SAINTE-ANNE-DE-BEAUMONT

Happy Feast of St. Anne!

 

While on holiday last year in Canada (New Brunswick) I went for a drive through Memramcook to Beaumont. It’s all very beautiful and on the way you pass through Belliveau Orchards with their wonderful apple trees. Much of the land across the Petitcodiac River from Beaumont was settled in the mid-1700s by German immigrants. There is an old story passed down in the Steeves (Stieff) family about how shortly after their ancestors arrived a Mr. Belliveau crossed the river in his canoe and helped the newcomers with useful, life-sustaining information and advice, one farmer to another, French and German, human to human.

 At Beaumont is Sainte-Anne-de-Beaumont Chapel built in 1842. As well as being beloved of the Acadians St. Anne is the Patron Saint of the Mi'kmaq (Lnu) people, and the chapel was used by members of the First Nations Reserve as well as the French who lived peacefully alongside them. It’s a lovely place and it’s where I wrote this song.

 

 

IN THE PLACE

 

Hey there, are you awake yet?
When you’re done hogging the blanket
Let’s go watch the dawn begin the day
Later, when we get the lawn mowed
We’ll take a drive down the old road
To where the river runs into the Bay
We’ll have a thermos full of hot tea
We’ll enjoy the quiet and the view
We won’t care about the weather
As long as we’re together
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Say there, do you remember?
That day back in December
It snowed so hard we couldn’t see across the street
We ate bread and molasses
And watched the storm as it passed us
And made a little fire to warm our feet
The sun came out and the world was covered over
With snow that was so clean and crisp and new
The cold wind made me shiver
Just like that day by the river
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Well now, you know what I’m wishing?
That we soon can go fishing
When the ice breaks on the river in the spring
We’ll go when the fish are biting
To a place so inviting
It stirs my soul and makes me want to sing
The beauty of the woods always reminds us
There is still so much living left to do
There is joy all around us
Just like the day that it found us
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

© 2013, Dale Petley (Beaumont, N.B.)

BOB & CAROL & TED & THECLA

“I think of life as a cosmic joke, which keeps getting bigger all the time. But I've learned tolerance and maybe affection for the Chasidim. They are real people, who can see light in the darkest things.”

Paul Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014)

 When I think about the earliest Christians I’m inspired by their joy. They were joyful in ways that did not depend on events and circumstances. They were joyful in trials and tribulations. They wrote things like: We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. In John’s Gospel Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” In his first Epistle St. John declares, “We write these things unto you so that our joy may be complete.” St. Paul called his brothers and sisters in Philippi to be joyful, using the words ‘joy’ and ‘rejoice’ repeatedly, and famously proclaiming “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice.”

The joy of the earliest Christians was not caused by self-satisfaction over accomplishments but was simply the way that they were learning to be in Christ. They believed that they had died. They also believed that they had been born again and that the life they now lived was utterly identified with Christ. Sometimes they took on a new name as a new creature in Christ. Moreover they saw themselves as one body in Christ so much so that they held their goods in common. They saw their oneness not as some flimsy, ethereal, longed-for-yet-never-realized condition but as the fundamental reality of creation. Your early-church Bob, Carol, Ted, and Thecla understood that they were married to Christ and in Christ were one body. In chaste virginity, a Thecla, for example, was not seeking isolation but deeper fellowship. Even when she went to live in a cave she knew she was never truly alone but always moving into closer communion in the Body of Christ.

The unity consciousness of the earliest Christians was no regression to a childlike, pre-personal, oceanic feeling of oneness. They were not blurring distinctions and ignoring real contrasts in favor of a hazy, lazy, vague unwillingness to engage the world. That’s just self-protective avoidance, and avoidance is merely a veiled form of aggression which is why it turns hateful so quickly.

Attempts to manufacture such a sense of unity often are destructive of nature and tend to reduce human beings to concepts and abstractions. Only love can truly celebrate unity while not obliterating diversity. Love bears witness to unity while celebrating its own nature within all the glorious, scandalous particularity of life. We do not make unity, but simply let go of the obstacles keeping us from realizing it. Unity, like love, is the very nature of things. If we do not realize and ‘see’ the unity of life it is only because we are turned away from it to an image of our self and this makes us afraid of love because real love is self-emptying. It is joyful, though, and eternal, and it leads us to see light even in the darkest things.

