St. Thecla surviving one of multiple attempts to make her a martyr
Spiritual Sunday
Jeannie Babb, director of our church’s Christian Education program, gave a wonderful Adult Forum lecture two weeks ago on St. Thecla’s relationship to the apostle Paul. The talk got into the contentious relationship that many women have had with the establishment church, as well as with two different ways of looking at Paul. I was excited because I gained new insights into Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who has her own battles with church authorities.
According to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla, a young noble virgin, broke with her fiancé and her family after hearing Paul’s discourse on virginity. After surviving various attempts to martyr her (one of them supposedly involving a basin filled with flesh-eating seals!), she went on to become a healer.
Jeannie noted two conflicting views of Paul, the ascetic and the domesticated. Thecla was responding to the ascetic Paul, the one who in 1:7 Corinthians counsels that “it is well for a man not to touch a woman.” The other Paul, however, explicitly condemns anyone who forbids marriage. Jeannie doesn’t believe any theologian has satisfactorily reconciled the two Pauls.
The Wife of Bath is no trained theologian, drawing on her experience rather than church authority as she defends her right to remarry as many husbands as she wants. (She’s been widowed five times and is looking for husband #6.) I imagine her local priest regularly directing his sermons against her, which would explain how an illiterate woman would be so well-versed in the ascetic Paul. How is she to fight back against his injunction?
After hearing Jeannie’s talk, I realized that Chaucer’s Wife pits the domesticated Paul against the ascetic Paul. Her arguments carry a surprising amount of weight.
To
be sure, her prologue reads like a spoof of a theological debate, sometimes spinning
off in hilarious directions. For instance, she refers to Solomon as an instance
of someone else who had multiple partners but then starts fantasizing about all
the fun he must have had in bed. Her sensual nature trumps dry theology.
She
resorts to theology, however, because she sees the church authorities dictating
her life with their pronouncements and believes she must talk like them to hold
her own. In fact, she longs to be a member of their power club.
Despite botching the theological debate, she scores some points. Certainly God made the sexual organs for more than urinating and distinguishing the genders, she points out. Furthermore, Paul didn’t command virginity but only recommended it. And as for virgins, how could they be born if it weren’t for non-virgins?
The apostle when he speaks of maidenhead; He said, commandment of the Lord he’d none. Men may advise a woman to be one, but such advice is not commandment, no; He left the things to our judgment so. For had Lord God commended maidenhood, He’d have condemned all marriage as not good; And certainly, if there were no seed sown, Virginity, where then should it be grown?
After Jeannie’s talk, I now realize that the Wife is drawing on the domesticated Paul tradition in these latter arguments. She also does so when she quotes him as saying that “it is better than to marry than to burn,” even though Paul probably didn’t have in mind a widow burning with sexual desire at the Wife’s now advanced age. But no matter. The Wife hones in on whatever concessions Paul makes to the world of the flesh, and, for good measure, throws in God’s injunction (in the Book of Genesis) “to be fruitful and multiply.” Her pilgrim auditors are alternately amazed, entertained, and horrified by her performance.
Which brings me to another point that Jeannie made. Chastity, for women, could be a source of autonomy, in that it saved them from answering to a man. St. Thecla, who journeyed all over the Middle East, had much more power than she would have had she married. So does Chaucer’s Prioress, the only other woman amongst the pilgrim storytellers.
The Wife of Bath, however, wants autonomy and sex both, and the way she uses Paul to refute Paul now makes more sense to me. She’s there to show us that Thecla isn’t the only model available to women.
I mentioned last Sunday that Chaucer felt it necessary to recant Canterbury Tales at the end of his life, either to placate the church authorities or to insure his own entry into heaven. As I see it, however, the Wife is more spiritual than those misogynist monks who demonized women. In her longing for a good marriage, she has a vision of spiritual union between a couple, even though the reality so often is sabotaged by patriarchal fears, gender power struggles, and the like.
Her vision gets communicated in her tale, where an old crone argues that a union of souls is more to be valued than wealth, class, or good looks. She doesn’t convince her rapist husband, but she puts the vision out there. I suspect that both Pauls would approve.
A couple of my students’ Odyssey essays have me thinking of times in American military history when Americans have gone off the rails. I think of Lieutenant Calley and the May Lai massacre, those who ordered the waterboarding of 9-11 suspects, and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, credibly charged with various war crimes but recently pardoned by Donald Trump. Wikipedia sums up the charges against Gallagher as follows:
Gallagher had been charged in September 2018 with ten offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice over accusations that he had stabbed to death an injured, sedated teenage ISIS prisoner, photographing himself holding the dead teenager’s head by the hair and sending the photo to friends. He was also accused by fellow Navy SEAL snipers of randomly shooting two Iraqi civilians: a girl walking with her friends on a riverbank; and an unarmed elderly man.
Following reports of American torture following the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, I recall a military official noting that the Geneva Conventions were in place to protect us from ourselves as much as from an enemy that may or may not abide by them. We ourselves require checks if we are not to descend into darkness.
The Odyssey has many images of monstrous darkness, perhaps none so horrifying as the cyclops Polyphemus. Because our monsters are always our own shadow side, the cyclops can be understood as the savagery that we publicly disavow and secretly recognize.
The Greeks saw themselves as more advanced than cannibalistic shepherds who don’t cultivate fields or construct ships. Spurning Zeus (law and order), Polyphemus worships only Poseidon (nature). When Odysseus asks him to honor the laws of hospitality as dictated by Zeus, the cyclops replies,
You order me to fear the gods! My people think nothing of that Zeus with his big scepter, nor any god; our strength is more than theirs. If I spare you or spare your friends, it will not be out of fear of Zeus. I do the bidding of my own heart.
