Spiritual Sunday
It has become a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver poem every Easter. Although the poet, who died this past Thursday, wasn’t overtly religious, many of her poems are dramas of grace intervening in a fallen world. She strikes me as the kind of Christian that Emily Dickinson was, finding God privately in the natural world and worshipping no less ardently than those who attend church. As she says in “How I Go to the Woods,”
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Once one starts looking for Christian imagery in Oliver, one finds it everywhere. Consider, for instance, “The Fawn”:
Sunday morning and mellow as
precious metal
The church bells rang, but I went
To the woods instead.
While there, she encounters a fawn, which she says is like engaging with a joyful text. The church bells that set the stage for the encounter conclude it as well:
I did not touch him.
I only sang, and when the doe came back
Calling out to him dolefully
And he turned and followed her into the trees,
Still I sang,
Not knowing how to end such a joyful text,
Until far off the bells once
more tipped and tumbled
And rang through the morning, announcing
The going forth of the blessed.
“Egrets” also invokes Christian imagery, even though it does so elliptically. There are the thorns that remind us of Jesus’s crown of thorns while the “black and empty” pond recall the black and empty tomb. The three egrets, meanwhile, call to my mind the “three trees on the low sky” of T. S. Eiot’s “Journey of the Magi,” an image of Calvary that is transformed by a miraculous birth.
In Oliver’s vision, faith transcends logic if one has faith in the world:
Egrets
Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and whining.
And that’s how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets—
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them—
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.
Mary Oliver aspired to such faith in the world. Let us pray that she has softly opened her wings and stepped over every dark thing.
Further thought: I learned today from our rector Rob Lamborn’s sermon that Oliver is an Episcopalian, my own denomination. When I mentioned that Oliver hides her Christianity, Rob wryly observed that this is typical of Episcopalians.
Because today’s Gospel reading is Jesus turning water into wine, Rob read an Oliver poem that alludes to the miracle. Oliver observes that the power of language and the “felt ferocity” of love is the real miracle:
Why worry about the loaves and fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.
