Few poems better capture for me the idea that we are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) than William Blake’s “Divine Image.” In the poem, distinctions collapse between God and humans, just as—at the end—so also collapse distinctions between people of different beliefs and faith systems.
Poet and pastor Malcolm Guite says that Blake’s poem captures the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. By taking on human nature, he says, God “becomes involved in, visits, redeems the whole of humanity, not just the chosen people…”
“And what is more,” the poet adds, “when the fullness of God comes to dwell in the fullness of Christ’s humanity, then that mysterious ‘image of God’ in which all humanity was made is at last restored.”
Heaven on earth, in other words, is people embodying Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. Consider memorizing the poem so that, whenever people call upon you to hate others, Blake’s incantatory words will be within you, giving you the strength to resist.
The Divine Image By William Blake
To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.
It’s been less than a month since I shared Maya Angelou’s soaring poem “Still I Rise,” but I turn to it again because I can think of no better lyric to celebrate the nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee for president. In my earlier post, I applied it Simone Biles, who has “And still I rise” tattooed on her chest and who used the poem as inspiration to win multiple medals in the Paris Olympics, including overall gold.
I can find an indirect connection between Biles and Harris. After the event, Biles trolled Donald Trump’s racist remark about immigrants taking “Black jobs” by tweeting out, “I love my Black job.” In Michelle Obama’s powerful convention speech Tuesday night, meanwhile, the former first lady dished out more of the same. Her zinger came after her observation that “Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us” and that “his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.” Then came the punchline. “I want to know,” she added. “who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
While I don’t think that Harris has an Angelou tattoo, I have no doubt that she is well familiar with the poem, which takes on special resonance when applied to her.
For instance, the first stanza mentions African Americans being written down in history with “bitter, twisted lies.” Angelou, of course, is partly talking about racist attempts to erase slavery and Jim Crow from American history books, which we see happening in school districts throughout the south (and not only the south). But Angelou is also writing about her personal experience, as anyone who has read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings knows.
In Harris’s case, meanwhile, Trump’s lies are coming thick and fast, including that she’s “stupid” and “crazy” and that she only recently became Black and that she met with Vladimir Putin and begged him not to invade Ukraine shortly before he did. (Fact check: she has never met with Putin.) Despite it all, however, she keeps going:
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
One thing that particularly grates upon Trump’s nerves is Harris’s laugh, which is full and unapologetic. It infuriates him that she assumes she has full rights to a place at the table. I suspect there’s a pun when Angelou says she walks as though “I’ve got oil wells/ Pumping in my living room.” Striding across the stage with the assurance of a “Bradford millionaire” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot), her legs pumping in high-heeled pumps, Harris confounds those who believe that a Black woman should know her place. In fact, she enters as naturally as, and with the force of, moons and suns and tides:
Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.
One line of attack that has been directed at Harris is a relationship she once had with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (both were single at the time), leading Trump supporters to label the Biden-Harris pair as “Joe and the Ho.” Rather than get defensive, however, Harris—like Angelou—is comfortable in her body:
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
And so we come to a moment in history where this descendant of Jamaican slaves rises up “from a past that’s rooted in pain” to vie for the most powerful position on earth. She is indeed “the dream and the hope of the slave,” and their gift to her is resilience in the face of adversity:
Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
Harris had her own version of this confident self-assertion in last night’s acceptance speech. “My mother had another lesson she used to teach,” she told the assembled delegates. “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”
May Kamala Harris, and may we all, rise into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear.
