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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

—George Herbert

Thanks to poet Malcolm Guite for mentioning this poem during a conversation hosted by the Trinity Forum.

Thank you, Jenzia Burgos, for the incredible resource of a Black Music History Library. Today, I read Greg Tate’s review of Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme. The article includes this block quote describing how Coltrane’s album begins:

Elvin Jones leans to his left and, striking a Chinese gong, opens the album with an ethereal, exotic splash. “It’s the signal of something different,” remarks [Alice and John Coltrane’s son] Ravi. “You don’t hear that instrument anywhere else on any other John Coltrane recording.” … In one stroke, the hammered metal’s distinctive shimmer clears the air of standard jazz practice… . Coltrane enters with a brief fanfare. Whether blown from minarets or at military barracks, as a call to prayer or to arms, it’s a time-honored device with a timeless function …

Now I’m gonna go listen to “Psalm” and read Coltrane’s liner-notes poem. Salud!

Nick Cave is batting 1,000 on his last few Red Hand Files newsletters. I shared a highlight from the last issue regarding writers block. This week, he connected the principle and practice of "mercy" to the problem with cancel culture. He wrote:

Mercy allows us the ability to engage openly in free-ranging conversation — an expansion of collective discovery toward a common good. If mercy is our guide we have a safety net of mutual consideration, and we can, to quote Oscar Wilde, “play gracefully with ideas.”

...It is a value we must nurture and aspire to. Tolerance allows the spirit of enquiry the confidence to roam freely, to make mistakes, to self-correct, to be bold, to dare to doubt and in the process to chance upon new and more advanced ideas. Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humorless.

The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. "Bearing with" the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.

Ethicist and Church Historian, Walter Brueggemann makes the case that the most fundamental, human enemy of mercy is "the pattern of self-preoccupation." Krista Tippett interviewed Brueggemann some time ago on the podcast "On Being" and asked him, as Nick Cave was asked, to define "Mercy." Here's Brueggemann:

You may know that the Hebrew word for — Phyllis Trible has taught us that the Hebrew word for mercy is the word for womb with different vowel points. So mercy, she’s suggested, is womb-like mother love. It is the capacity of a mother to totally give one’s self over to the need and reality and identity of the child. And mutatis mutandis (translation: "things being changed that have to be changed"), then, mercy is the capacity to give one’s self away for the sake of the neighborhood.

Now, none of us do that completely. But it makes a difference if the quality of social transactions have to do with the willingness to give one’s self away for the sake of the other, rather than the need to always be drawing all of the resources to myself for my own well-being. It is this kind of generous connectedness to others. And then I think our task is to see how that translates into policy. Now we’re having huge political storms about whether our policies ought to reflect that kind of generosity to people other than us and people who are not as well-off as we are, or whatever.

I think that a community or a society, finally, cannot live without the quality of mercy. The problem for us is, what will initiate that? What will break the pattern of self-preoccupation enough to notice that the others are out there and that we are attached to them?

"Others are out there" means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real." Love initiates and invites mercy

Here are a few of John Coltrane’s words from “A Love Supreme” liner notes:

This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say “THANK YOU GOD” through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.

Like a good jazz fan (in the mode of a good jazz musician), Tim Keller stole and used the same for the epigraph to his book. The “THANK YOU GOD” in all caps has, lately, been reminding me that the best attitude is gratitude.