DOWN MAIN STREET

Two enduring influences in my life have been Main Street in Moncton, New Brunswick, and the Petitcodiac River which runs alongside it. I am blessed to have grown up in a place where we could shop, visit City Hall, conduct business, go to the movies, enjoy a good meal, get a drink, have a haircut, be measured for a suit, do our banking, and watch the Santa Claus Parade without ever having to leave Main Street. Today the people of Moncton work diligently at maintaining a Main Street that is vibrant and alive. Because of their efforts much of what was said above is still true. In fact, it is now even a better place to go out for an evening of music and entertainment than it was in the old days. I remember a time when things did not look so promising but Monctonians decided to work purposefully at keeping Main Street as the vital heart of the city.

The fact that the residents of Moncton attend to Main Street as a center of activity speaks to their recognition of the importance of community. After all, one of the city’s oldest buildings is the Free Meeting House constructed in 1821 so that people of all faiths would have a place to pray. Moncton is a city where the Mayor and Members of Council, the Police Chief, the Fire Chief, Members of the Judiciary, and assorted other dignitaries joined residents from all walks of life to pack a large Catholic church for the funeral of a homeless man who had severe psychological disorders and crippling addictions, and who used to spend most of his winters incarcerated. I remember him from when I was a child. He was a fixture; part of the landscape; a character in a city full of them. He was written about in the newspaper by a friendly and compassionate reporter. Readers felt like they knew him. When I heard about his impressive funeral mass it surprised me for a moment, but then I thought that this was somehow typical of Moncton.

Sometimes it takes unspeakable tragedy to bring people together. Folks will remark on the uniqueness of such times and how out of character it all seems. To my mind, though, Moncton has demonstrated time and again the resolve to foster a strong sense of community that does not depend on circumstances and events, tragic or otherwise; a sense of belonging together as the tides of life come and go, both giving and taking away. It is a city shaped by a tidal river which even at its lowest never fails in its promise to rise again.

DOWN MAIN STREET

The first time that we met was down on Main Street

You said, “You got here fresh from the U. S., eh?”
You laughed at my stupid joke about your accent
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

We ate at the first place we found open for coffee
You laughed when I tried to describe a poutine râpée
You told me all your dreams for the future
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

Now surfers ride the tidal bore of the river
Where they built so many ships back in the day
Schooners and steamers would come to deliver molasses
Then ride out of town before the tide took the river away

 

Let’s do the dishes then take a walk down Main Street
To the spot where we met thirty years ago today
We’ll toast the past and smile toward the future
And watch the tide take the river away

 

© 2013 Dale Petley (Moncton)

DAD

It seems I have inherited my father’s sense of humor. My mother enjoyed a good joke, both telling one and hearing one, but she found my father’s idea of what was funny annoying. His humor was based a good deal on whimsy. I called him one day while I was watching coverage of a Papal Election on TV. I asked how he was doing:

“I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I’m answering the phone all the time.”
“Who keeps calling you?”
"The Vatican; they want me to run for Pope but I told them I won’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Not enough money in it.”

I laughed and he said, “When I told that to your mother she got mad at me.”

After New Brunswick’s Provincial Liberal Party destroyed the Conservatives by winning every single seat on election night Dad called me bright and early the next morning doing his best Connie Francis imitation as he sung: “Who’s Tory now, who’s Tory now?” I noticed a similar sense of humor in Dad’s older brother, Tom. I well recall driving around the village where he lived while he pointed out various odd looking characters old enough to be Civil War veterans and told me that they were the ‘Mayor’, the ‘Fire Chief’, and ‘Members of the Town Council’. When we returned from that drive to his home where Aunt Jackie was preparing supper he announced out of the blue that he had decided to buy a mule. He cracked me up, and I’m sure that I was laughing, smiling, or eating any time I visited Uncle Tom and Aunt Jackie.

A good example of what made Dad laugh is a story he told about his younger brother, Ern.  One day Dad and Ern were driving on New Brunswick’s Route 126 from Moncton to Harcourt. Ern was behind the wheel. Somewhere near Coal Branch he suddenly pulled the car off to the side of the road, put it in reverse, and backed up until coming to a stop where he sat looking past my father through the passenger side window. Dad turned to see what Ern was looking at and saw a man standing perfectly still in the middle of a field of hay, all alone, his hands down by his side, staring off into the distance. Ern sat there for a moment then put the car in park, got out and walked around to the front, took a deep breath and yelled: “What are you looking at?!” The man, startled, simply stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away. Ern, his mission accomplished, got back in the car and drove on. Dad laughed while he told me about this all those years later. He still found it funny.

Fathers try to do the right things for their children and say the right things to them but we children tend to remember other things. We remember that they were there for us more than what they said to us. We recall their advice and their aphorisms but we recall their voices with greater clarity. We cherish the memories of their foibles and fumbles, their humanity, and their humor, and it’s all because we love them. Happy Father’s Day!