Delphin Enjolras, Woman Reading in Front of the Fire
Thursday
In the dedication to my new book I write, “To Julia, from the man who loves the pilgrim soul in you.” In doing so, I know that I am slightly misusing W.B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old and Gray” since the Irish poet is writing to a woman who rejected him while I have been married to Julia for 51 years. Nevertheless Julia, like Maud Gonne, is now old and gray (as am I), and she too has what could be called a pilgrim soul. Here’s the poem in full:
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Is Yeats imagining that Gonne is regretting not having accepted the poet’s marriage offer? Perhaps. But he also seems to be acknowledging something she herself told him, that she served his purposes far better as a muse than she would have as a companion. She is quoted as having said to him,
you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
As a result of the rejection, Yeats “paced upon the mountains overhead/ And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” In other words, he attained lyrical poetic heights that a dull marriage might have blunted.
I am no lyrical poet so a dull marriage is fine with me–although I wouldn’t characterize our marriage as dull, even though it appears to the world as fairly conventional. That’s because I know, in a deep way, that Julia has a pilgrim soul. Propelled by a spiritual belief that she can help others touch their best selves, she gives her entire self over to teaching and mothering and grandmothering and community service and prayerful meditation. I sensed this when we first met at Carleton College all those years ago, but it has taken growing old and gray together for me to fully appreciate it.
So now, when we are sitting before our fire—or in the summer, on our screen porch overlooking Lake Eva—I sometimes watch Julia bending over a book and experience a wave of tenderness and admiration. The poem helps me frame what I am seeing.
I’m currently chairing Sewanee’s Friends of the Library committee, an organization committed to raising money for library projects and arranging a series of lectures and presentations. (I have given two card-playing presentations for the series, one on Speculation as it is played in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the other on Ombre from Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock.) We recently gave a framed and beautifully lettered copy of the following poem to two members who are rotating off the committee.
Written by Paul Hamilton Engle, once Iowa’s poet laureate, “Library” reminds us how powerful books can be, which is one reason public and school libraries are under assault by the MAGA at the moment. I love how Engle moves between seeing books as social dynamite and books as a comfort in terrible times. Of course, Engle is talking about all books, not just literature, but his observations apply to poems, plays and stories as well:
Library (written on the 50th Anniversary Reunion of the Coe College Class of 1931)
Fire burns the trembling hand. Cold freezes the fire fingers. Rock breaks the unbending bone.
But books can grasp you by the throat and kill.
Go to a library, listen. You can hear The books inside their bindings breathe aloud. Hear reckless phrases howling from their type, Hear jokes tickling you ear like a fine feather, Hear screams of rage, delight, and agony.
Some books have brutal teeth that snap and bite, Collared like dogs we lead them on a tight leash.
Passions of men and women cry Out of silence from that printed page.
Some books, soft as a hand, caress your hand.
Beware the library, its books are sticks Of dangerous dynamite that men have dropped. When they explode, governments disappear.
Some covers hold ideas like live steam– Open them, they shatter your live face.
The mind is a gun shooting at history. than a rocket’s fuel– The sky’s the limit in a fury of fire.
Libraries are alive, walls tremble, books bounce on their shelves. In terrible times Enter, your life comforted by their lives.
To demonstrate my agreement, here’s a passage from my book Better Living through Literature, released yesterday:
[W]hen English teachers play it safe, they risk underplaying literature’s fierce urgency and its ability to speak directly to our life struggles. Taming literature down to a boring irrelevancy leaves its potential untapped. Students go unchallenged in ways that could lead to real and exhilarating growth.
This is why it’s useful to acquaint ourselves with stories of literature stepping up to the plate during tough times, often in the most unexpected of ways. Who could have predicted a Somali political prisoner falling in love with Anna Karenina or a kidnapped Pakistani girl turning to Little Women?Who could foresee Iranian women, banished from universities by fundamentalist mullahs, recognizing themselves in the character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Dolores Haze? (In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi reports that her students related to how Dolores is trapped in an older man’s fantasies.)
And then there are the South African freedom fighters who, when imprisoned by the apartheid regime, found purchase in the words of various Shakespeare characters. Nelson Mandela responded to Julius Caesar’s “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once”; his confidant Walter Sisulu saw himself in Shylock: “Still have I borne it with a patient shrug / For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”; and future Parliament member Billy Nair saw a kindred soul in Caliban: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother / Which thou tak’st from me.” Why limit literature instruction to rhyme and meter when you could be preparing your students for life?
