for he has forgotten self

Seamus Heaney - St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?St Kevin and the blackbird
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

... singing is the breath of the spirit that consecrates the act of existence.

- Natalie Curtis, The Indian's Book (1907)

 You cannot turn your back on today's technological culture (and the
western philosophy which lies behind it) and ignore it, but you can
study it without feelings of inferiority, and judge or condemn it - as
is your right - not for its few good things, but on the points which
have effectively convinced you, after serious study, that this
civilization as it now stands constitutes a deadly threat to the
possibility of living an acceptable life, to that which in ancient
philosophy, we say it for one last time, was seen as man's ultimate
aim, and which it called the best life.

- Zissimos Lorenzatos, Second Notebook 1975

Three conditions for asking

There are three conditions, though, for asking a question. The first is that we genuinely seek to learn - not to doubt, ridicule, dismiss, reject. The second is that we accept limits to our understanding. Not everything is intelligible at any given moment.  This should induce in us a certain humility. Not every answer survives the test of time. Not everything that we do not understand is intelligible. Faith is not opposed to questions, but is opposed to the shallow certainty that we think at the moment is all there is. Third is that when it comes to the faith, we learn by living and understand by doing. We learn to understand music by listening to music. We learn to appreciate literature by reading literature. There is no way of understanding Shabbat without keeping Shabbat, no way of appreciating how Jewish laws of family purity enhance a marriage without observing them. Judaism, like music, is something that can only be understood from the inside, by immersing yourself in it..... every question asked in reverence is the start of a journey towards God.

- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Haggadah

there is a measure

... the civilization which is now in the process of being formed... is not only a civilization wholly other than those which have appeared up until now, but in addition is, I would say, a different world altogether. In our years, technology, whether or not that was its intention, is well on the way to destroying everywhere the systems which - as we said - were initially based on agriculture and animal husbandry, in East and West, and to abandon both them and the ancient cosmologies, philosophical visions, religions and myths, as well as the question which is of most moment for the whole world, physically and metaphysically: what for man constitutes the 'best life', as the Greeks formulated it. And it has not set out to destroy these systems alone, but every system or vision like them which has sustained smaller groups of human beings within the world, from the jungle to the steppe and from the savannah to the tundra.... If technological civilization in the course of its progress - whether this will be long or short we do not know - oversteps those difficult limits which the agricultural civilization knew as 'measure', μετρα in Greek (whether by doing physical damage or metaphysical harm), we can be sure that the Erinyes, 'the handmaidens of justice', will find the transgressor, track him down, and stop him. This law, one of the great themes of an age-old spirituality, has always functioned on all levels, for it was formulated not only in the Greek world around 500 BC by Heraclitus and the Tragedians, but before them by the Hebrews in the Psalms: 'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over' and in the Proverbs: 'Remove not the ancient landmark, that thy fathers have set'.

- Zissimos Lorenzatos, Second Notebook 1975

Within the realm of grace

I am and I am not a universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and he has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, he has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: “There is therefore now no condemnation. . . .” All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not.

"But I am not a universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of his already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment. No one is ever kicked out at the end of those parables who wasn’t included in at the beginning.

- Robert Farrar Capon

Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him

The closer one comes to the end of life, the stronger is his love for the dead. Is this not a premonition of meeting them? You joyfully sense not only them, but also the setting and things associated with them - objects, an old Gospel, a chair, a forest path, the smell of hay, the sound of bells. Apparently, nothing ever dies of what a person somehow needed on earth, of what somehow brought him toward God. Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him. If, as Dionysios the Areopagite said, 'all things pre-exist in God', it is impossible for anything good - whether now, in the past, or in the future - to not exist in God. We will encounter everything - all the warmth of the earth, everything cleansed and holy; it will seize and embrace us, and we will never more be separated from it. We are not going to a Hindu Nirvana, but to the House of God, where we will use our eyes to search for, and will find everyone whom we had come to love on earth.