THINKING ABOUT ETERNITY

“God don’t never change. Always will be God.” (Blind Willie Johnson.)

“No object has ever done the experience of being touched.” (Michel Henry.)

“And I’m thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me.” (Bruce Cockburn.)

The glory of the Incarnation is not that it somehow constitutes an ontological change in God but that it doesn’t. “God don’t never change.” God is Spirit and Spirit is not part of any duality. God isn’t half of anything. God is not an object of any kind and neither are we. If I have to define myself I am going to do so with reference to what is true about me eternally. Anything less, pre-ascension, seems like idolatry – trying to make eternal that which is by definition transitory. Anyway, about eternity …

1: Heaven isn’t in your future or mine. Heaven doesn’t begin at some point in time because it is not in time, although time might be included in it. This means that folks in the past, like Moses and them, were no further away from Heaven than are we, or closer. Why do I find this important? It reminds me that those I love but see no longer are as close to me as Heaven, and God.

2: If we are to inherit it then what is true of Heaven must be true of us. What is true of Heaven? When we recite the Creed we affirm our belief that Heaven means eternal life in the Communion of Saints. And so, if our ultimate destiny is eternal loving union and communion it must mean that every issue, controversy, and disagreement is transcended and overcome. Our divisions are merely temporary; hardly the sorts of things worth killing each other over. What is more, if Heaven is limitless then so are we. Jesus told us that the Kingdom of God is within us. It’s what Rumi meant when he wrote: “In this house is a treasure which the universe is too small to hold.” We feel intimations of our eternal vastness in our desire not only to survive but to keep growing. Unfortunately the materialistic mindset of our time expresses this as a sad, Cyclopean pursuit of expansion. We want more – more land, more money, and more power. In the world just now there seems to be no such concept as ‘big enough’. The problem is that we do not understand our spiritual nature. If we could remember who and what we truly are and live with a sense of boundlessness even here in the midst of the restraining confines of daily life knowing the peace and joy that belongs to eternal Spirit we would bring a wonderful and mysterious quality to this world. We would be a light to enlighten the people. We would manifest timelessness in time. We would be truly and profoundly free. We used to call this sort of thing salvation.

3: Contrary to motion pictures and popular misconceptions, Heaven doesn’t wait; it is complete, entire, and perfect. It has always been so. To put it another way, when we declare in Holy Communion that we join our voices “with all the company of Heaven,” we mean it; we’re serious. Let’s give Thomas Traherne the last word: “The contemplation of eternity maketh the soul immortal, whose glory it is, that it can see before and after its existence into endless spaces. Its sight is its presence.” (Centuries: 55.)

DEVOTION

The first time I noticed my mother’s French accent was when she spoke Latin. I heard no such accent when she spoke English. To my ears how she said things in English was simply the way words were supposed to sound.  Other people heard an accent but not me; not until one day when we were talking about the church and she recited parts of the Latin mass. (Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecatta mundi …) She remembered this from childhood. In the early1940’s her father (our pépère) gave her a tiny prayer book, 2 inches by 31/2,  which could be used to follow the services in Latin, French, and English. I still have it.

Mum participated fully in celebrations of the Holy Eucharist. She would sit as near as possible to one of the loudspeakers in hopes of hearing the readers and the officiating priest. Even though she knew the service by heart she would still have her copy of the Sunday Missal open and her reading glasses out of the case, ready to use. She listened attentively to the sermons and used to share with me some snippet of what the preacher had to say, especially if he told a story or a little joke.

Over the last several years I’ve been increasingly drawn to worship. This does not mean I’m especially intrigued by the wonders of the church. I’ve always said that being Anglican suits me because it’s just about as much religion as I can stand. I continue to have little interest in the history of liturgy and have experienced no sudden fascination with ecclesiastical architecture; no swooning over flying buttresses. When I say I’m drawn to worship I’m referring to the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, noonday prayers, and prayers said and sung at sunrise and sunset. I suppose I should say I’ve become more devotional.

When I pray it is not because I feel somehow separated from God; it reminds me that we’re never apart. When my parents were alive and I was living more than twenty-two hundred miles away I felt I was far apart from them, but when they died, so did any sense of distance.  It’s like that when I pray. I’m not attempting to communicate with a remote deity from the great beyond but am in communion with the One in whom I live and move and have my being. I realize that God is transcendent but I am also aware that transcendence doesn’t mean distance.

