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Sunday
Victoria Emily Jones’s Art & Theology blog is must reading for those interested in how literature can deepen one’s spiritual life. A few weeks ago she reported on a fascinating interview with author and poetry teacher Abram van Engen on “why Christians in particular should read poetry.” At one points he notes how literature can speak to us in ways deeper than expository prose:
I often think that ministers in particular—and especially the heavier the preaching tradition, the more true this is—need creative literature—poetry, novels, and other things—to enliven what it is they’re doing from the pulpit. Not just to understand human life in all of its flourishing and misery, but to connect to people in different kinds of way than pure principle and message can do.
The observation reminds me of the poem “Windows” by 17th century poet George Herbert, who points out the difference between transparent glass and stained glass. The former, like Engen’s “pure principle and message,” fails to convey God’s “light and glory.” Unless preachers “anneal in glass thy story,” Herbert writes, God’s “eternal word” appears “waterish, bleak, and thin”:
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy preachers, then the light and glory More reverend grows, and more doth win; Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
Of course, Herbert’s own version of conveying God’s shining is through poetry.
In her blog post, Jones also cites pastor and author Russ Ramsey and singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken, who talk about how one should, essentially, read the Bible as literature:
Scripture calls for reading with a fully engaged imagination, Ramsey says, because that’s how literature works and that’s how people work. “How are you supposed to understand Scripture if you’re not trying to empathize or get into a situation and walk around inside of it?” he asks. They discuss wonder, mystery, and paradox—the unresolved dissonance and complexity present in many Bible stories—and the need to take a Bible story on its own terms instead of always trying to extract a moral or “life application” from it.
Jones notes that the two are
basically advocating for Ignatian contemplation, a.k.a. the Ignatian method of Bible reading and prayer, in which you put yourself into the story and try to experience it with all your senses.
Ramsey provides a fascinating example. Since Mary had recently anointed Jesus with nard (much to Judas’s displeasure), that means he would have smelled “opulent” when he was being arrested, tried, flogged, and crucified. Ramsey imagines a first-century Christian thinking, “He left a lingering scent as he went down the Via Dolorosa, and it was the scent of royalty. And it was the scent of extravagance.”
Poets who take up Biblical themes, either directly or indirectly, have therefore something particularly valuable to offer us. The Bible is not only poetry and fiction and drama itself but it invites poetic and fictional and theatrical interpretation (as the works I share on Sundays make clear). Just as poets “tell the truth but tell it slant” (to quote Emily Dickinson), so literature that echoes Biblical language and literature that explores Biblical stories is a way of engaging with spirit at the deepest level. And this includes literary works that have been condemned by church establishments, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Molière’s Tartuffe, D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died, and Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ.
Of course, a work doesn’t have to deal specifically with religious themes to be spiritual. God moves through us in all kinds of ways. The best poetry and fiction gives us glimpses of that movement.
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Friday
Poet Tess Taylor has turned to Mary Oliver’s prose poem “Don’t Hesitate” to express the change in mood Democrats are experiencing since Kamala Harris became their nominee. Here’s the poem:
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Taylor savors the final sentence, noting that
it reminds me that joy is maybe so much bigger than we often let it be. It’s no crumb but the whole pie, the full nutty loaf, the full raucous potluck. Joy might be the meal that sustains us. Noticing joy can be a guiding force, helping us name what matters in our lives. Joy, Oliver suggests, helps us discern what we love, and, just maybe, helps us figure out how we want to live.
Taylor finds that joy in the Harris/Walz campaign. “It’s telling,” she writes,
that one of the signs that Kamala Harris might be an awesome candidate is that right now, she helps us imagine a world where we are happy and happier together. She seems, well, joyful. As much as I love Harris, (and I really do), the end of this column is not really about her. It’s about the fact that it’s important to discover our joy. When we find that joy, it’s important to savor it. And it’s important to let that joy point us toward naming the big dreams about what our lives might feel like.
Perhaps Taylor is thinking of Harris’s laugh or how she and her running mate Tim Walz are calling themselves “happy warriors.” There’s certainly been a shift from the constant worry many of us were experiencing as Trump, bolstered by the mainstream media, battered Joe Biden over his age. Optics seemed to matter far more than substance.
The substance pretty much remains the same with the succession but the optics have changed radically. The slogan “Make America Laugh Again” appears to be driving Trump crazy. It’s as though we have spent years in an abusive relationship and have finally packed up our bags and walked out of the house.
The shift has me wondering if we have been far more traumatized by the Covid pandemic and the Trump presidency than we realized. We’ve been hunkered down so long in a defensive crouch—holding our breaths as we prayed that Joe Biden would hang on and that our Trumpian nightmare wouldn’t return—that we forgot what it was like to breathe freely.
Then the transition to Kamala Harris occurred and we realized (in Oliver’s words) that “life has some possibility left.” There’s no doubt that this “way of fighting back” against the darkness is far, far better “than all the riches or power in the world.” People are so starved for joy that they are packing into Harris and Walz’s rallies, with the result that we are watching Donald Trump melt down before our very eyes.
The moment seems even more powerful than the Barack Obama ascendancy and not because Harris is more charismatic than Obama (although she has plenty of charisma of her own). Rather, she and Walz are modeling the positivity that we’ve desperately needed. If Trump gave Americans a permission structure to indulge in grievance, Harris is giving us cause to hope again.
