Reflection for May 6, 2012

“I saw new heavens and a new earth”

            When someone you love dies suddenly, the world seems so empty.  Work, supper, errands, bills, plans - everything seems so irrelevant.  Your mind and heart are elsewhere.  The landscape as you drive to work now looks strange; like the receding panorama you see from the rear platform of a moving train, a panorama rapidly being taken over by the past tense.  It’s a world that you feel you have somehow left behind – of little interest anymore.

            I wouldn’t call it simply a state of depression.  There is something positive or curious about it.  I think you begin to feel distant from your everyday surroundings because the death of the one you love has made you suddenly more conscious of other dimensions you were till then too preoccupied to notice.  It’s like a wake up call. Caught up in this merely three dimensional world; caught up in the daily melodrama of the workplace, in the ever changing, never changing politics of “current events”; performing the several roles of breadwinner or housewife or entrepreneur or bureaucrat or “life of the party”; reciting the lines expected of us - it’s no wonder we assume that this theatre of our own preoccupations is the only world there is.

           

            And then someone like my young son suddenly departs (4/28/93) and you experience grief yes, but also what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes in a poem called “Death Experienced”.  “The world is full of roles we act,” he says:

                        But when you went, a streak of reality

                        broke in upon this stage through that fissure

                        where you left: green of real green,

                        real sunshine, real forest.

                        We go on acting.  Fearful and reciting

                        things difficult to learn and now and then

                        raising gestures; but your existence,

                        withdrawn from us and taken from our play,

                        Can sometimes come over us, like a knowledge

                        of that reality settling in,

                        so that for a while we act life

                        transported, not thinking of applause.

            No - that initial sense of emptiness or distraction we feel when someone we love suddenly departs this life cannot be simply called depression.  It can be the commencement of an awareness of a realm so real, so wonderful, so durable that it leaves us – as it were - standing upon our every day stage immersed in the descending light, colors,  pattern and theology of the rose window of some grand cathedral.

                        I am so grateful to a dear friend for giving me this poem – unwittingly - on the second anniversary of the very hour I received a call that my son was dead.

Reflection for April 29, 2012

You must change your life

            It has been said that poems or paintings or any worthwhile work of art should not be seen simply as objects of pleasure – things to be admired, acquired.  They should not be seen as something passive. Rather, such things should be seen as active, as if they impose on us a moral obligation to change our lives; they reach into our passivity and call us forth to become as beautiful as they are.  Take for example Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Candle Indoors”, which opens with:  Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by. / I muse at how its being puts blissful back / With yellowy moisture mild night's blear-all black.

            Hopkins is charmed by the glow coming out of an evening dwelling – that makes the night somehow hopeful.  But in his second stanza he shifts from admiring that candle indoors to sensing it is imposing upon him a moral obligation to become a luminous person; to trim his own lamp, so that others might draw hope from his own candle indoors even as those evening suburban homes aglow which I passed on my solitary walks when I was 10 years old were saying to me, “You have a moral obligation not to despair over the dysfunction of your own home; you have an obligation to save your soul by becoming yourself a candle indoors whence others may derive a moral obligation to have faith, to make of this otherwise dark world  a home alight with warmth.” 

            Of course, I didn’t think of moral obligations when I was 10 years old.  It takes time to catch the voice, the face, the moral imperative that’s confronting us in every “candle indoors”, in every poem, painting, sonata, or biblical episode we encounter. A good example of the gradual nature of spiritual awakening is the case of Mary Magdalene as she sadly faces life on Easter morning as nothing but an empty tomb. But then she sees two angels in white sitting there, asking, “Why are you weeping?”  Then next, she sees a gardener asking her, “Why are you weeping?”  And only then does the apparent gardener get personal, no longer asking questions but simply and intimately saying, “Mary!”

            That’s the way it is with life.  At 10 years of age I pass by those warmly lit dwellings and they awaken in me only a desire for a home that’s more than a stop on a suburban trolley line.  Then, thanks to Hopkins, I later realize those warm domiciles were signaling to me what I myself   must become – a beacon in a world gone dark.  Those angels, that gardener, those suburban dwellings, Hopkins’ poem, every sonata, or vase of flowers, or the evening star, or church interior, or Eucharist lays a moral obligation on you and me to trust that each of us is the most important person in the world.  And over time we should come to realize that the voice addressing us personally (like Mary) out every sonata or Iris or novel or sanctuary or out of every chalice or face we meet is none other than that of the divine Poet out of whose very being came the whole world as “home”, like a rose arbor cascading with galaxies – intent on making you and me his latest poem.