. Try again!”

I mean, may we not say that Jesus, having closed these two parables within the standard endings we expect, only did so to challenge us to rewrite their endings in ways that correspond to the behavior he describes in his Sermon on the Mount and to the way he himself behaves with people who are lame, paralyzed, immobilized, foolish, hesitant - mercifully?

Certainly, as far as our own lives are concerned, these parables are presented to us at our liturgies to encourage us to change the ending of our own stories. To encourage us to acquire a surplus of warmth and light to share with others; to be cognizant of the worth God has already bestowed on us and ever ready to multiply that worth by the graciousness we show to others.

Reflection for November 6th, 2011

“It is a good and holy thing to think of the dead rising again.”

“I never saw color as this year; the trees are like lamps, with the light coming from within.” So thought Cleotha Powers - in Paul Horgan’s story “The Peach Stone” - about the passing of peach orchards as she along with her husband began the long drive from their ranch amid the tumbleweed of New Mexico to transport the body of their two year old daughter (contained in a sandpapered wooden box) to the family burial plot in Cleotha’s girlhood town of Weed. The orchards reminded her also of how as a girl she used to catch up the peach petals by the handful, crush them and wrap them in a handkerchief to place in her bosom so that she might smell like peach blossoms – and of how her girlfriends used to say that if you held a peach stone in your hand long enough, it would sprout. But then no one wanted to hold a peach stone that long to find out and so they would laugh about it. But Cleotha believed the saying – and she especially believed it now in her bereavement.

Indeed, ever since she woke up that morning a spell had come over her. She had done all her weeping the night before. And now she never wanted to merely look at anything anymore; she wanted to see, to watch for any signals of something grand and eternal within the ordinary contours of reality – so much so that instead of relaxing for the journey ahead she felt herself leaning forward in the back seat – reaching with her eyes beyond the windshield - singling out things like this unusual beauty of the peach orchard. Or look - that dead tree! But still there’s that little swarm of green leaves on its top branch. And what’s that dazzling light on the road – like a ball of diamond light which danced and quivered so far ahead? Could it be a daytime star, sent to guide them? That it might only be sunlight reflected off the metal of an oil truck made no sense to her because, as I have said, Cleotha was trying to see! She wanted to catch a glimpse of where her daughter, whose inert form lay beside her, had gone.

And hasn’t that been the question that has preoccupied us ever since the dawn of our species? Our appetite for life and love, our insatiable curiosity bridles at the thought of our being ultimately and forever confined within a space of six feet by two. We want to know! And it was this need to know that now possessed Cleotha. Or to put it theologically, she was operating now out of faith and hope – that pair of eyes with which sorrow and love endows us. And so the most consoling thing she finally saw, once she and her relatives and friends knelt by the burial plot halfway up Schoolhouse Hill, was a boy coming down the hill from the school. He was framed in sunlight and she couldn’t help but notice his wonder at the people kneeling mournfully around a grave. So innocent of death, discretely coming down the hill shying away from the mystery and yet large eyed with a hunger to know in ways his schoolhouse will not teach him. And Cleotha found in his respectful curiosity confirmation of her own and all humanity’s need to know, to envision that “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns” that she cried out, “I believe, I believe” and she said it “as if she were holding the peach stone of her eager childhood in her woman’s hand.”

I’ve been holding a peach stone in my closed fist for 18 years now. And I’ve been leaning forward, not just looking but trying to see amid the unfolding wonders of Autumn signals of an even greater glory to come – somewhere beyond the windshield of my mind. And what I’m precisely looking for is the gradually unfolding presence of the son I knew, who I hope has had the patience to wait for me upon whatever path he has been traveling since his death, so that together we may continue what – so many years ago – was just beginning to be fun.

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