When I come across stories of people attacking and sometimes banning works of literature, I think of a scene from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991). Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” These contentious conversations about literature are happening because literature wields the power of a loaded gun.
Literature is like Aslan as he is described by Mr. Beaver in C.S. Lewis’s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Lucy asks whether he is safe, Mr. Beaver replies,
Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
Elsewhere Mr. Beaver says, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”
Poems, plays, stories. Not safe. Not tame. But good.
So the day has arrived that I have been working towards for the past 10 years: Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History (Quoir, 2024) has just been released to the world. You can order a copy by going here.
Although I’ve been actively working on the book for just over a decade, its roots go far deeper. All my life I have been fascinated by people’s book choices, in large part because it was wonderful to find kindred souls. As a child, for instance, I loved that the Bastable kids (in the Edith Nesbit series) were enthralled with Kipling’s Jungle Books and that David Copperfield lost himself in Tom Jones and that Tom Sawyer sought to reenact The Count of Monte Cristo. I would have been smitten with Roald Dahl’s Matilda had it been written when I was a child
As I grew older, I realized you could get special insight into people by learning about their favorite books. That’s why, in this endeavor, I delve into why Plato loved The Odyssey, Aristotle Oedipus, Sir Philip Sidney The Aeneid, Karl Marx Robinson Crusoe, Sigmund Freud Hamlet, W.E.B. Du Bois The Three Musketeers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Jane Eyre, and on and on. And of course, from the very beginning of my teaching career I was interested in why my students responded as they did to the books in their lives, whether read in class or out. Better Living through Literature is the culmination of this life-long fascination.
The fascination went further, however. I wasn’t only interested in why people loved (or in some instances, hated) certain books but if and how these books had changed them. I became aware as early as 11 that books could be transformative: that’s when Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird helped me negotiate our community’s desegregation battles. It made sense, therefore, that I would go on to examine what the great thinkers had to say about the matter. As the synopsis on the back of the book reads,
For 2500 years people have been debating how literature changes lives, and versions of those debates continue today in classrooms, school and library boardrooms, and state legislatures. The life-transforming potential of books caught the attention of Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Percy Shelley, and many others…Contending that reading is sometimes like playing with dynamite, Robin Bates brings the issues alive with compelling accounts of stories and poems upending individual lives and sometimes history itself.
From as far back as I can rememberm poems, stories and plays have had (to quote W.B. Yeats) “all my thought and love.” Better Living through Literature grows out of that love. I am honored to be able to share that love with you in book form.
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Monday
I was reading Maria Popova’s reflective and always stimulating weekly essay in The Marginalian yesterday when I came across something that reminded me of a powerful passage in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Memories came flooding back as that passage meant a lot to me when I was mourning my oldest son 25 years ago.
Popova is citing an essay by paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley, who in his 1969 collection The Unexpected Universe observes that venturing into space and landing on the moon “is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion.” The inward world, Eiseley writes, “can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.”
To make his point, Eiseley tells about an accident that led to a life-altering realization. Popova describes the accident:
Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself face-down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling.
Knowing that the blood he is seeing is made of millions of cells, phagocytes, and platelets, Eiseley writes that,
for the first time in my mortal existence, [I] did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as I read it, is about a man who doesn’t fully value his life until he finds himself in a situation like Eiseley’s. In the story, Gawain has been challenged to a beheading contest by a Green Man figure from Celtic mythology: first he cuts off the Green Knight’s head and then, in a year’s time, the Green Knight gets to return the blow. Being essentially a vegetation god, the Green Knight has survived the ordeal, and Gawain knows only too well that he won’t be so fortunate.