A sizable portion of the electorate sensed the instant that the joy began, which Oliver tells us is “often the case.” So don’t be afraid of joy’s plenty. Don’t fret about the honeymoon ending or about a possible letdown. Rather, stand fully in the joy. That crumb is enough, and more than enough, to make a full meal.
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Thursday
I always love learning about the favorite literary works of well-known figures as my mind instantly goes into motion to figure out why. Reading a blog post by basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I learned that, growing up, he was a fan of one of my childhood favorites, Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. That tidbit appears in a wonderfully reflective essay about the importance of art in our lives. Here’s what Abdul-Jabbar has to say:
Most people remember books they read as children that opened their eyes to new possibilities and nudged them in a different direction in life. That, too, is the purpose of art.
For me, many books inspired me, but two books come immediately to mind. Alone in my room, I was barely a teen when I read Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. It was exciting and suspenseful with lots of swordplay, intrigue, and betrayal. But it taught me something about teamwork, about being part of a group that was more important than the individual. I spent most of my youth and adulthood as part of a team in which we celebrated “All for one and one for all.” The passage occurs when D’Artagnan and the three musketeers decide to go all in on their feud with Cardinal Richelieu. You can see why a champion like Abdul-Jabbar would find it so thrilling:
“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?” “And yet—” said Porthos. “Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once. Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by D’Artagnan: “All for one, one for all.” “That’s well! Now let us everyone retire to his own home,” said D’Artagnan, as if he had done nothing but command all his life; “and attention! For from this moment we are at feud with the cardinal.”
The other book Abdul-Jabbar mentions, incidentally, is The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
It so happens that another fan of The Three Musketeers was W.E.B. Du Bois. In Souls of Black Folk, the great author, activist, and founder of the NAACP writes,
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.
I devote a chapter to Du Bois in my forthcoming book Better Living through Literature because of the importance he attached to literature. Challenging African American authors to be courageous, in his essay “Criteria of Negro Art” he writes that
it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth — not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness — goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right — not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.
In my book I speculate that Du Bois drew on the musketeers’ “all for one” slogan when he was founding the NAACP. Abdul-Jabbar has made me more confident in this speculation.
I’m pretty sure, from reading Abdul-Jabbar’s essay, that he is familiar with Du Bois’s writing on art and literature. And one point he writes that, whereas science shows us the possibilities of life and business the practicalities,
art shows us how to better enjoy life. What is the point of science prolonging life and business building better homes if we are miserable in that longer life and those comfortable homes?
Abdul-Jabbar opens his essay with a quote from Trappist monk, author and poet Thomas Merton—“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time’’—and talks about how it has worked this way on him. He says that art helped him in his identity quest, discovering “who I was and who I wasn’t,” and also made him realize that, to become part of a team that was bigger than him, he needed to lose his childish ego. And that’s not all that art has done for him:
Art helps one find the joy in life and reveals the source of pain so it can be addressed. But it also is a celebration of our individual and group values. We build statues of people we admire so that we can emulate them. We don’t always get it right, but like I just mentioned, getting it wrong is also part of the journey.
He also quotes Aristotle about how art helps us see beyond the outward appearance of things. And not only that. Art is also fun, he points out, citing a Richard Wilbur poem to make his point:
Finally, art is entertainment. It can be a delightful distraction from the daily dark of routine and struggles. A chance to catch our breath and regroup for tomorrow. That makes me think of the poem “The Juggler” by Richard Wilbur in which the audience watches the juggler juggling a table, a plate, and a broom—the symbols of their heavy daily responsibilities—as if they were weightless. When he’s done, the audience bursts into thunderous applause for lightening their load:
For him we batter our hands Who has won for once over the world’s weight.
Here’s the poem in its entirety:
A ball will bounce; but less and less. It’s not A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience. Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls So in our hearts from brilliance, Settles and is forgot. It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls
To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands, Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres Grazing his finger ends, Cling to their courses there, Swinging a small heaven about his ears.
But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all Than the earth regained, and still and sole within The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble He reels that heaven in, Landing it ball by ball, And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.
Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom’s Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry: The boys stamp, and the girls Shriek, and the drum booms And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.
If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands In the dust again, if the table starts to drop Through the daily dark again, and though the plate Lies flat on the table top, For him we batter our hands Who has won for once over the world’s weight.
I like the way Wilbur describes applause as battering our hands. It is a reminder of “the daily dark” in which we spend much of our lives. Art gives us momentary reprieve, prompting Abdul-Jabbar to conclude with the following piece of advice:
As you venture forth today, notice the art that surrounds you, enlightens you, and lifts you. And rejoice.
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Wednesday
As the Olympic games have me looking up classical references (see yesterday’s post), here’s the description of the foot race in The Aeneid, held in honor of the recent death of Aeneas’s father Anchises. Note that it’s a much more chaotic affair than our own races—although having said that, I notice that there was controversy in the women’s 5000 meter race yesterday involving a Kenyan and an Ethiopian runner. The Ethiopian accused Faith Kipyegon of obstructing her during the race, which led to Kipyegon being stripped of her silver medal, although it was later restored on appeal.
