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.

Looking ahead to my own sons baptism this coming Sunday, these words from Russel Moore brought me a chill of wonder:

When I was baptizing people every week in a traditional baptistery in a Southern Baptist church, I learned to repeat something I had heard from an old preacher in my tradition: to end the baptisms by turning to the congregation and saying, “And yet, there is room for more.”

“Room for more” sounds like leaven growing in a loaf, a non zero-sum game, an economy of abundance, the Kingdom of Heaven.

Biblical hermeneutics has traditionally been understood as the study of right principles for understanding the biblical text. “Understanding” may stop short at a theoretical and notional level, or it may advance via the assent and commitment of faith to become experiential through personal acquaintance with the God to whom the theories and notions refer. Theoretical understanding of Scripture requires of us no more than is called for to comprehend any ancient literature, that is, sufficient knowledge of the language and background and sufficient empathy with the different cultural context. But there is no experiential understanding of Scripture - no personal knowledge of the God to whom it points - without the Spirit’s illumination. Biblical hermeneutics studies the way in which both levels of understanding are attained.’

—J.I. Packer

Ivan Illich via L.M. Sacassas:

I would like to get … people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them … how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them. In other words, I’m interested in the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the sacramental tool structure of the world.

The latin phrase translates to something like “make haste, slowly.” Used as a motto for an Italian printing press during the Enlightenment and a coffee roaster in 21st century Austin,TX, the phrase features in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

This imagined map of Robin Sloan’s favorite email newsletters inspires me. He uses his sizzling imagination to lift up others so well. He tells stories in everything he does. He sees the gritty reality of the internet with one eye and the croaking garden of a bright other world with the other. I’m thankful for his Kubo-like vision.

He also gave me some great insight into maybe my favorite song of 2019, “Don’t Take The Money.”

Carl Truman mentioned the Benedict Option in a podcast interview I heard recently. It led me to see what he’s written on the subject. I found a helpful shortlist Truman made after hearing a talk that Rod Dreher gave on the topic. I want to highlight the one point I heard mentioned on the podcast but here is the whole list:

• Conventional politics will not save us. Nota bene: This is not the same as saying that political engagement must cease. It is simply a claim about the limited expectations we should have regarding political engagement, particularly at the national level.
• The church is not the world. As Rod merely agrees with Jesus on this point, it should not be too controversial.
• Christians must retrieve their own traditions as the fundamental sources of their identities. Again, with the Apostle Paul on his side here, Rod is hardly breaking dangerous new ground.
• Christians must prioritize the local community as their sphere of action. Once more, nota bene: This is not, repeat not, the same as saying that Christians should head for the hills. It is simply to say that they should be far more concerned for what is happening in their neighborhood than on Capitol Hill.
• What we face is not a struggle within a culture but, strictly speaking, a clash of alternative cultures. This is where the language of the end of the culture war needs to be understood correctly. It is not that we are to surrender to the dominant culture. It is rather that we are to model an alternative culture. And we are to do so first in our local communities.

I couldn’t help but think that Ivan Illich had the same sort of Christian resoponse in mind when he made the case that we should take on the culture war with friendship and hospitality (A theme I mention here).

In an article about the poetry of doubt and faith, Christian Wiman brings together Christology with interpretation. The way I read Wiman’s take on John 8, he seems to say that the two natures of Jesus the Christ source and pattern the mind’s conception of being and meaning. In other words, two seperate ways of encountering life are, in Christ, one thing. Does that mean, in some sense, the hermeneutical key of meaning and being is the mystery of the hypostatic union?

Being and meaning: two ways in which the mind relates to – or, in the case of the former, participates in, even fuses with – life. Christ and Jesus: two names that are the source and pattern for that way of relation. Christ is Being itself. Jesus is one specific meaning that Being acquired at one specific date in history (and forever after). And they – being and meaning, Christ and Jesus – are one thing.

In the same article, the theme of faith and poetry touches on a question I’ve been considering. How are poems like prayer? Or said another way, what about prayer fits so well to poetry? Wiman gives a response by sharing a poem by the Australian poet Les Murray. I’ll include it here

Poetry and Religion

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds—
crested pigeon, rosella parrot—
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Christine Smallwood via James K.A Smith in Image Journal:

“It’s hard to know when something ends,” Dorothy says late in the novel. But maybe this isn’t just because of our own myopic inability to recognize the end; maybe it’s because, with kairos hovering over everything, you never know when an ending isn’t the end. When the dead are raised, not even death is the end. The question isn’t “What time is it?” but “Which time is it?” The absolute is available to everyone in every age. That means any blip of chronos holds the possibility of being kairos, a moment pregnant with possibility. As Daniel Weidner has said, speaking about the theologian Paul Tillich, kairos means “every moment might be the small gate through which the messiah will enter.” It might even mean that those moments of serendipity aren’t random coincidences but gifts, a sign that someone is whispering just to you.