But the Green Knight isn’t interested in Gawain’s death. Rather, he wants Gawain to acknowledge that he cares about his life. Gawain thinks that such caring is unmanly. After all, he is a Christian knight and believes he shouldn’t fear death. The nature god considers this an affront.
I have a theory that the poem, coming as it did a few decades (or maybe just a few years) after the Black Plague ravaged Europe, was written to reconcile audiences with Life, which had proved to be spectacularly unreliable. (Europe lost a third of its population!) Perhaps people, suffering from PTSD, figured that downplaying the preciousness of life was a kind of mental insurance against death. If you focus on the next world rather than caring about this one, dying (so the psychological reasoning goes) won’t hurt so much.
Initially Gawain think he can shrug off the fate that awaits him. “Good men can but try,” he says as he goes off to meet up with the Green Knight. Then, throughout the poem, the Green Knight attempts to lure him back to a lust for life. Gawain faces sexual temptation from the knight’s consort (which he resists) and he is given opportunities to turn back. In the end, however, Gawain shows up for his rendezvous with death and rests his head on the chopping block.
Twice the Green Knight feints with his axe, pointing out that Gawain’s flinch means that he cares to some extent about his life. Then this happens, leading to an experience similar to Eiseley’s:
[The Green Knight] gathered up the grim ax and guided it well: Let the barb at the blade’s end brush the bare throat; He hammered down hard, yet harmed him no whit Save a scratch on one side, that severed the skin; The end of the hooked edge entered the flesh, And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth. And when the man beheld his own blood bright on the snow, He sprang a spear’s length with feet spread wide, Seized his high helm, and set it on his head, Shoved before his shoulders the shield at his back, Bares his trusty blade, and boldly he speaks Not since he was a babe born of his mother Was he once in this world one-half so blithe… (Trans. Marie Borroff)
When he sees his blood, which lets him know he is still alive, Gawain feels an immense joy–which is what the Green Knight has been trying to get him to see all along. Life is to be embraced.
In the summer following Justin’s death, I sensed that Sir Gawain had something special to tell me, although I wasn’t at first sure what it was. After I had read it over multiple times, I came to realize that it framed what I was seeing as I looked out my study window at the woods that bordered our lot. I started viewing, with a kind of awe, how nature never stops asserting itself. That year we had a prodigal summer (to borrow Barbara Kingsolver’s phrase), and the grass, catbrier, bushes, and trees kept up their never-ending greening. It may have been a season of death for me, but it was not so for them.
When we feel that life has let us down, as many did in the 14th century and as I did after Justin drowned, our response should not be to turn our backs on it. Rather, we must embrace it all the more fiercely, holding it against our bones (to quote Mary Oliver) and seeing it as the gift that it is.
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Sunday
Victoria Jones at Art and Theology alerted me to this Ana Akhmatova poem. It’s all the more powerful when you realize that the Russian poet lived through two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalin regime. She saw her first husband executed by the Soviet police, her common law second husband die in the Gulag, and her son get imprisoned there as well. Yet she passed up opportunities to emigrate, choosing instead to stay and report on what she witnessed.
In other words, when she writes that “Death’s great black wing scrapes the air” and that “Misery gnaws to the bone,” she knows what she’s talking about. And yet, there’s a reason why we do not despair. Cherry blossoms and a sky that glitters with new galaxies remind us that there is more to life than suffering. This miraculous world comes “so close to the ruined, dirty houses.”
The deepest part of ourselves knows this. The knowledge has been “wild in our breast for centuries.”
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scrapes the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods, cherries blow summer into town; at night the deep transparent skies glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses— something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries.
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Friday
In recent months I have been riveted by the mystery novels of Ireland’s Tana French, so much so that I scrutinized my responses to figure out why. I’ve concluded that it has to do with my anxieties over Trumpism.
Allow me to explain. The best mystery novels are much more than whodunits. Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, tapped into the anxieties that Londoners were feeling about the chaos of urban living. Holmes descends from his cozy apartment into the streets, encounters a murder and a number of seemingly unrelated clues, and then returns to that apartment to explain to Watson the pattern connecting the clues. The new world may initially seem to defy our attempts to make sense of it but we are reassured by the end.