In Virgil’s race, one runner has the race all but won until he has an unfortunate mishap involving blood on the track:
[O]n hearing the signal, they left the barrier and shot onto the course, streaming out like a storm cloud, gaze fixed on the goal. Nisus was off first, and darted away, ahead of all the others, faster than the wind or the winged lightning-bolt: Salius followed behind him, but a long way behind: then after a space Euryalus was third: Helymus pursued Euryalus, and there was Diores speeding near him, now touching foot to foot, leaning at his shoulder: if the course had been longer he’d have slipped past him, and left the outcome in doubt. Now, wearied, almost at the end of the track, they neared the winning post itself, when the unlucky Nisus fell in some slippery blood, which when the bullocks were killed had chanced to drench the ground and the green grass. Here the youth, already rejoicing at winning, failed to keep his sliding feet on the ground, but fell flat, straight in the slimy dirt and sacred blood.
Realizing he can’t win, Nisus figures that he can at least help out his lover Euryalus, who is also in the race. (Euryalus, we’ve learned earlier, is “famed for his beauty, and in the flower of his youth.”)Therefore he deliberately trips up one of their competitors:
But [Nisus] didn’t forget Euryalus even then, nor his love: but, picking himself up out of the wet, obstructed Salius, who fell head over heels onto the thick sand.
As a result, Euryalus is first across the finish line:
Euryalus sped by and, darting onwards to applause and the shouts of his supporters, took first place, winning with his friend’s help. Helymus came in behind him, then Diores, now in third place.
Needless to say, Salius does not take this well:
At this Salius filled the whole vast amphitheatre, and the faces of the foremost elders, with his loud clamour, demanding to be given the prize stolen from him by a trick.
So what is the referee (Aeneas) to do? He comes close to using the Dodo’s strategy in Alice in Wonderland following the confusing race amongst all the animals that have fallen into the pool of tears: “Everyone has won and all must have prizes.” This means giving Salius a consolation prize:
Then Aeneas the leader said, “Your prizes are still yours, lads, and no one is altering the order of attainment: but allow me to take pity on an unfortunate friend’s fate. So saying he gives Salius the huge pelt of a Gaetulian lion, heavy with shaggy fur, its claws gilded.
But if Aeneas is giving out pity awards, then Nisus figures he deserves somethng as well. After all, he would have won had he not slipped in the ceremonial blood. No problem, says Aeneas:
At this Nisus comments: “If these are the prizes for losing, and you pity the fallen, what fitting gift will you grant to Nisus, who would have earned first place through merit if ill luck had not dogged me, as it did Salius?” And with that he shows his face and limbs drenched with foul mud. The best of leaders smiles at him, and orders a shield to be brought, the work of Didymaon, once unpinned by the Greeks from Neptune’s sacred threshold: this outstanding prize he gives to the noble youth.
By this time, it’s starting to sound like Aeneas is handing out participation trophies, which I remember well from when I was coaching my kids’ soccer teams. These were important for when the kids were little, but it didn’t take long for the adults—and even some of the kids—to become heartily sick of them.
Then again, we weren’t giving the kids shields and horses. Or, as Aeneas does following a sailing race, a Cretan born slave-girl. Seen in this light, the modern Olympic committee is getting away cheap by limiting its awards to gold, silver and bronze medals.
Further thought: Virgil tells us that Euryalus, who won only because his lover cheated on his behalf, might not have fared quite so well had he not been so good looking. We are told, “His popularity protects Euryalus, and fitting tears,/ and ability is more pleasing in a beautiful body.” Some things never change.
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Tuesday
Somehow it happens every four years: I declare that I’m going to resist getting sucked into the Olympics and then I get sucked into the Olympics. Yesterday it seemed a matter of utmost importance whether the sublime Swedish poll vaulter Armand Duplantis would break his own world record. (He’d already won the gold so was only competing against himself at this point.) And whether Noah Lyles would stay on track to add the 200-meter gold to his 100-meter gold. And whether a Kenyan or an Ethiopian would win the 5000-meter race. And so on. Every day has moments like this.
As I watched Lyles win the “fastest man in the world” race on Sunday, I thought of the race in The Odyssey, which may have been composed around the time that the first Olympics was being held (8th or 7th century BCE for The Odyssey, 776 BCE for the first Olympics). The race where the Phaiakians compete against each other is far less exciting than the Lyles race. Then again, at a quarter mile this race would be 400 meters, not Lyles’s 100 meters:
The runners, first, must have their quarter mile. All lined up tense; then Go! and down the track they raised the dust in a flying bunch, strung out longer and longer behind Prince Klytoneus. By just so far as a mule team, breaking ground, will distance oxen, he left all behind and came up to the crowd, an easy winner.
There were no oxen in this race, which everyone ran under ten seconds (!!). Lyles beat out his Jamaican opponent by .005 seconds, leaning just enough to take the victory.
The Phaiakians have other Olympic sports as well:
Then they made room for wrestling—grinding bouts that Seareach won, pinning the strongest men; then the broad jump; first place went to Seabelt; Sparwood gave the discus the mightiest fling, and Prince Laodamas outboxed them all.
