My latest: on pastors’ reading habits, in Sapientia

I’ve got an essay in Sapientia called “The Reading Lives of Pastors.” The prompt was to reflect on Pope Francis’s “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation” and, more broadly, on why pastors should (if they should) include fiction and poetry as part of their regular reading diet. After clarifying at the outset that literature does not per se make you a better person, I write the following:

The fact of literature is in general a human good, in the sense that it is a sign of an advanced culture: symbol, narrative, myth, technology, writing, literacy, communication—these are to be celebrated, granting their capacity to be bent to any number of ends. But the act of wide reading in literature in and of itself entails nothing at all about a person. The voracious reader may be either selfish or selfless, vain or humble, vicious or virtuous, religious or secular, joyful or melancholy, full of life or obsessed with death, a treasured friend or a despised enemy, a cosmopolitan or a provincial, a sage or a boor. Hitler and Stalin may not have been men of letters, but they had men of letters for followers and apologists. The list of wicked writers and artists—who abused women, abandoned children, and passed in silence over the suffering of countless victims—is too long to recount.

It is a difficult lesson to accept, but learning and goodness are not synonymous or coterminous. More of one does not necessarily lead to more of the other. They are neither directly nor inversely related. The desire for a cleaner, clearer correspondence between them is understandable, but utterly belied by the facts. Ordinary experience is a trustworthy teacher: Are the holiest people you know the smartest, the best educated, the most widely read?

Click here to read the whole thing.

My latest: a review of Christian Wiman in Comment

It’s called “A Poet’s Faith Against Despair.” The following excerpt comes after the essay’s opening discussion of kataphatic and apophatic talk about God:

You can see why apophasis—as a theory and practice of language, yes, but just as much a style or mood—might appeal to poets. Poetry is the art of saying with words more than words can say. Poets are not masters of words; or, at least, the mastery lies in their recognition of the incapacities of language and their resilience with the failures that result. Is human language metaphysically load-bearing? Poets know the answer is affirmative so long as it’s immediately negated.

Of apophasis in all its varieties, Christian Wiman is a poet without living peer. Or if that’s too grand for you—I wouldn’t really know, since I read poetry the way Wiman reads theology, for nourishment and joy and the prick of provocation, which is to say, not professionally, not with a skeptical and parsimonious eye, which is to say, the way we all read before we’re taught to stop it—then say simply that Wiman’s work stands out from the crowd. Whether he’s writing prose or poetry or something in between, you know his voice at once. In part this is because he’s always writing about the same thing (more on that below, and why it’s not a criticism). What he writes about, though, is indistinguishable from how he writes. That’s what makes him great.

Click here to rest the rest.

Deposits of mercy

Tidal

By R. S. Thomas

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

Three R. S. Thomas poems for Advent/Christmas

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

*

Nativity

The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.

They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.

*

Coming

To be crucified
again? To be made friends
with for his jeans and beard?
Gods are not put to death

any more. Their lot now
is with the ignored.
I think he still comes
stealthily as of old,

invisible as a mutation,
an echo of what the light
said, when nobody
attended; an impression

of eyes, quicker than
to be caught looking, but taken
on trust like flowers in the
dark country toward which we go.

Mary’s gaze

Don’t look up, Christ’s concave golden gaze
unbearable, wholly
beyond, beyond
holy: taste
the gold scent and kiss
the icon laid open, one wing of a book, with
its following eyes and
closed eyelid-like mouth’s
superimposed prints
of lips (as one white rose is
manifested in others, too
infinitely petaled)—this mouth
hiving unnumbered
kisses
of the by now long long dead . . .
I’ve come back to the church
of my mother, of
my own deceased six-year-old
self and his father
as usual absent, and
I look straight ahead and slowly walk
into Mary’s all enfolding
labyrinth-unraveled blue
and white child’s-drawn-
stars-haloed
gaze
made of birds’ sleep
and word-light
and find
without seeking, by
smell and touch only,
HER—
she is home, waiting
visible,
here.

—Franz Wright, third part of “Triptych,” titled “St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church: Minneapolis, 1959,” in Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009), 26-27

“TV" by John Updike

TV

By John Updike

As if it were a tap I turn it on,
not hot or cold but tepid infotainment,
and out it gushes, sparkling evidence
of conflict, misery, concupiscence
let loose on little leashes, in remissions
of eager advertising that envisions
on our behalf the better life contingent
upon some buy, some needful acquisition.

A sleek car takes a curve in purring rain,
a bone-white beach plays host to lotioned skin,
a diaper soothes a graying beauty’s frown,
an unguent eases sedentary pain,
false teeth are brightened, beer enhances fun,
and rinsed hair hurls its tint across the screen:
these spurts of light are drunk in by my brain,
which sickens quickly, till it thirst again.

Denise Levertov: “Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell"

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

By Denise Levertov

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.

Denise Levertov: “On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX"

On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX

By Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”
The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

“This Day" by Denise Levertov

This Day

By Denise Levertov

i

Dry wafer,
sour wine.

This day I see

God’s in the dust,
not sifted

out from confusion.

ii

Perhaps, I thought,
passing the duckpond,
perhaps—seeing the brilliantly somber water
deranged by lost feathers and bits of
drowning bread—perhaps
these imperfections (the ducklings
practised their diving,
stylized feet vigorously cycling among débris)
are part of perfection,
a pristine nuance? our eyes
our lives, too close to the canvas,
enmeshed within
the turning dance,
to see it?

iii

In so many Dutch 17th-century paintings
one perceives
a visible quietness, to which the concord
of lute and harpsichord contribute,
in which a smiling conversation
reposes;
‘calme, luxe,” and—in auburn or mercurial sheen
of vessels, autumnal wealth
of fur-soft table-carpets,
blue snow-gleam of Delft—
‘volupte’; but also the clutter
of fruit and herbs, pots, pans, poultry,
strewn on the floor: and isn’t
the quiet upon them too, in them and of them,
aren’t they wholly at one with the wonder?

iv

Dry wafer,
sour wine:

this day I see

the world, a word
intricately incarnate, offers—
ravelled, honeycombed, veined, stained—
what hunger craves,

a sorrel grass,
a crust,
water,
salt.