The Tana French novels have their own pattern. In all the ones I have read (spoilers ahead), the killer comes from a tight-knit community that he or she is afraid of losing. This fear is the motive for the violence that ensues. Although the outside forces that threaten the community may be bad, they are not as corrupt as those within.
Trump, of course, has risen to political prominence by playing on White America’s fear that “invaders” are desecrating its idealized vision of itself as Mayfield in the 1957-63 sitcom Leave it to Beaver. These invaders are variously seen as people of color, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ folk, and even Democrats. Trump’s favorite poem—maybe the only poem he knows—captures the danger he sees:
On her way to work one morning Down the path alongside the lake A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew “Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you” Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful,” she cried “But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died” Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite “I saved you,” cried that woman “And you’ve bitten me, even why? And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m gonna die” “Oh, shut up, silly woman,” said that reptile with a grin “Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”
With Trump, of course, every attack is an inadvertent confession. While he and his fans think the poem is about brown-skinned people that we have allowed into the country, the real snake has been Trump himself. The nation took him into its highest office and he responded with a vicious bite.
Now look at the pattern in French’s novels.
In The Likeness, a tightly knit group of college friends—they’re almost incestuous–is infiltrated by an impostor, who wins their trust but whom they then kill when it turns out that she plans to betray them.
In The Faithful Place, the narrator seeks to escape his suffocating family and his suffocating community with his girlfriend, only to have her disappear on him. Years later he learns that she was killed by his brother, who resented how the narrator was leaving him to take care of the family.
In The Secret Place, a girl who is in love with her friendship group kills a boy that she sees threatening their unity.
In The Trespasser, the killer turns out to be in the police unit that is investigating a murder. In this instance, the tight community is the police force, and the rookie cops investigating it must confront the corruption of their superiors.
In The Hunter, a former Chicago police detective thinks he has found, in a seemingly idyllic Irish community, respite from a life of chasing murderers. Against his will, however, he is persuaded to investigate a disappearance and learns that his folksy neighbors—fearful that one of their own is bringing in a big city drug gang—have killed the man. The detective discovers who the killers are but decides not to expose them in order to preserve the community.
The Searcher, which involves the same detective, has a version of the same plot. Once again one of the community’s own brings in a crook, with whose aid he hopes to scam everyone out of their savings. The crook ends up dead and the local who brought him in is suspected of the murder and flees. The real murderer, another of the townspeople, is again allowed to escape justice.
I haven’t yet read In the Woods, Broken Harbor, or The Witch Elm.
In some ways, Tana French reminds me of Faulkner, describing a tight knit world that appears increasingly corrupt the deeper you look. That is how many of us were feeling about an America that could elect and possibly reelect Trump. As long as Americans seemed likely to propel this snake to the White House, French’s ambiance fit my prevailing mood.
Things don’t seem so dark at the moment. But, like French’s courageous and honest detectives, we need to keep fighting if we want a different ending.
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Thursday
My jaw dropped recently after receiving word from two friends, Scott Lee and Valerie Hotchkiss, that the pope has passionately and intelligently endorsed literature. Given the Catholic Church’s long and dark history of banning books, I initially wondered whether this was another Francis apology tour for past church misbehavior.
Francis may indeed have past church book bans in mind, but his letter goes far beyond any apology. Rather, he sees literature as absolutely essential to our spiritual, intellectual, and physical well-being. The letter is one of the most extraordinary defenses I have encountered, up there with those of Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley.
