I want to revisit Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. After sharing a Wendell Berry poem written in response to the painting, I again came across the image in Benjamin Myers’ book, Christ the Stranger: The theology of Rowan Williams. In Christ the Stranger, the fifteenth century work helps introduce the intellectual history of the former archbishop of Canterbury. Myers notes that the “mute eloquence” of visual theology, like frescos and icons, serves as “a leitmotif” in Williams’ poetry.

And so, it turns out, there exists at least two poems in response to this masturful image, by at least two wise and thoughtful contemporary thinkers in Berry and Williams. An embarrassment of riches! What kind of poetry blog would this be if I did not let poetry speak for itself and give the last word. Here now is Rowan Willams poem, “Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro.”

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulders sags. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like
drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Blogging should sound like talking to myself. But it’s not journaling becasue, while talking to myself, I’m also talking to you. The most “virtuous” (because I’m a virtue ethicist of my own behavior) thing I can do is help you, others, pay attention…to my own words, which I hope hold value for their thoughtfulness and to the Word of God. It’s what the poet, G.M. Hopkins invites himself and others to do: pay attention to the Kingfisher and the dragonfly, consider what they say. “Pay attnetion to what you pay attention to,” says, Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

Well, If you’ve found yourslef here, in my clouster of the internet, you might have noticed…I pay attention to poetry. Why is that? I grew up with my mom reading it aloud. I studied it in university. etc (on my past experience). Most of all—and this is thanks to re-reading Hopkins just now— I hear Christ “lovely in [voice] not his.” I swim upstream of poets to the scripture they read. I remember God. Usually in by body. Today, it was with tears while reading Hopkins aloud. I get that I’m weird for crying at poetry, I accept it and you’re free to as well.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

I'm headed to the beach this weekend!

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.

— Carl Jung via: Swissmiss

This Jung quote grabbed my attention for its Emersonian charm and near narration of what I hope this weekend to be. On second reading, I found myself remolding some of the pastoral platitudes. At the risk of over-spiritualizing, here are my thoughts:

When one enters a dream, more than one's self is present. We enter the unconscious in the compony of the invisible. There, not all are benevolent. Yet, when we humble ourself to the good, true, and beautiful one, we bath in the sea, walk in the calming compony of the woods and are consequently washed, calmed, and put right, in the compony of The Man of Sorrows. In him, we get clean. In him, we touch nature from the inside.

Prayer is the portal.

This morning a listened to a podcast discussion on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar that sadly seems to be inactive. Despite truncated production, the one episode that was published gave an invigorating introduction to Balthasar’s book Christian Meditation. From which, the hosts highlight VB’s theology of meditation, IN Christ. I have two takeaway thoughts and one takeaway prayer:

1. Thomas Torrance’s The Mediation of Chirst might make a great reading companion to VB’s Chirstian Meditation for their mutual, high christology. Torrance holds a reformed catholic view of the atonement that leaves much to mystery, while staying firmly trinitarian in upholding the hypostatic union. Jesus the Christ is cosmically inclusive by way of his exclusice mediation on the cross. In a similar way, VB maintains the particular mediation by the person of Christ, in prayer. By Christ’s mediation, one does not empty the mind in order to incite God to come near. Rather, Jesus prays for us as the incited action of God, particularly when he came near in space and time to pray for us in death (Lord, Jesus, pray for me now and in the hour of my death). “Why am I forsaken,” can only be prayed by Christ on his cross.

   VB and Torrance might hug or, at least shake hands, in saying: even now, the risen, slain-Lamb is behind the veil, praying to his father, in the love of the Spirit, for his people.

2. Prayer is inviting one’s soul into the presence of Chirst and finding one’s home in the triune God. AND Prayer is kneeling, at the trough of our sin, sadness, misery, and self-love, in/with Christ, long enough to find satisfaction in a father already running to meet us—coming to our senses…in the words of George Herbert, “Something understood.”

Our Father, in whom we surrender our perceived control, your self-revelation is heavy with value. Please bring your crowned king to rule, here and now, like it is there and always, in heaven. Give us grace enough for our next breath and decision, in remembrance of you. Please wash us with the clensing blood of your son, Jesus, as we wash others with the water of your word. Don’t steer us into the songs of the Sirens but sail us away from the rocks into the open sea of your love. Because we journey, fight, and serve your purpose, by your strength, and for your praise. Amen