Believing in God, for me, means trusting God and I suppose that’s why I like the word ‘devotion.’ As well as meaning worship, devotion connotes loyalty and love. Devotion means sticking with someone through thick and thin; never leaving their side. It inspires me to be more faithful, more in tune to the present moment, and more grateful. Devotion establishes a pattern for each day and helps keep me oriented towards what is true and good and beautiful.

Gratefulness and praise are qualities of eternal Spirit and it seems like Mother Nature expresses this every morning when I listen to the birds sing before sunrise. They greet the dawn as if they are joyfully testifying to evidence of things not seen. I do not suggest the birds are praying, as such, but they do seem to have a lot to celebrate. We all do.

Happy Mother’s Day!

PASCHAL PROCLAMATION

Christ is Risen! This is the traditional Paschal Proclamation. My computer thinks it ought to be ‘Christ is raised.’ At least it’s not ‘Christ was risen.’ I’m not questioning ‘historicity.’ I’m thinking about eternity, which is what the resurrection has to do with. Christ Jesus doesn’t merely come back to history in resurrection but transcends time itself and every other created thing. The resurrection does not restore Christ to history, it restores history to Christ.

I don’t much care for Bible movies. A film is a thing I watch passively as a spectator. The word does not allow such passivity. The word requires engagement. The word calls for a dance partner and says follow me. A film seems a step removed from its subject, not closer. On the other hand there is no real distance between the word and the one who receives. A spectator may be acted upon but the word acts within.

If we are going to present the Christian faith as a motion picture then we’re going to need a suitable screen upon which to view it. I suggest mending the Veil of the Temple and projecting our images on it. Be warned, though. This won’t work with the word for the word is a lover and is not content merely to be seen but tears the veil of our soul’s inner sanctum and enters in to share himself with us, planting the seed of eternal life.

Happy Easter!

LOVE

In Plato’s ‘Symposium’ Socrates tells the story of how a priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, taught him about Love. My guess is not everyone learns of it this way.

According to Diotima, Eros/Love was conceived on a Feast of Aphrodite as a result of the coupling of the Spirit of Plenty (Poros) and the Spirit of Poverty (Penae). The Gods do not seek wisdom for they are already wise, but Aphrodite insured that her beloved Son would be a seeker. Edmund Spenser pictured it this way:

Or who alive can perfectly declare
The wondrous cradle of thine infancie,
When thy great mother Venus first thee bare,
Begot of Plenty and of Penurie,
Though elder then thine own nativitie,
And yet a chyld, renewing still thy yeares,
And yet the eldest of the heavenly peares?

(An Hymne In Honour Of Love)

As Diotima describes him, Eros/Love is not “delicate and lovely, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, in doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of heaven.” He always partakes of his Mother’s poverty and yet is also his Father’s son, the son of Resource/Plenty. “He is a mighty hunter and a master of device and artifice – at once desirous and full of wisdom, a lifelong seeker after truth.” Love, says Diotima, is “neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he will be now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and now dying, to be born again by virtue of his Father’s nature, while what he gains will always ebb away as fast. So, Love is never altogether in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between wisdom and ignorance.”

When I read Diotima’s description of Love as a tough, barefoot, lifelong seeker after truth, at once desirous and full of wisdom, I did not think of Socrates, even though he matches the description. I didn’t make the connection until later, when Alcibiades showed up and spoke of his exploits with Socrates during wartime in the field of battle. Not only did Socrates acquit himself with honor and valor, his bravery made enemy soldiers leery of him. This fact helped him save the life of Alcibiades when the latter was injured. Socrates not only enabled Alcibiades to escape with his life but also retrieved his armor. We’re told that during the winter months of the military campaign Socrates continued to dress in the same simple cloak he always wore (and apparently slept in), and continued to go barefoot as he always did without the slightest complaint. When rations were scarce and they went hungry, no one put a cheerier face on things than Socrates. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for food, for when there was something to eat he enjoyed it right along with the rest of the soldiers, but it just seemed that whatever life sent his way he accepted with remarkable equanimity, so much so, he became a source of amazement to those around him. I suppose they wondered why he was so happy.

Diotima says, “Love is a lover of wisdom, and, being such, he is placed between wisdom and ignorance – for which his parentage also is responsible, in that his Father is full of wisdom and resource, while his Mother is devoid of either.” Philosophy is for lovers, and for Plato no one embodies this more than Socrates. He loves wisdom, and in wisdom he knows that he does not know. He does not think he knows the truth when he does not. And so, Socrates is at once rich and poor, always midway between wisdom and ignorance.