At this point the prince turns to Odysseus, who has just survived drowning and so is not exactly in shape. When one of the contestants baits him, however, the Ithacan king has to prove his mettle. I thought of this moment when American athlete Valarie Allman won her second straight Olympic gold medal in the discus:
[Odysseus] leapt out, cloaked as he was, and picked a discus, a rounded stone, more ponderous than those already used by the Phaiakian throwers, and, whirling, let it fly from his great hand with a low hum. The crowd went flat on the ground all those oar-pulling, seafaring Phaiakians— under the rushing noise. The spinning disk soared out, fight as a bird, beyond all others. Disguised now as a Phaiakian, Athena staked it and called out: “Even a blind man, friend, could judge this, finding with his fingers one discus, quite alone, beyond the cluster. Congratulations; this event is yours; not a man here can beat you or come near you.”
I wonder whether, following a successful contest, the gold-medal athletes feel as though a god is announcing their victory. Athena’s words certainly apply to that magnificent pole vault.
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Monday
With Kamala Harris having just wrapped up the Democratic nomination (!), I’m reconfiguring an essay I wrote four years ago after Joe Biden chose her as his running mate. When I learned that Harris’s first name means “lotus” in Sanskrit, I researched the flower and discovered that it is associated with Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of divine energy, who was once incarnated as a lotus. Given that I’ve just written an essay on the Fisher King story, where a wasteland presided over by an impotent monarch is rejuvenated by a young knight, the lotus symbolism seems even more applicable. In Hindu mythology, the lotus is often regarded as a fertility symbol, associated with life-giving waters.
This is how the lotus is depicted in a poem that appeared in my father’s collection AnABC of Radical Ecology. There is at least one environmental poem—sometimes more—for each letter of the alphabet, and the letter I is associated with the Egyptian fertility goddess Isis, whose flower was the blue lotus.
My father was fascinated by erotic symbols as they appear in different mythological traditions, so in his “I” poem he also mentions Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality, and Iesus, who many early Christians regarded as a fertility god along the lines of Dionysus. I’m sure he would have added in Lakshmi if her name had begun with an “I.” (I’m not sure where Ignatz, the brick-throwing mouse in the old George Herriman cartoon strip, fits in.)
Bates pairs his “I” poem with his “H” poem, which stands for “the Hero from Inner Space.” Think of the “I” poem, then, as a female poem balancing out a male poem. Drawing on the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and many others, Scott Bates looks to balance the male and the female. When these forces unite, they achieve an ecstatic bliss where time stops, a kind of infinity. We all long for this sacred union.
I’ll explain in a moment how this applies to Kamala Harris’s candidacy. First, however, here’s the poem:
While I on the Other Hand Is for Isis (and for Iesus and Ishtar and Ignatz and All Those Other Infinities)
“I am risen!” said Jesus making love to the Priestess of Isis…–Lawrence
I is the Goddess sitting on a lotus floating on a lotus in the middle of the Nile X is her legs crossed O is her leaf U is her flower the Love of her Life and S is her serpentine smile
While H the Hero is on a quest, Isis sits on the sacred lotus floating in the middle of the Nile. The epigraph, taken from the D. H. Lawrence novella The Man Who Died, refers to the resurrected Jesus turning his back on Calvinist Christians (Trump’s most loyal base) and impregnating a priestess of Egypt’s fertility goddess. The Jesus in the novella has been emptied out by too much sexual repression and needs the healing that she represents. “I am risen” has a sexual double meaning, and the union of Jesus and Isis represents the coming together of sky and earth, individual and community, self and other.
Put another way, Isis is the valley of sensuality that the hero seeks. The letters featured in the poem are all (with the exception of the last one) perfectly symmetrical and therefore represent balance and completeness. The “U” opens up as a flower while the “S,” representing the goddess’ serpentine smile, is a wild card, a final mystery that eludes us.
How does this apply to “Lotus” Harris? When I wrote this post in 2020, I could say that she balanced out the Biden ticket, a (relatively) young woman of color balancing out an older white patrician, a life force rejuvenating this representative of the old order. But one could also argue that Harris herself represents a healthy balance of female and male.
On the female side, there is the way she opposes those seeking to control and regulate women’s bodies. She is far more comfortable in talking about abortion than Biden, while GOP attacks that she is hypersexualized are falling flat. And while Harris doesn’t exactly have a serpentine smile—rather a boisterous laugh—she offers the hope of renewal in a land that is being threatened by male patriarchs that are hostile to anything sexual.
Oh, and Isis is a cat lady, a goddess often depicted with a black feline. So when it comes to Harris’s female side, think of this as “Auntie Kamala” or (as her stepchildren call her) “Mamala.”
But she has also excelled in activities that have been traditionally gendered male, a tough prosecutor who uses the law in the cause of restorative justice and civic order. Black women prosecutors have been giving Trump a difficult time recently—think also of Tish James and Fani Willis—and Harris is another entry into that field. Her “male” aggressiveness is one thing that is exciting those Democrats who worried that Biden wasn’t taking it to Trump hard enough. Few credibly argue that Harris lacks the toughness required of a leader.
In other words, Harris has within her both female and male. She’s empathetic and tough both.
Democrats hope that voters will be undertaking pilgrimages to voting booth shrines to pay homages to this lotus figure. Or as some are saying, “Lotus for POTUS.”
The alternative is a full plate of toxic masculinity.
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Sunday
As today’s Gospel reading is the passage from John where Jesus declares that he is “the bread of life,” I am reposting a presentation on holy bread that I delivered last summer. The occasion was the adult lectures that accompany our Vacation Bible School. The theme was “Manna in the Wilderness.