Leafing thru this list of peotry resources from poet Christian Wiman, I found a great article on T.S. Eliot by former archbishop Rowan Williams.

From Rowan Williams (Poetic stanzas Eliot’s):

Where, then, is healing? Here Eliot is at his most stark: there is no escape, except into fantasy. There is only a penetrating further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death, and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion, and living without illusion is the first step to salvation. “Only through time time is conquered.” And here the starkness gives way to gospel. If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and women, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it.

        The wounded surgeon plies the steel

        That questions the distempered part;

        Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

        The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

        Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all that we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernable meaning or pattern, but into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organize the chaos of the world in systems and mythologies, and realize that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way in which love can begin. Only if we are honest about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we can take into ourselves to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man.

        The dripping blood our only drink,

        The bloody flesh our only food.

Last week, about this time, I set off for my maiden voyage to Laity Lodge. There, I met some great people and heard some wise words on the Lord’s Prayer from Wesley Hill and Alan Jacobs. For Jacobs, wise words means poetry. He shared what he called two short sermons and three poems: George Herbert’s “Prayer,” Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us…,” and Andrew Hudgins “Praying Drunk.”

In the course of his talk, Alan Jacobs kept calling the poems prayers. I think the connection is more than just a slip of the tongue. The poem and prayer that’s stuck with me most is the last line of “Praying Drunk,” “Remember me.”

BY CZESLAW MILOSZ

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

Awe is the feeling we have when we encounter the monumental or immeasurable. We experience a sudden shrinking of the self, yet a rapid expansion of the soul.
—Nick Cave

The common ground between awe and love would seem to be 'a sudden shrinking of the self,' 'the way one looks at distant things.' When we love, we find the monumental and immeasurable. When we wonder, we learn to see in a way that heals the heart without knowing it.

There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.

– Simone Weil

I first heard these bits of C.S. Lewis brought together in a talk by the poet Rev Malcolm Guite. I've often since thought that they help explain the prayer from Psalm 86:11:

Teach me Your way, O Lord, that I will walk in Your truth; bind my heart to fear Your name.

From Surprised by Joy:¹

The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-sided sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Reason²
BY C.S. LEWIS³

Set on the soul's acropolis the reason stands
A virgin, arm'd, commercing with celestial light,
And he who sins against her has defiled his own
Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;
So clear is reason. But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded and her pains are long, and her delight.
Tempt not Athene. Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.
Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make imagination's dim exploring touch
Ever report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly say, that I B E L I E V E.

[Dadid Foster] Wallace missed what [C.S.] Lewis missed in observing his pupil Betjeman: Irony is not always and everywhere snark; sometimes it’s a painful awareness of our own absurdity, an awareness painful enough that it’s best to deflect it through humor.

—Alan Jacobs

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David.
His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before me.
It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven.

—from Psalm 89

I love thinking of the moon as a faithful witness. She’s always there. Sometimes during the day, despite light pollution, even when I don’t pay attention, she shines.

Abide means sickness and sarcoma, waves
at your chin and satan’s grin
won’t swallow. Engulfed in saline
the buoyant body bobs
in limbo. Only in dream
can I breathe water but here
I wake where
fear stays.

I was introduced to Julia over at Narrative RX through the CPE residency. About a month ago, I attended one of their, online, close reading workshops. This poem came as the result of a free writing exercise. I like the idea of defining a word poetically, which is an idea I stole from Christian Wiman’s poem “Every Riven Thing.”

I stumbled on an Andy Anderson skate video on Chris Hannah’s blog. Andy lives the “dirtbag” lifestyle of a skater and makes a wonderful observation on what it means to rest (emphasis mine):

…There’s a skill to relaxing, finding peace…It’s funny how relaxing is so tied into being lazy because it doesn’t neccesarily mean you’re being lazy. Part of my work is relaxing. Becasue relaxing is taking control of yourself¹ and accepting that you’re not controlling anything else.

Hearing Anderson talk about the the work of relaxing, I couldn’t help but think of what it means to stop…that is “sabbath.” Then, when he went on to talk about control and “accepting that you’re not controlling anything else,” something occured to me. “Control and surrender” is a sabbatic balance.

Brian Eno, Austin Kleon, and Alan Jacobs²—all speak of the creative process flourishing via the slow growth of control and surrender. Here’s Eno:

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part. I want to rethink surrender as an active verb…It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.