The word ‘pharmakos’ is a loaded term for the Greeks. In Ancient Greece it referred to a cleansing sacrifice made on the 1^st Day of Thargelia, a festival of Apollo observed each year in Athens. The pharmakos was similar to a scapegoat. A condemned prisoner was led outside the city and beaten to death. All the misdeeds, mistakes, sins, and grievances of the previous year were symbolically removed from the city with the pharmakos. The 2^nd Day of Thargelia was a joyful occasion, a time of freshness to celebrate the newness of life as games were played, songs were sung, and children recited the poetry they had learned.

‘Pharmakos’ (pharmakon) also referred to a recipe for a medicine in which a small amount of what is harming us is used to make us well. Jews, Christians, and Muslims might think of Moses holding up the bronze image of a serpent in the wilderness so that those bitten by serpents could be healed by looking at what hurt them. Socrates was a kind of pharmakon in that he used the arts of the sophists against them to demonstrate the inherent weakness and fault of their position. He skillfully used an exact amount of what was making Athens sick to cure her, or more precisely, to allow the body/politic to heal herself. It was nothing if not a labor of love.

Philosophy is not the acquisition of wisdom but the love of wisdom. Plato had such a deep and profound understanding of this he chose to write in dialogue form. Approaching wisdom through dialogue the way Socrates and his interlocutors did is to be involved with each other intimately. Most of us find it less threatening to toss opinions back and forth, but coming together as one in order to move through (dia) the words (logos) of an argument in order to arrive at a mutual understanding requires a level of unity appropriate to lovers. To begin again from a place of not knowing is to be naked and exposed in one’s ignorance, open to the exploring questions of our fellow lovers of wisdom. All of this takes a good deal of trust, and gentleness. It is the stuff of deep spiritual communion.

Love is why Socrates was utterly content as well as a tireless seeker (one might even say a mighty hunter) after wisdom. Love is always full and always emptying itself for its beloved. I’m reminded of the Invocation of the Isha Upanishad: “Fullness comes from fullness. When fullness is taken from fullness, Fullness still remains.” Eros loves not because he is in want; he wants because he loves. Eros loves because it is his nature to love. He is always full and always emptying himself, spending himself into poverty for his beloved only to be raised again according to his Father’s nature.

It was love which allowed Socrates to accept fate as he did. Trying heroically to accept God’s will in a sort of ‘Amor fati’ without self-emptying love is likely to end in suicidal despair. We need the kind of love with which we can see through our selves. It is why Socrates said that Philosophy – the love of wisdom – is about learning to die.

According to Diogenes, citing Apollodorus, Socrates was born on the 1^st Day of Thargelia, the day of cleansing when the sacrificial victim was taken from the city. Plato was born on the 2^nd Day of the Festival, the time for celebration and renewal. These philosophers were true lovers of wisdom, and in love they were led to seek a vision of “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, and which neither flowers nor fades away.”

MOTHERING SUNDAY

Mothering Sunday, when we give thanks for Mother Church, seems like the right time to post this golden oldie.

I had been reading the Saturday Newspaper’s listing of Religious Institutions and their Service Times when I came across a church’s description of itself as: Independent, Fundamental, Pre-Millennial, and Missionary Minded. The song wrote itself.

The italicized words in square brackets are spoken. Enjoy.

THE BIBLE BELT

[This is the story of the hand Fate dealt

In a part of the Country called the Bible belt

On a hot summer day when I wanted a nice, cold beer

I didn’t know where the tavern was

But I saw a young lad and thought ‘I bet he does’

And said, “Excuse me, son, can you point the way from here?

I’m a weary pilgrim, feeling cursed,

I’m looking for a place to slay my thirst

I need a spirit or two to help me cool down

Now, he was carrying a Bible and I should have known better

But I thought I’d die in this hot weather, and he said,

“I know just the place for you in this town”]

“Well … there … is …

First Four-Squared Open Bible Seminary

Reformed, five-point Calvinistic, Missionary

Free-will, Christ-Centered, Independent, Fundamentalist

Primitive Baptist Church”

“And … they … have …

AWANA Youth Groups, hearing-aid audio loops

Wheel chair ramps, elevators, summer camps,

Greeters at the door, plus a whole bunch more at the

Primitive Baptist Church”

[I said, “Young man, young man, listen to me

Let me explain and I think you’ll see that

We have got a misunderstanding here

The ‘spirits’ I want are the earthly kind

Secular, worldly if you don’t mind

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge

Would you tell me, am I near?”