Talk for Parish of St. Mark & St. Paul, Sewanee, June 6, 2023
If we see bread as a basic necessity, the archetypal food and symbol of our grounding in the world of matter, then bread provides a powerful means of exploring the point where the material and the spiritual meet.
This, it so happens, is the way that Jesus uses bread. When he says, “I am the bread of life, they who come to me shall not perish,” he is saying that the spiritual life he represents is as foundational to our existence as bread is. In fact, Jesus is a poet at such moments, just as he is a skilled author of fiction in the way that he shapes his parables.
For instance, when he breaks bread with his disciples, he is using the bread metaphor in multiple ways. In the breaking and share of the bread, he is giving the disciples a powerful symbol of community in which people care for each other. When Jesus says, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me”—and when we say at the eucharist, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven—the disciples take in both his spiritual and his physical presence. At such moments, we are at the threshold of the spiritual world but, as physical beings, require something that we can taste and see.
All of which is to say that the bread that shows up in poetry is always much more than bread.
A quick survey of the times that Jesus mentions bread might have us calling him a “bread poet” given the importance he assigns to it Here are a few key instances:
–Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.—John 6:35
–“I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” – John 6:51
–But He answered [to Satan] and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’”—Matthew 4:4
–While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.” – Matthew 26:26
–And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”—Luke 22:19
–“I am the bread of life.”—John 6:48
–Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed them, and broke them, and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the people.—Luke 9:16
–“Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”—John 6:31
–“Give us this day our daily bread.”—Matthew 6:11
Turning to bread poems, I start with one of the most familiar poetic mentions of bread, attributed to the 12th century poet, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Omar Khayaam, who was maybe a Sufi mystic, maybe a Zoroastrian, maybe an atheist. In any event, one can say that bread figures into his vision of heaven on earth:
FromThe Rubaiyat ofOmar Khayyam XI A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
Poetry, bread and wine, and a singing companion = the kingdom of God brought to earth.
In Christian poetry, there are a number of poems that take up Jesus’s bread metaphors and explore them further. Friend and colleague John Gatta alerted me to one by the American Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729), who meditates on Jesus’s declaration (John 6:51) that “I am the living bread.”
Edwards is writing in the tradition of the metaphysical poets, who pushed their metaphors to the limit. John Donne is the most famous example although it’s worth noting that not everyone was a fan. Samuel Johnson once wrote that, in metaphysical poetry, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”
Anyway, in the poem Edwards compares the soul to a bird of paradise trapped in a wicker cage that is doomed to famish because it has pecked at the forbidden fruit. As a result, it has fallen into “celestial famine.” Edwards says that it can neither fill its hunger from earthly grain nor—and this is significant—from angel food, which is to say, purely spiritual bread. Don’t go knocking on heaven’s door, the poet admonishes us, because the angels have “no soule bread.” We need something that is at once spiritual and earthly and we get it delivered to us (warning!) straight from God’s bowels. I pick up the poem from the final stanzas:
From Meditation on John 6:51: “I am the living bread” By Edward Taylor
In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life. Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.
Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake, Which from his Table came, and to thine goeth? Doth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take. Come Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe? Its Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take And Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake. … This Bread of Life dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry. Eate, Eate me, Soul, and thou shalt never dy.
Although many in the Middle Ages and Renaissance saw angels as higher than humans in “the great chain of being”—after all, they are more spiritual—Taylor points to the importance of bringing the earthly and the spiritual together. In last year’s Vacation Bible School lecture on literary angels, I observed that Philip Pullman makes a similar point in his Golden Compass Trilogy. There we see angels who are jealous of humans’ abilities to interact with the world of the senses. They long for “Heavens Sugar Cake,” as it were.
The English Anglo-Catholic mystic Evelyn Underhill has a wonderful “Corpus Christi” poem that similarly explores eucharistic bread imagery. Sewanee chaplain Peter Gray informs me that it’s particularly appropriate today (June 11, 2023) as it is the Face of Corpus Christi, which celebrates the real presence, in the Eucharist’s bread and wine, of the body and blood, soul and divinity, of Jesus.
Underhill draws a connection between the harvested wheat—“torn by the sickles”—and the crucified Christ. But in a mystical revelation, Underhill realizes that out of this “mystic death” arises a “mystic birth.” The poem at this point alludes to mother earth and the seasonal cycles:
I knew the patient passion of the earth, Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs The Bread of Angels and the life of man.
Now, “blind no longer,” Underhill sees God’s plan behind human suffering. Though, like Jesus, we may be “reaped, ground to grist, crushed and tormented in the Mills of God,” ultimately we ourselves are “offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.”
Corpus Christi By Evelyn Underhill
Come, dear Heart! The fields are white to harvest: come and see As in a glass the timeless mystery Of love, whereby we feed On God, our bread indeed. Torn by the sickles, see him share the smart Of travailing Creation: maimed, despised, Yet by his lovers the more dearly prized Because for us he lays his beauty down — Last toll paid by Perfection for our loss! Trace on these fields his everlasting Cross, And o’er the stricken sheaves the Immortal Victim’s crown.
From far horizons came a Voice that said, ‘Lo! from the hand of Death take thou thy daily bread.’ Then I, awakening, saw A splendor burning in the heart of things: The flame of living love which lights the law Of mystic death that works the mystic birth. I knew the patient passion of the earth, Maternal, everlasting, whence there springs The Bread of Angels and the life of man.