To look at the Vatican’s dark past for a moment, here a list of some of the works that have have, over the centuries, appeared on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum or Index of Prohibited Books:
–Dante, The Divine Comedy (partially redacted) –Boccaccio, The Decameron —John Milton, Paradise Lost –Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil –Jean Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Éloise –all of Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy novels –Stendahl, The Red and the Black –Victor Hugo, Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris –Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo –Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Salambo –all of Émile Zola’s work (with Nana singled out) –all of André Gide’s work –all of Jean Paul Sartre’s work –all of Alberto Moravia’s work –Nicolai Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
Francis begins by saying that he wrote his letter originally to point out how literature can contribute to “the path of personal maturity” for Catholic priests but adds that “this subject also applies to the formation of all those engaged in pastoral work, indeed of all Christians.” You can read the letter in its entirety here, but I have pulled out some of the highlights. I quote Francis directly because he articulates his points so well:
–In moments of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer itself does not help us find inner serenity, a good book can help us weather the storm until we find peace of mind. Time spent reading may well open up new interior spaces that help us to avoid becoming trapped by a few obsessive thoughts that can stand in the way of our personal growth.
–A book demands greater personal engagement on the part of its reader [than audio-visual media]. Readers in some sense rewrite a text, enlarging its scope through their imagination, creating a whole world by bringing into play their skills, their memory, their dreams and their personal history, with all its drama and symbolism. In this way, what emerges is a text quite different from the one the author intended to write. A literary work is thus a living and ever-fruitful text, always capable of speaking in different ways and producing an original synthesis on the part of each of its readers. In our reading, we are enriched by what we receive from the author and this allows us in turn to grow inwardly, so that each new work we read will renew and expand our worldview.
–I would agree with the observation of one theologian that “literature… originates in the most irreducible core of the person, that mysterious level [of their being]… Literature is life, conscious of itself, that reaches its full self-expression through the use of all the conceptual resources of language.”
–Literature…has to do, in one way or another, with our deepest desires in this life, for on a profound level literature engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences.
–In the end, our hearts always seek something greater, and individuals will find their own way in literature. I, for my part, love the tragedians, because we can all embrace their works as our own, as expressions of our own personal drama. In weeping for the fate of their characters, we are essentially weeping for ourselves, for our own emptiness, shortcomings and loneliness. Naturally, I am not asking you to read the same things that I did. Everyone will find books that speak to their own lives and become authentic companions for their journey. There is nothing more counterproductive than reading something out of a sense of duty, making considerable effort simply because others have said it is essential. On the contrary, while always being open to guidance, we should select our reading with an open mind, a willingness to be surprised, a certain flexibility and readiness to learn, trying to discover what we need at every point of our lives.
–How can we reach the core of cultures ancient and new if we are unfamiliar with, disregard or dismiss their symbols, messages, artistic expressions and the stories with which they have captured and evoked their loftiest ideals and aspirations, as well as their deepest sufferings, fears and passions? How can we speak to the hearts of men and women if we ignore, set aside or fail to appreciate the “stories” by which they sought to express and lay bare the drama of their lived experience in novels and poems?
–From a practical point of view, many scientists argue that the habit of reading has numerous positive effects on people’s lives, helping them to acquire a wider vocabulary and thus develop broader intellectual abilities. It also stimulates their imagination and creativity, enabling them to learn to tell their stories in richer and more expressive ways. It also improves their ability to concentrate, reduces levels of cognitive decline, and calms stress and anxiety.
–Even more, reading prepares us to understand and thus deal with various situations that arise in life. In reading, we immerse ourselves in the thoughts, concerns, tragedies, dangers and fears of characters who in the end overcome life’s challenges. Perhaps too, in following a story to the end, we gain insights that will later prove helpful in our own lives.
–When I think of literature, I am reminded of what the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges used to tell his students, namely that the most important thing is simply to read, to enter into direct contact with literature, to immerse oneself in the living text in front of us, rather than to fixate on ideas and critical comments. Borges explained this idea to his students by saying that at first they may understand very little of what they are reading, but in any case they are hearing “another person’s voice”. This is a definition of literature that I like very much: listening to another person’s voice. We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us! We immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of “spiritual deafness”, which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with God, no matter how much theology or psychology we may have studied….This approach to literature, which makes us sensitive to the mystery of other persons, teaches us how to touch their hearts.