 

-  Sergei Fudel, At The Walls Of The Church

The uncompromising acceptance of death which is so characteristic of this culture is assisted by the fact that the people are no strangers to it, and from their earliest years they see the older generations one by one succumbing to the onset of infirmity which, it is accepted without fuss, will lead to the stones of the burial ground. Children are allowed freely into rooms where people are sitting with the dead, they see the open coffins of the Orthodox funeral, and with the rest of the congregation they go up to kiss the dead person at the end of the funeral service in the ritual of ‘the last farewell’. And the community’s physical care for the body does not end with the funeral service, for after the required number of years in the ground the bones are dug up by the relatives to be washed with water and wine, put in the church over Saturday night and Sunday morning, and then set aside in the ossuary. The exhumation is an encounter with the nature of physical existence so sharp that invariably someone is moved to remark involuntarily, ‘Look at what we are!’ or, ‘That’s what man is—a handful of little bones’, and someone else to reply, ‘We are only temporary here’. So the dissolution of the flesh is in its own terms the final reality, and this is faced with a certain robust realism which defies any easy comfort referring to the life of the soul in paradise: ‘A fat lot I’ll see when I’m under the earth!’ and ‘No-one’s come back to tell us!’ It is an acceptance of death firmly based on a repeated confrontation with the limits of physical existence — a continual following through of the cycle of life from the birth of a child onto the earth from which it came, to the return of the body to the earth when that life is finished.

But although the people accept death, because they must, they do not thereby weaken in their love of life. It is this life in which people eat, drink, and feel the light of the sun, in which they dance, laugh, and love, which is celebrated with such passion, this life in which even the simplest things occasion the most profound delight—the planting of chickpeas in the vineyard so that the worker among the vines can ‘go eating’, a drink of cold water from a mountain spring, a special find of mushrooms in the autumn which are borne back pierced through one after the other on a long withy, the use of the round leaves of the arbutus as spoons to scoop off the froth from buckets of new milk, or the rosy translucent vein of pine wood which smells wonderfully of resin and burns with a brilliant flare. It is this world of precise and personal experiences that represents life, and this world which man, because he cannot bear to leave it, leaves behind to his children who inherit it in his stead and in their turn re-people it and hold the past in their memories.

- Juliet du Boulay, The Violence of Death, in Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (2009)

 [In memory of Subdeacon Joseph Woog (August 14, 1944 - August 5, 2013)]

Ithaka - C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

Edwin Muir: The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.


But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

- Edwin Muir

It makes a terrible mess,
said the Cup,
But I love running over.

- James Broughton, High Kukus

Outwitting hell With human obviousness.

Cattivo Tempo

Sirocco brings the minor devils
A slamming of doors
At four in the morning
Announces they are back,
Grown insolent and fat
On cheesy literature
and corny dramas,
Nibbar, demon
of ga-ga and bêtise,
Tubervillus, demon
Of gossip and spite.

Nibbar to the writing-room
Plausibly to whisper
The nearly  fine,
The almost true;
Beware of him, poet,
Lest, reading over
Your shoulder, he find
What makes him glad,
The manner arch,
The meaning blurred,
The poem bad.

Tubervillus to the dining-room
Intently to listen,
Waiting his cue;
Beware of him, friends,
Lest the talk at his prompting
Take the wrong turning,
The unbated tongue
In mischief blurt
The half-home-truth,
The fun turn ugly,
The jokes hurt.

Do not underrate them; merely
To tear up the poem,
To shut the mouth
Will defeat neither:
To have got you alone
Self-confined to your bedroom
Manufacturing there
From lewdness or self-care
Some whinging unmanaged
Imp of your own,
That too is their triumph.

The proper riposte is to bore them;
To scurry the dull pen
Through dull correspondence,
To wag the sharp tongue
in pigeon Italian,
Asking the socialist
Barber to guess
Or the monarchist fisherman to tell
When the wind will change,
Outwitting hell
With human obviousness.

- W. H. Auden