Now in each blade I, blind no longer, see The glory of God’s growth: know it to be An earnest of the Immemorial Plan. Yea, I have understood How all things are one great oblation made: He on our altars, we on the world’s rood. Even as this corn, Earth-born, We are snatched from the sod; Reaped, ground to grist, Crushed and tormented in the Mills of God, And offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.
I turn now to one my favorite characters in all of literature, who at one point does a riff on the parable of the loaves and the fishes that is so outrageous that her audience can only stare in wonder. Some background is useful to put Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in perspective.
Alisoun is one of only two women amongsts Chaucer’s 31 pilgrims, and making her position even more uncomfortable is the fact that she has had five husbands. She desperately wants to be taken seriously by her fellow pilgrims, however, and as a result goes on a long, rambling, and sometimes wild defense of her life. Since she sees those around her drawing lessons from the Bible—sometimes to condemn her for her sexual appetites—she tries to interpret the Bible in ways that support her.
Her reasoning is dubious but that’s almost beside the point because it’s so much fun. Meanwhile, her lust for life comes through—she’s a far more attractive character than some of those who condemn her, like the hypocritical pardoner and the lecherous friar—and the fact that she sees herself as a version of “the bread of life” makes her perfect for this talk.
As Alisoun sees it, Chris is white bread while she is “hoten barly breed.” And although she acknowledges that it would be nice to be the first, she says the world needs both—which means that she sees herself as a Christ figure doing her own kind of refreshing. Incidentally, in the passage she calls Christ a virgin, which while technically accurate is a bit strange. She does so, however, to draw a contrast with herself:
Christ was a virgin and shaped like a man, And many a saint, since the world began; Yet lived they ever in perfect chastity. I will envy no virginity. Let them be bread of pure wheat-seed, And let us wives be called barley-bread; And yet with barley-bread, Mark can tell it, Our Lord Jesus refreshed many a man.
In other words, there’s a granular difference between Alisoun and Jesus. (Heh, heh!)
From such passages one sees why Chaucer felt the need to apologize for The Canterbury Tales, articulated in a retraction. Alisoun, however, is more than a figure of fun for him but a vital life force. She is also a figure centuries ahead of her time: ultimately, she is asking no more than R-E-S-P-E-C-T from her fellow pilgrims.
My next poem, Lynn Ungar’s “Blessing the Bread,” connects bread-making with the rhythms of life. In an intricate set of associations, she sees the lines of her hands etched into the bread she is molding. And while she says that she does “not believe in palmistry,” nevertheless she finds herself looking for “signs of life” in the imprint. Comparing kneading bread with massaging, she mentions that a kind of imprint also can be seen “on the bodies we have touched.”
Drawing on an image from palmistry, she sees a miraculous (eucharistic?) transformation arising from this tactile connection with the bread dough:
This is the lifeline — the etched path from hand to grain to earth, the transmutation of the elements through touch…
However unwilling we may be to be believe in miracles (Ungar, a Unitarian Universalist minister, worries about superstition), something miraculous occurs in the transformation of earth to grain to hand to finished product, which we bless and eat. God is present in that transformation, and for that we offer up thanks:
Blessing the Bread By Lynn Ungar
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. [Praised be thou, eternal God, who brings forth bread from the earth.
Surely the earth is heavy with this rhythm, the stretch and pull of bread, the folding in and folding in across the palms, as if the lines of my hands could chart a map across the dough, mold flour and water into the crosshatchings of my life.
I do not believe in palmistry, but I study my hands for promises when no one is around. I do not believe in magic. But I probe the dough for signs of life, willing it to rise, to take shape, to feed me. I do not believe in palmistry, in magic, but something happens in kneading dough or massaging flesh; an imprint of the hand remains on the bodies we have touched.
This is the lifeline — the etched path from hand to grain to earth, the transmutation of the elements through touch marking the miracles on which we unwillingly depend.
Praised be thou, eternal God, who brings forth bread from the earth.
Denise Levertov has a poem which, while not specifically about bread, concludes with a bread image that is so striking that I include it in this talk. Written in the 1960s when feminists were charting new paths (“stepping westward”), Levertov is trying to define herself as a woman. What does it mean, she asks, when she is contradictory and what does it mean when she is steadfast?
The final image is one of her carrying bread—traditional woman’s work—but coming to see this nurturing role as a gift as well as a burden. While the weight may hurt the shoulders, it also means that she is “closed in fragrance.” That buoys her up, even though she doesn’t appear able to stop and fully enjoy it. As she puts it, “I can eat as I go.”
Stepping Westward By Denise Levertov
What is green in me darkens, muscadine. If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening. If her part is to be true, a north star, good, I hold steady in the black sky and vanish by day, yet burn there in blue or above quilts of cloud. There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am, a shadow that grows longer as the sun moves, drawn out on a thread of wonder. If I bear burdens they begin to be remembered as gifts, goods, a basket of bread that hurts my shoulders but closes me in fragrance. I can eat as I go.
I conclude with an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Bread.” As is characteristic of the Chilean poet, it is both earthily sensual and spiritually socialist (bread should be shared with all).
Bread, as Neruda describes it, is like a mother’s rounded womb but also the product (when put in the oven) of a revolutionary fertility:
there’s the joining of seed and fire, and you’re growing, growing all at once
In the end, bread represents
humankind’s energy, a miracle often admired, the will to live itself.