He said: “I’m sorry that I misunderstood

But I’ll direct you to that neighborhood

Where you will find the awful things you crave

I would never go to such a place

With their worldly ways and actions base

Yet I’ll point the way and hope the Lord will save”]

“Well … there … is …

Old Memorial, highly editorial,

Social, liberal, literary-critical

Open, caring, feelyweely-sharing

E-pis-co-pal Church”

“And … they … have …

Tai Chi, Tie-dye, Yoga where you learn to fly

Roll playing, politics, agitation, meditation

Feminism with a bang, Meetings up the Yin/Yang

E-pis-co-pal Church”

[I said, “Young man, my friend, it is getting late

And what we got here is failure to communicate

I don’t want religion … I want to be amused

I want a lounge, a Club, a place to go that’s

Air-Conditioned with a stage and show

Now please help me; I’m tired and I’m confused

He said: “Well now I know the thing you want

Like Hollywood – a fleshly haunt – where people go

Because they like the show

I’ll point you to the place, but I hope you see

It is a Den of Iniquity

But I’ll tell what it is you want to know”]

“Well … there … is …

Holy Roller, re-born, tongues of fire, faith-alone

Renewed, unglued, always in a prayin’ mood

Get saved; know your fate, Exorcism while-you-wait

Pentecostal Church”

“And … they … have …

Guitars and a big drum, cushioned pews for you bum

Light-shows, TV Station, Tongues with translation

Miracles, prophecies, get a vision when you please

Pentecostal Church”

[Well my head was sore and my throat was dry

I felt like I was about to die, and I said,

 “Look at me, and get this through your head

I’m looking for a place to have a beer

Now can you tell me if there’s one near

If you soon don’t help me we both might end up dead”

He said, “My oh my, what a fool I’ve been

Pointing to all these churches when

What you really wanted did not dawn on me

You’re not looking for a Reformed Bible Church

That is not the purpose of your search

For I do believe that you might be ‘R C’”]

Well … there … is …

Hail Mary Full of Grace, Holy water in your face

Sacred Heart Family, purgatory, pay the fee

Sacramental Church of Rome, Papalism in the home

Roman Catholic Church

And … they … have …

Confession, fasting, bingo everlasting

Incense, K of C, Holy Sea and rosary

Homilies to bore ya, Saints, Medjugoria

Roman Catholic Church

And there used to be a tavern …

Owned by a lapsed Methodist …

But it closed!!!

© 1994 Dale Petley (Petitcodiac, N. B.)

LENT

 HOLY SONNETS - XIV

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

~ John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God …

The image is one of a battering ram and the language is that of war. Why does Donne address the Almighty in terms of martial conflict? He might just as easily have written: ‘capture my heart,’ or ‘open my heart.’ (Neither would have disrupted the metrical flow of the Sonnet’s loose iambic.) However, the poet’s employment of siege imagery is in keeping with his conviction that his life has been hijacked by a usurper, and that refusing to relinquish control, this tyrant must be overthrown.

Donne makes his appeal regarding his ‘heart’ because the heart is the seat of loving-knowledge. As a metaphor ‘the heart’ represents who we are at our center - our fundamental identity. When we know something ‘deep-down in our heart’ it means we have more than merely an emotional appreciation or a purely theoretical understanding. It means we get it. It means the distance between subject and object has been bridged, the veil torn in two.  The heart as the center of loving knowledge represents who we are as those created in God’s “own image and likeness.” The address to the ‘three person’d God’ is at once an appeal to the Holy Trinity and a cry from the heart to the One in whose image all hearts are made. The supplicant is pleading for nothing less than to be conquered by his own eternal reality.

I suppose most of us don’t focus much on our eternal reality or even believe in it for that matter. Instead each of us identifies singularly as an isolated psychophysical entity convinced that we are somehow separate from the rest of the world, out there, and God. Perhaps this is why Origen maintained that Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs should be studied together. Proverbs concerns our turn to wisdom; Ecclesiastes, in maintaining  the futility of seeking fulfillment in the passing vanities of the world, points to our growth in wisdom, and the Song of Songs celebrates the soul’s homecoming in loving union with God. Most of us get stuck somewhere in Ecclesiastes, yet to be convinced of the vanity of it all.

The poet declares that God knocks, breathes, shines, and seeks to mend. God invites, inspires, enlightens, and welcomes us to wholeness and fullness of life but we are captivated by our selfishness and find that we cannot stand upright unless we are overthrown. We are constantly betrayed by our nagging fear, our need to control, our victim identity, and our sense of never being enough. As our own worst enemy we must be broken and refashioned by a master craftsman. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” cries the author. He knows that he cannot overcome himself and that all ‘labor’ to do so solidifies the false identity. He pleads to be enthralled and ravished, terms expressive of the radical, fierce, reality of grace. He yearns to rest in the love which never forsakes us and never lets us go; a love which feeds us, and sustains us, and gathers up all our broken pieces so that not one fragment remains.