At another point, Eno pictures surrender as a dynamic ship flexible enough to move through rough waters without breaking. This dynamism of “surrender as an active verb” ripens what it means to stop and rest. Without control, surrender would acquiesce to abstraction stripped of it’s particularity. Without surrender, control would absolutize into tyranny.

Shabbat begets the weaving of shalom. Control and surrender is the sabbath balance. Let’s re-create and weave peace bringing love its due worth.

Today, I want the framework of my consumptive desires visible. I want to denaturalize the compulsion to soothe myself through consumption — make it strange and ridiculous. I want to continually name the script in my head and, in so doing, chip away at its power over me. I want to do all of this without shaming myself or others, because it takes years to unlearn a learned behavior this invasive, this robust. The problem isn’t buying shit, at least not exactly. It’s misidentifying, again and again, the source and character of our sadness.

This from Anne Helen Petersen’s Cultre Study describes the individual, existential game each of us must play with our needs and desires. It connected with something else I heard from Michael Sacasas on The Outsider Theory podcast. He says that we would be well served to “Reconfigure what we think we need.” He says that the historian Ivan Illich worked to catalog a history of needs and pinned a critique on modern institutions generation of neediness that “generates a demand for themselves.” Illich’s books Deschoolong Society and Medical Nemesis offer this perspective on generated needs in education and healthcare. His human-scale countermeasure for how to subvert the modern, neediness project is friendship and hospitality.

Anne Helen Petersen recognized her need for what she names as “community” when she was worn down from over work, travel, and found herself with the impulse to medicate with consumption of goods. She vectors toward a similar cure. I would make a distinction between “community” in general and frienships constituted of hospitality. For this distiction I will channel Illich. Hospitality, he says, is “A free cration between two people.”

Illich arrives at this defenition by his study of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. In his study, he comes back to the importance of the question that initiates Jesus’ telling of the story, “Who is my neighbor?” He explains the grammatical-historical context of the parable and the distinct point that Jesus is making.

This doctrine about the neighbor, which Jesus proposes, is utterly destructive of ordinary decency, of what had, until then, been understood as ethical behavior… In antiquity, hospitable behavior, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawn around those to whom I can behave in this way. The Greeks recognized a duty of hospitality towards xenoi, strangers who spoke a Hellenic language, but not towards barbaroi. Jesus taught the Pharisees that the relationship which he had come to announce to them as most completely human is not one that is expected, required, or owed. It can only be a free creation between two people, and one which cannot happen unless something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence. ¹

It seems to me that “The source and character of our sadness” that AHP invokes in her astute observation of modern human, consuptive habits, might have something to do with our longing to host in the way that costs us something. What might be more unsettling is the thought that our own hospitality finds its seat at the table of the self-sacraficial love feast God has spread in the manumition from sin and death, the resurrection feast. “…Something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence.”

In order that a new asceticism of reading may come to flower, we must first recognize that the bookish “classical” reading of the last 450 years is only one among several ways of using alphabetical techniques…I have not written this book to make a learned contribution. I wrote it to offer a guide to a vantage point in the past from which I have gained new insights into the present. No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship. They are here to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia—rocks, fauna, and flora—which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others. They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading.

—Illich, Ivan. In the vineyard of the text : a commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (p3 and 5).

I wish more folks, including myself, thought of footnotes this way!

1. Learning the rhythm of “action, reflection, action.”

2. Working on how to do cold-call ministry by walking up to a stranger and inviting them to talk about God and their emotions with God thru their emotions.

3. The joy and frustration of working in a residency and interdisciplinary team of which I must see myself as a vital member, equipped with agency to change what I don’t like about the system.

4. I’ve learned how to sleep while on call after more than a couple nights spent staring at the ceiling, waiting for my phone to ring.

5. Attending transitions in care and patient deaths and discovering that there are no right words for the moment. When any words do come that aren’t terrible, they squirm, wild and fresh, from the silence and tears shared with those in grief.

6. The new practice of remembering a highlight or something I did well for the day. I’ve integrated this practice into the vocabulary I know from Ignatian spirituality: consolation and desolation.

7. Self-compassion (a Loving, Connected Presence) is a lifelong practice encouraged by scripture. How can I love my neighbor as myself if I don’t account for God’s love given to me, in Christ.

8. Discovering that conversation is prayer wherein I work to overhear and help others overhear what we say out loud.

“In a world without beauty––even if people dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it––in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: I Seeing the Form (Ignatius Press, p. 19).

I found the above quoted in an article by Hal Willis that details the contribution philospher, Roger Scruton made to the reaffirmation of beuaty as a vital componnent of the transcendentals. Willis makes the case that beauty is the thing that gives us wings to transcend the self for a moment, long enough to apprehend the true and the good. As a consequence of beauty’s flight, one is able to make contact with the real and what Scruton called conservatism: “love what is actual.” Beauty begins the journey of “un-selfing” (Iris Murdoch). Beauty raises one up long enough to love the good, true, and the beautiful that brought you.