–T.S. Eliot, the poet whose poetry and essays, reflecting his Christian faith, have an outstanding place in modern literature, perceptively described today’s religious crisis as that of a widespread emotional incapacity. If we are to believe this diagnosis, the problem for faith today is not primarily that of believing more or believing less with regard to particular doctrines. Rather, it is the inability of so many of our contemporaries to be profoundly moved in the face of God, his creation and other human beings. Here we see the importance of working to healing and enrich our responsiveness. On returning from my Apostolic Journey to Japan, I was asked what I thought the West has to learn from the East. My response was, “I think that the West lacks a bit of poetry”.
–What profit, then, does a priest gain from contact with literature? Why is it necessary to consider and promote the reading of great novels as an important element in priestly paideia?… Let us try to answer these questions by listening to what the German theologian [Karl Rhaner] has to tell us. For Rahner, the words of the poet are full of nostalgia, as it were, they are like “gates into infinity, gates into the incomprehensible. They call upon that which has no name. They stretch out to what cannot be grasped.” Poetry “does not itself give the infinite, it does not bring and contain the infinite.” That is the task of the word of God and, as Rahner goes on to say, “the poetic word calls upon the word of God.” For Christians, the Word is God, and all our human words bear traces of an intrinsic longing for God, a tending towards that Word. It can be said that the truly poetic word participates analogically in the Word of God, as the Letter to the Hebrews clearly states (cf. Heb 4:12-13).
–As far as content is concerned, we should realize that literature is like “a telescope”, to use a well-known image of Marcel Proust. As such, it is pointed at beings and things, and enables us to realize “the immense distance” that separates the totality of human experience from our perception of it. “Literature can also be compared to a photo lab, where pictures of life can be processed in order to bring out their contours and nuances. This is what literature is ‘for’: it helps us to ‘develop’ the picture of life,” to challenge us about its meaning, and, in a word, to experience life as it is.
–In terms of the use of language, reading a literary text places us in the position of “seeing through the eyes of others,” thus gaining a breadth of perspective that broadens our humanity. We develop an imaginative empathy that enables us to identify with how others see, experience and respond to reality. Without such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, mercy. In reading we discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone.
–In reading about violence, narrowness or frailty on the part of others, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of these realities. By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understand others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition. Judgement is certainly needed, but we must never forget its limited scope. Judgement must never issue in a death sentence, eliminating persons or suppressing our humanity for the sake of a soulless absolutizing of the law.
–The wisdom born of literature instils in the reader greater perspective, a sense of limits, the ability to value experience over cognitive and critical thinking, and to embrace a poverty that brings extraordinary riches. By acknowledging the futility and perhaps even the impossibility of reducing the mystery of the world and humanity to a dualistic polarity of true vs false or right vs wrong, the reader accepts the responsibility of passing judgement, not as a means of domination, but rather as an impetus towards greater listening. And at the same time, a readiness to partake in the extraordinary richness of a history which is due to the presence of the Spirit, but is also given as a grace, an unpredictable and incomprehensible event that does not depend on human activity, but redefines our humanity in terms of hope for salvation.
At one point in his letter, Francis worries about what happens when literature is seen as non-essential. He is talking about the education of seminarians, but his observation extends to everyone. Dismissing literature as a frill, he contends, “can lead to the serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests, who will be deprived of that privileged access which literature grants to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual.”
He also talks about his own teaching experiences in Argentina. When he encountered students who wanted to read the contemporary poet Garcia Lorca rather than the canonical El Cid, he decided to discuss Lorca in class while having the students read El Cid at home. In the process, he discovered that discussing the contemporary poet led his students to appreciate the older one.
I can’t say much more in response to Francis’s letter than a loud “Amen!”