OF GODS AND MEN

There is a painting by Simon Vouet (1590-1649) in The National Gallery in Washington entitled Urania and Calliope, (1634). The two Muses sit together near a temple of Apollo. Urania, who inspires those who contemplate the order of the heavens, wears her starry crown. To her left sits Calliope, Homer’s Muse, holding a copy of The Odyssey while to her left winged babies carry laurel wreathes of achievement heavenward. Urania has her hand on the shoulder of Calliope who in turn faces her, and so the Muse of Epic Poetry looks to the Muse of those who observe the heavenly order. Meanwhile Urania turns and looks directly into the eyes of the viewer of the painting as if to suggest the Delphic admonition to know thyself.

With St. Valentine’s Day approaching and Lent on its way I’m reading Plato’s Phaedrus. It is all rather wonderful. For Socrates, it is a rare romp in the woods as he and the beautiful Phaedrus sit together under a Plane Tree at mid-day along the banks of the Ilissus River in a place dedicated to the god Pan, rich with nymphs. As cicadas sound overhead the story is told of how these tiny, noisy, creatures report to the Muses and tell which humans honor them and how.

To the eldest, Calliope, and her next sister, Urania, they tell of those who live a life of philosophy and so do honor the music of those twain whose theme is the heavens and all the story of gods and men, whose song is the noblest of them all. 1

1.      Phaedrus, R. Hackforth (trans); Hamilton/Cairns (ed).

OUR RIGHTFUL MIND

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. (Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed, 2007)

Little Protestant shopkeepers and players of golf take the meaning out of everything.

(Lewis Thompson, 1909-1949, Journals)

I think both of the authors quoted above would agree that if humanity has any hope of surviving we are going to have to come to see things in a whole different way. I’m talking about changing our perception of reality. We tend to discourage that sort of that sort of thing; it’s bad for business. Right now most of us perceive ourselves as needing a lot more stuff than we actually require. Our perception is that we need this, that or the other thing, and we cannot possibly be happy, fulfilled, whole, complete, cool, hip, or whatever without it, and in a consumer society we do not want those perceptions messed with. If the commercials during championship football games teach us anything it is that it takes time, talent, and lots of money to encourage our perceptions and we don’t want anyone waking up and questioning the insanity of our lives – not the quiet desperation, nor the fragmentation, nor even the way in which we spend so much time dwelling on the past or fretting about the future that we sleep-walk through our day relying on familiar patterns and routines to such an extent that even our most intimate moments run the risk of becoming formulaic. As near as I can determine consumerism is its own zombie apocalypse.

Sooner or later we’re going to have to criminalize prayer. It can lead us to recognize our true likeness, and the Market won’t stand for that. Prayer introduces us to our rightful mind; it enables us to see among other things that happiness belongs to our essential and eternal nature and is what we bring to people, places, and things, not what is produced by them. This knowledge changes us. What would life be like if we loved God with our whole heart? What if we really loved our neighbor? What would become of grasping and fear if we truly knew that nothing in this world has the power to rob us of our happiness?

SOTERIA (2)

The ego is, precisely, the impossibility of surrender. Only Reality in us can surrender to Itself.  This is already the centre of our being – pure being – for which there is no “nothing else.”

~ Lewis Thompson (1909-1949), Journals.

The Lord said to Moses, “thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me and live.” That sounds about right to me. After all, our response to the beatific vision is not to ask what’s next? It is not a vision from which one walks away; it is the fulfillment of all seeing. There is also the practical consideration that God doesn’t have a face, as in a body part, and so when Moses said: “I beseech thee, show me thy glory,” he was asking for something infinitely deeper. According to Philo, “the soul that loves God seeks to know what the one living God is according to his essence.” He says that Moses “entreated God to become the exhibitor and expounder of his own nature to him.” (De Posteritate Caini) To ‘see’ on this level is perfect freedom and the letting go of all that is false, desperate, contrived, and unreal. It is the end of what we thought we were and the realization of what we have never not been.

I suppose, in light of what I’ve just written, I’m also reminded why Jesus told us not to rehearse what we’re going to say when persecutors haul us away for trial. This has always struck me as a tall order, and yet all three synoptic gospels have him saying it. I don’t know about you but if I knew I was about to be interrogated I’d have a hard time thinking about anything else. I’d be tempted to play through in my head responses to all possible questions, and then re-play them over and over until I had them exactly right and was off-book; ready to perform when the time came. Then again, Jesus also told us not to live as if we are actors putting on a performance to be judged by others. Our task isn’t to reinforce and make real any character we have invented. It is not about somehow solidifying the way we imagine ourselves. It is a matter of knowing our essential nature. It is about passing from the unreal to the real, out of the shadows and into the truth.