Thinking of beauty in this way reminds me of something I, recently, heard Marilynne Robinson say in a conversation she had with Cherie Harder of The Trinity Forum. I’ll quote it here:

Cherie Harder: So much of what is beautiful does depend on our perception. You have probably one of your most beloved characters, John Ames, say that “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a willingness to see.” You’ve said similar things, in your own voice as well as your character’s voice, which I am betting evoke no small amount of wistfulness in many of your friends, fans, and readers who would deeply like to see the same luminous beauty that you do. How does one learn to see?

Marilynne Robinson: By looking, basically. I consider the primary privilege of being a human being as a universal privilege of being able to watch light fall on things, watch vegetation live in the world in the complicated ways that it does. The shimmer, the effulgence, all these things, are simply there to be seen whether or not people choose to look at them—whether they relegate too many things to the category of ordinary or meaningless. That’s the original choice. But if you are interested in the nature of the experience of life on this planet, then very quickly all sorts of things begin to present themselves to you as mysteriously beautiful. Discovered beauty: no rarification or falsification, but the thing itself.

“I consider the primary privilege of being a human being as a universal privilege of being able to watch light fall on things…” What a simple and profound account of what it means to be human!

Also…I plan to make some time to watch a documentary with Roger Scruton on “Why Beauty Matters.” Maybe I’ll report back on that.

So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty—describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the things around you, the images from your dreams, the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2558.

Quoted in this video, “Writing as Spiritual Practice: A Conversation with Rev. James Martin, S.J.” Linked from ImageUpdate

I look forward to reading J Todd Billings’ recent book, The End of the Christian Life📚. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying the podcast he’s produced interviewing friends he met while writing the book.

In particular, I found Billings’ interview with Thomas Lynch on the human body refreshingly honest. Their conversation dignified the the dead and the work of those who oversee the last journey of this life. Lynch speaks of his work as an undertaker with genuine gratitude and poetic insight. He sees the beauty of the body, even in death.

In my work as a hospital chaplain, I’ve accompanied families of the dying. I think Lynch has it right when he says that, in those moments, the mundane is interrupted by mortality. Even the moment of death happens in-between breaths. There is a before and after death. Both spaces require their own sort of paying attention. Both are told as stories.

This theme of death and dying came home to me last week when I made the decision to put my dog to sleep, after he suffered sudden, internal bleeding. My pup, Moses was part of our family. My wife and I adopted him from the shelter and he moved around the country with us. His daily companionship and capacity to be present offered grace and peace. As one of God’s beloved creatures, he served us well and has his place in kingdom come, kept by God. I’ll miss you, Mosey.

We sat outside at church this morning with a Live Oak blocking our view of the preacher. I kept thinking of this poem I read from Plough’s recent collection of Easter Poems.

I See His Blood

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.

Joseph Plunkett

Does he bear not only his future pain but the wounds, words, deeds, and things of all, for all time: the splitting of the atom, the finding of fire, the exploding of the bomb, the child pinned under the Pinto, the dog sunk in a black pond, the smoke rising over the vain city, the first split cell, mutation of fish, arrow into beast, tufts of gun smoke, sunspots on a high window, gallons of cold coffee? Does he bear it all, Christ, churning within him, every war that ever was or ever will be, dancing in his molecules so that it is just challenging to be around this man? Does Christ carry the you of two thousand years away, you and all your pretty madness, the girl you left behind, the bad movies, the failed exams, the love child, the weird quiet relief of cutting the lawn, the crushed cathedral, the mushroom and the cloud and the way a snake turns everything around it into sacred fear? Does he bear that, him down on the end of your bench? […] The disease, love, joy, tender flesh in a battlefield; a carjacking, a first kiss, a last breath. Does he carry these things, he who became sin?

—Joe Hoover, SJ O Death, Where is Thy Sting? A Meditation on Suffering

“The women who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the that Saturday they rested according to the commandment.”

St. Luke 23:55—56

“Moral advance carries with it intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialised daring of spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom and love…Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”

Iris Murdoch (1970/2013) The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, p. 93.

Laity Lodge recently shared a newsletter featuring the ancient Japanese calendar of 72 seasons. Each lasting about 5 days, the 72 mark lived changes with attuned awareness and (as the website details) “the names of each season beautifully depict the tiny, delicate changes in nature that occur around us, year in year out.”

I’ve decided to call this 5-day-season in Austin, TX “The peach tree flowered despite some chill and the xmas lights are still up.”

Today in 1939, William Butler Yeats dies.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.