And because it is connected with the will to life, it must be shared:
Because we plant its seed and grow it not for one man but for all, there will be enough: there will be bread for all the peoples of the earth.
Nor does Neruda stop with bread. This staple of life becomes a symbol for all our foundational needs:
And we will also share with one another whatever has the shape and the flavor of bread: the earth itself, beauty and love– all taste like bread and have its shape, the germination of wheat.
Here’s the excerpt:
From Ode to Bread By Pablo Neruda
Bread, you rise from flour, water and fire. Dense or light, flattened or round, you duplicate the mother’s rounded womb, and earth’s twice-yearly swelling. How simple you are, bread, and how profound! You line up on the baker’s powdered trays like silverware or plates or pieces of paper and suddenly life washes over you, there’s the joining of seed and fire, and you’re growing, growing all at once like hips, mouths, breasts, mounds of earth, or people’s lives. The temperature rises, you’re overwhelmed by fullness, the roar of fertility, and suddenly your golden color is fixed. And when your little wombs were seeded, a brown scar laid its burn the length of your two halves’ toasted juncture. Now, whole, you are mankind’s energy, a miracle often admired, the will to live itself.
O bread familiar to every mouth, we will not kneel before you: men do no implore unclear gods or obscure angels: we will make our own bread out of sea and soil, we will plant wheat on our earth and the planets, bread for every mouth, for every person, our daily bread. Because we plant its seed and grow it not for one man but for all, there will be enough: there will be bread for all the peoples of the earth. And we will also share with one another whatever has the shape and the flavor of bread: the earth itself, beauty and love– all taste like bread and have its shape, the germination of wheat. Everything exists to be shared, to be freely given, to multiply….
Given our parish’s commitment to help feed the poor around us, we can use this year’s theme to remind us to continue contributing bread to that effort. Neruda’s poem is very appropriate to that end.
But bread, as all these poems point out, is never just about bread. It is always about much, much more.
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Friday
My close friend Rebecca Adams recently suggested that there’s a fisher king feel to the transition from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. The story of a maimed king presiding over a desolate wasteland—and of a knight rising up to save it—is a powerful archetype that has been told and retold over the centuries. Perhaps it is because Harris has tapped into that archetype that she is generating so much energy and excitement.
While the Arthurian narrative may have some explanatory value, however, I hasten to add that Joe Biden is no maimed king. He may be old but he is still proving to be an effective leader, as evidenced by how he engineered yesterday’s remarkable prisoner swap. Although he was 79 when he became America’s president, he has proved to be the most effective Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, even while working with the tiniest of margins in the House and the Senate.
In short—and despite Donald Trump’s assertions to the contrary—America under Biden’s leadership is no wasteland.
But effective or not, the vibes that Biden set in motion with his poor debate performance—and that were exacerbated by the mainstream media piling on—persuaded many that he is a maimed king. Which is what Perceval encounters in his journey, first meeting the king fishing and later sitting in his bed. Here is that second encounter in Chrétien de Troyes’s version (trans. Burton Raffel):
Seated on a bed, in the middle Of the hall, he saw a handsome Knight with grizzled hair, His head covered by a hat As dark as a blackberry, wrapped Like a turban in purple cloth. And all his clothing was black. He lay leaning on his elbow…
The king, while he proves to be as gracious as Biden, also must acknowledge his infirmity:
“My friend, don’t be offended If I don’t rise to give you Welcome, because I can’t.” “Don’t speak of it, Sir, in the name Of Our Lord. I’m not bothered, God having granted me joy And health.” With a great effort The knight sat up as far As he could: “Come closer, my friend: Don’t be afraid. Come sit Quietly at my side. It would make me Exceedingly happy.”
Later in the story we’ll encounter a spear with a drop of blood at its tip and a grail. Instead of inquiring about these things, Perceval remains silent, and we later learn that his silence has devastating consequences.
Perceval receives the word from a damsel in distress that he encounters after leaving the castle, which has disappeared so that he finds himself in a desolate marsh. The woman informs him that the king, who had been wounded in battle, would have been cured if only Perceval had spoken up. Think of him as a complacent citizen who fails to vote:
You’re Perceval The Unhappy, the Miserable, the Unfortunate! Ah, how unlucky you are, For had you asked those questions You could have completely cured The good king of all his wounds: He would have become entirely Whole, and ruled as he should. How much good you’d have done!
The most famous modern use of the story, of course, is T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. There are multiple references to the fisher king in the poem, including the following:
A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
Eliot shows us a land that has been deprived of its vital life force:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
There were many experiencing abject fear as the mainstream media and a number of Democrats piled on Biden about his age. Again, I’m not saying that Biden himself was finished. There is a deep humanity in the president that, along with his stellar economic record, would (I believe) have carried him to reelection. (I rely on prognosticators with a good track record, like Christopher Bouzy and Alan Richtman, in making this prediction.) But it’s true there was a wastelandy feel to the election. For many people, it was as though we were witnessing a battle between two maimed kings.
Chrétien died before finishing the story but others stepped up with “continuations,” including some who imagined Perceval returning and becoming the new fisher king, presiding over a rejuvenated wasteland. Kamala Harris, multicultural candidate for a multicultural American future, has activated the archetype.
