Poetics of Prayer

Tessa Carman (on Rowan Williamses book Looking East in Winter):

To recover wholeness means both seeing aright and desiring aright. This includes seeing the material world, creation itself, “as communicating the intelligence and generosity of the creator.” For the self to be whole, notes Williams, is not to be “self-actualized” or to be metaphysically self-sufficient in the modern idea of autonomy, but rather for each human self to “move in the mode for which it was created … in alignment with the purpose of God, habitually echoing in finite form the infinite ‘desire’ of God for God, of love for love.”

I’m posting this mashup video as an example of what Jeremy Begbie calls “hyper hearing.” My beloved wife was spinning Zeppelin’s first album, when she heard a Green Day song in the progression under “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” So, I gave it a quick Google.

It must be that the church is in Eastertide that I keep thinking about New Creation. I added a tag for it some time ago and just today posted a favorite Robert Jenson quote. To go along with that, I just skimmed this article that details Makoto Fujimura’s gaze toward New Creation in his recent book Art + Faith.

I think, almost daily, of this passage from Robert Jenson:

The truly necessary qualification is not that the City’s streets will not be paved with real gold, but that gold as we know it is not real gold, such as the City will be paved with. What is the matter with gold anyway? Will goldsmiths who gain the Kingdom have nothing to do there? To stay with this one little piece of the vision, our discourse must learn again to revel in the beauty and flexibility and integrity of gold, of the City’s true gold, and to say exactly why the world the risen Jesus will make must of course be golden, must be and will be beautiful and flexible and integral as is no earthly city. And so on and on.

“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.

From the last lines of “On Fairy Stories” (PDFs of the article are easily unearthed), JRR Tolkien:

But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the happy ending. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Mark Sebanc’s article makes the case that Tolkien deployed the serious and learned device of play in his fantastic, or what Tolkien called ‘Enchanted,’ stories. Sebanc:

It seems to me that of all the ways of looking at Tolkien’s mythopoetic genius, at the truths that he breathes with praeternatural elvish craft through silver, the most comprehensive and overarching way would be to see it as falling into the category of a game-something that the ancients saw as being far from shallow and sophomoric, merely a children’sthing, as we might be tempted to see it. Plato links play with culture, denominating these two ideas as the things he deems most serious. These two words, “play” and “culture,” are, moreover, closely cognate in the original Greek. This is no accident of etymology. There are untold and fascinating intellectual depths to this idea of play, which Huizinga’s magisterial work, Homo Ludens, goes far towards explicating. It strikes me as being one of modern intellectual history’s idkes mnitresses, a superb interpretive tool with the help of which we may arriveat a better understanding of Tolkien’s achievement and, adver- satively, a keener insight into the poverty of thought and form that blankets modern literature like a miasmic counterpane of marsh gas.

It occurs to me that a profound sense of play requires the work of improvosation. What seems to link play together with improvisation is the element of surprise. Surprise unfurls reality with a sense of ‘all-of-the-sudden-ness’. All of the sudden, something concealed is revealed; yet, in being revealed, the reality is simultaniously uncovered and made strange.

The juxtaposed paradox of coming to know and being left wondering leaves the knower with a sense of delight. The surprise and delight of play and improvisation act something like the lowest common denominator of that allusive quality we term humor. Steve Wilkens: pulls some of these threads together:

It is hard to define humor itself. A dictionary definition such as ‘something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing” hardly seems to capture the richness and variety of humor. Instead of attempting to define humor, it seems more helpful to focus on how it works. Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation, juxtaposition of seeming incommensurate things, challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices…Doesn’t it seem possible that these incongruities and surprises share common ground with humor, and isn’t the delight we should feel at the oddity of these stories akin to the delight we experience in a good joke?

Nick Cave’s Sacred Space. Joseph Campbell spoke of the sacred place as that place where:

…a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there.

By Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

After listening to a reading of Mark Sebanc’s article on the Logos in Tolkien on Mars Hill Audio, I set to some reseach on the author. Alongside a brief interview, I found a blog of his centered around his sci-fi series which he coauthors with a friend. With promo and process blogs, Sebanc also includes some personal notes on the work of writing. I enjoyed this post on the “ten commandments of writing” from John C. Wright. Here are rules one and seven which I found helpful.

1. In order to be a writer, you must write.

2. If your manuscript is good or bad, send out your manuscript again. Genius does not count. Only persistence counts. The world will not recognize your genius until after you are dead. But the world can recognize your persistence now.

To reinterpret into Austin Kleon’s (Kleonees) jargon:

1. Forget the noun, do the verb
2. There is no genius, there is social genius that abides thru the persistance of individuals in community.