DEADWOOD

From time to time I enjoy playing with iambic pentameter. I don’t write poetry (unless that’s what you consider song lyrics) and have never attempted to compose a poem using iambic pentameter, even though several of my favorite Robert Frost poems use that meter. And then there’s Shakespeare. The Bard’s use of iambic inspired one latter-day genius, David Milch, creator of the Television series ‘Deadwood’ (2004-2006). While the dialogue in that series was not written in strict iambic pentameter it seemed nevertheless to be inspired by it. The result was a profane brilliance the likes of which we’re unlikely to see again.

I decided to write a short sketch featuring three of Deadwood’s characters, Mr. Merrick, editor of the Newspaper, Jack Langrishe, actor and director of a theatrical troupe, and Richardson, a simple minded, lowly, waiter at the Grand Hotel Dining Room. If you happen to be a fan of that series then you might enjoy this bit of nonsense. If not, then just scroll on by.

Only the dialogue is Iambic Pentameter (10.10.10.10.), and if I’ve done it right you should be able to sing it to “Eventide’ (Abide with me), or any other hymn in that meter. Try it:

Yes, Mr. Merrick, I seem to recall

You making mention of this when first we

Met on the day our weary troupe arrived,

Slowly descending from these great Black Hills

If you enjoy this post then please consider it my way of wishing you a Happy Epiphany!

Anyways …

Interior location – The Grand Central dining room in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, 1877

Merrick: May I say, Mr. Langrishe, that I am much in your debt for taking of your time to keep the readers of The Pioneer informed about the finer things of life such as the theater, art, and acting in which, with all due modesty, I must confess to having dabbled in the past, though strictly as a budding amateur.

Langrishe: Yes, Mr. Merrick, I seem to recall you making mention of this when first we met on the day our weary troupe arrived, slowly descending from these great Black Hills.

Merrick: And a great day that was for me as well.

Langrishe: You are too kind.

Merrick: I simply speak the truth.

(Richardson arrives, silently places plates of food on the table, and obsequiously backs away.)

Langrishe: Such a face!

Merrick: Richardson?

Langrishe: He has the look of a character born in Shakespeare’s time.

(Merrick glances at Richardson and is for a second at a loss for words.)

Merrick: May I ask, Sir, if you might be so kind as to offer some insights into the creative process – in particular, how authors and actors are so inspired?

Langrishe: That, Mr. Merrick, is a question which I have considered now for many years. The ancients spoke of daimons which inspired. There is no amusement without the muse. Writers create, and their words proceed forth and are made flesh by actors who become the incarnate expressions of those words, so much so, I am left to wonder if there is a moment when characters become living creatures independent of their creator. And might such a creature become in its own right a living thing?

Merrick: And cry 'Subsisto!'

Langrishe: Yes! Yes, I exist. Most writers will allow that they are led by characters who in turn drive the plot, the creature becoming the creator.

Merrick: And might such characters continue to live on long past the final curtain call?

Langrishe: I think they do. In fact, I think they must, to be enjoyed forever and anon.

YOUNG IN MIND

In Plato’s Timaeus an account is given of a visit made by that great Athenian Statesman, Solon, to a city in the Egyptian Delta. There he met an elderly priest who remarked on how the Hellenes were young in mind. “O Solon, Solon,” he said, “you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.” When Solon asked the meaning of this the priest replied: “I mean to say that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.” (Timaeus 22.b) The priest went on to observe that while the Egyptians keep the records of antiquity stored safely in their temples, other peoples, like the Hellenes, have suffered catastrophic destructions such as fires and floods in which such documents were destroyed. When the writings are gone learning is gone as well. Moreover, when this destruction comes through a flood the ones who survive are “herdsmen and shepherds who dwell in the mountains” while those living in cities are “swept out to sea.” Such a deluge leaves “only those who are destitute of letters and of education, and so you have to begin all over again, like children.” (Timaeus 23.b)

On this Octave Day of Christmas I cannot help recalling those Jewish herdsmen and shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. They were the first to see the renewal of humanity. Those unlettered shepherds were the first to adore the Word of God made flesh. They were witnesses of humanity’s new creation in Christ.

I suppose the ancient Greeks were “always young in mind” in that they sought to know the reason in things and to contemplate the eternal which is never old but always new and known only here and now. My hope as this year begins is that we all may remain young in mind as we grow in the newness of life.

Happy New Year.