Chaucer’s Pardoner (from the Ellesmere Manuscript)
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Thursday
Yesterday I suggested that, if Kamala Harris is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, then Donald Trump is the Pardoner. I initially thought of Trump as this character only because he faces off with Alisoun midway through her prologue, but the more I thought about it, the more the comparison fits. As a skilled conman, the Pardoner provides insight into both how Trump regards his own fraudulent schemes and how they can come back to bite him.
Alisoun is a figure so vibrant and full of life that she is positively Shakespearean—and in fact, Chaucer’s characters may have made Shakespeare possible. (For instance, I see resemblances between the Wife and Falstaff, whom Harold Bloom regards as the Bard’s most three-dimensional figure.) The Pardoner, on the other hand, is a creepy and somewhat weird huckster whom other pilgrims put firmly in his place. Chaucer despises him to the same degree that he enjoys Alisoun although, being Chaucer, he also makes him memorable.
The Pardoner sells papal pardons or indulgences, which people could buy in lieu of actually journeying to Rome to see the pope. A pardon was a way of buying your way out of Purgatory for some sin you had committed, and it was a major source of revenue for the Vatican. It was also subject to abuse and became a major target of both Martin Luther (who objected to it on religious grounds) and the German princes who supported Luther (who didn’t like how indulgences were draining large sums out of their principalities). More than a century before Luther triggered the Protestant Reformation, Chaucer was calling out corruption in the church.
Chaucer’s Pardoner is a poster child for this corruption, carrying around fake saint relics in order to help sales. As Chaucer reports,
There was no other pardoner like him. For in his pouch he had a pillow-case, Which he said was Our Lady’s veil; He said he had a piece of the sail That Saint Peter had, when he went Upon the sea, until Jesus Christ took him. He had a cross of latten covered with stones, And in a glass container he had pigs’ bones…. And thus, with feigned flattery and tricks, He made fools of the parson and the people.
Like Trump, the Pardoner knows that a distinctive style helps with sales, and like Trump he has flamboyant hair:
This Pardoner had hair as yellow as wax, But smooth it hung as does a clump of flax; By small strands hung such locks as he had, And he spread them over his shoulders; But thin it lay, by strands one by one. But to make an attractive appearance, he wore no hood For it was trussed up in his knapsack. It seemed to him that he rode in the very latest style; With hair unbound, save for his cap, he rode all bare-headed.
Where he most resembles Trump, however, is in the upfront way he carries out his fraud. When I see him revealing the tricks of his trade to the other pilgrims, I think of the brazen way that Trump all but reveals his tricks to the suckers he takes in (for instance, the “Trump Stakes,” which carried the brand names of whatever store he had bought them from). In the prologue to his tale, the Pardoner reveals his methods to people he will later attempt to sell indulgences to:
First I pronounce from whence I come, And then my papal bulls I show, each and every one. Our liege lord’s seal on my letter of authorization, I show that first, to protect my body, So that no man be so bold, neither priest nor clerk, To hinder me from doing Christ’s holy work. And after that then I tell forth my tales; Indulgences of popes and of cardinals, Of patriarchs and bishops I show, And in Latin I speak a few words, With which to add spice to my preaching, And to stir them to devotion. Then I show forth my long crystal stones, Crammed full of rags and of bones — Relics they are, as suppose they each one.
The Pardoner then proceeds to list all the miraculous cures that (so he tells his marks) the indulgences will bring about, everything from their sick animals to getting them into heaven. It’s a profitable business, the Pardoner boasts:
By this trick have I won, year after year, An hundred marks since I was pardoner. I stand like a clerk in my pulpit, And when the ignorant people are set down, I preach as you have heard before And tell a hundred more false tales.
He cheerfully admits to his own hypocrisy: without skipping a beat, he tells his fellow pilgrims how he loves to preach against avarice. This he follows up with a tale—one of Chaucer’s best—about how three men find death in a treasure they chance upon. (They kill each other off.)
And then, thinking that it doesn’t matter that he has revealed himself as a conman, he attempts to sell indulgences to his fellow pilgrims, starting with the host. “How lucky you are to have me with you,” he tells them:
Look what a safeguard is it to you all That I happen to be in your fellowship, Who can absolve you, both more and less (every one), When the soul shall from the body pass. I advise that our Host here shall begin, For he is most enveloped in sin. Come forth, sir Host, and offer first right now, And thou shall kiss the relics every one, Yea, for a fourpence coin! Unbuckle thy purse right now.
By this point, however, the Pardoner appears to have become blinded by own success, thinking he can sell anything to anyone. These include his fellow pilgrims, to whom earlier he has revealed his trade secrets. Those who enjoy watching Kamala Harris call out Trump out will recognize a similar takedown from the Host. He’s not about to unbuckle his purse:
Thou would make me kiss thine old underpants, And swear it was a relic of a saint, Though it were stained by thy fundament! But, by the cross that Saint Helen found, I would I had thy testicles in my hand Instead of relics or a container for relics. Have them cut off, I will help thee carry them; They shall be enshrined in a hog’s turd!
The Pardoner is so angry that he cannot speak, and it takes the Knight, an exemplar of chivalry, to restore peace. The point for our purposes is that, when a fraudster is ripping everyone off, going high won’t necessarily work. These people revel in their hypocrisy and so are impervious to shame.
Sometimes a direct attack, accompanied by choice language and some humor, is the best way to stand up to a bully.