The bidding of his heart takes him to a horrifying place:
Leaping up high, he reached his hands towards my men, seized two and knocked them hard against the ground like puppies, and the floor was wet with brains. He ripped them limb by limb to make his meal, then ate them like a lion on the mountains, devouring flesh, entrails, and marrow bones, and leaving nothing.
It is not only Polyphemus who is associated with lions, however. As Walter Coker pointed out in an essay tracking nature similes, Odysseus too gets linked with the animal. This is what nursemaid Eurycleia sees after the killing:
Among the corpses of the slaughtered men
she saw Odysseus all smeared with blood.
After a lion eats a grazing ox
its chest and jowls are thick with blood all over;
a dreadful sight. Just so, Odysseus
had blood all over him—from hands to feet.
(Trans. Emily Wilson)
We see Odysseus preparing to do more of the same when he confronts the suitors’ families at the end of the epic:
They were desperate to save
their lives, and they turned back towards the city.
Unwavering Odysseus let out
a dreadful roar, then crouched and swooped upon them,
just like an eagle flying from above.
Walter noted, however, that a Greek value system exists to check an absolute descent into animality. Homer’s predatory images, therefore, often are conjoined with heavenly messages, as a higher principle asserts itself. This is especially true of bird omens, where the violence is superseded by a message of divine order:
Then Zeus, whose voice resounds around the
world,
sent down two eagles from the mountain peak.
At first they hovered on the breath of wind,
close by each other, balanced on their wings.
Reaching the noisy middle of the crowd,
they wheeled and whirred and flapped their mighty wings,
swooping at each man’s head with eyes like death,
and with their talons ripped each face and neck.
An old man gifted with prophecy interprets
the omen:
Now Ithacans, listen! I speak especially for the suitors. Disaster rolls their way! Odysseus will not be absent from his friends for long; Already he is near and sows the seeds of death for all of them.
Walter was especially struck by the final showdown with the suitors’ families, in which we see Odysseus preparing his lion/eagle attack. If Zeus forestalls him with a thunderbolt, it is because the killing must end if Ithaca is to experience peace:
But Zeus sent down a thunderbolt, which fell
in front of his own daughter, great Athena [disguised as Mentor].
She looked at him [Odysseus] with steely eyes and said,
“Odysseus, you are adaptable;
you always find solutions. Stop this war,
or Zeus will be enraged at you.”
He was
glad to obey her. Then Athena made
the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace
for future times—still in her guise as Mentor.
In other words, a powerful animal urge has
been trumped by an even more powerful signal from Zeus.
This final scene was key in Rego Jaquish’s essay as well. Comparing Odysseus with Batman in some of the Joker episodes, Rego noted that Joker ultimately wants Batman to descend to his level. He’ll do anything, including goading Batman into killing him, to accomplish this.
In other words, Joker is our dark side. As I
noted to Rego, Joker wants Batman to become Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness.
Although Batman sometimes enjoys the pain and fear of his enemies–in other words, he feels the Joker temptation–he ultimately refrains from killing, thereby saving his soul. Similarly, Odysseus abandons a blood lust, whetted by the suitor massacre, that could lead to interminable blood feuds. Odysseus is a hero because he listens to a higher authority at such moments, with Zeus’s thunderbolt functioning as a metaphor for internal self-governance.
It’s not only the military that needs self-checks on its behavior. In America today we have a president who wants to abolish anything that thwarts his primal desires. Our Zeusian thunderbolt should be the Constitution, the rule of law, governing norms, and our own consciences. Pray to whatever gods there be that they hold.
Mantra, Luxembourg street art (inspired by Marta Bevacqua photo)
Thursday
I’m in love with this Joe Mills poem about libraries. If more in government ever started seeing libraries in this way, however—some already do—then they might take away this ready access to books. So here’s to librarians keeping up a deceptive front.
If Librarians Were Honest By Joe Mills
“… a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work….” —Benjamin Franklin
If librarians were honest, they wouldn’t smile, or act welcoming. They would say, You need to be careful. Here be monsters. They would say, These rooms house heathens and heretics, murderers and maniacs, the deluded, desperate, and dissolute. They would say, These books contain knowledge of death, desire, and decay, betrayal, blood, and more blood; each is a Pandora’s box, so why would you want to open one. They would post danger signs warning that contact might result in mood swings, severe changes in vision, and mind-altering effects.
If librarians were honest they would admit the stacks can be more seductive and shocking than porn. After all, once you’ve seen a few breasts, vaginas, and penises, more is simply more, a comforting banality, but the shelves of a library contain sensational novelties, a scandalous, permissive mingling of Malcolm X, Marx, Melville, Merwin, Millay, Milton, Morrison, and anyone can check them out, taking them home or to some corner where they can be debauched and impregnated with ideas.
If librarians were honest, they would say, No one spends time here without being changed. Maybe you should go home. While you still can.
I write today about my Lifelong Learning class on “the Gothic Supernatural in American Literature.” Like many scholars, I explain America’s centuries-long fascination with the gothic by Freud’s return of the repressed—which is to say, when we don’t like something about ourselves, we push it under, only to see it return in the form of dark dreams.
In the first week, as I reported, I looked at how Hawthorne uses the gothic genre to expose the not-so-pure side of Puritanism and Poe uses it to expose the not-so-reasonable side of the founding fathers’ belief in a republic based upon Enlightenment Reason. Continuing in this vein last week, I contrasted Henry James’s Turn of the Screw with L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
The stark contrast between the two works, written two years apart (1898 and 1900), made my point. Exhibiting the eternal optimism of an American pioneer, Baum wanted to write fairy tales with no shadows. Turn of the Screw, on the other hand, resides permanently in the shadow world.
After initially complimenting the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers, Baum introduced Wizard of Oz with the following:
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
What Baum wants is innocent children and an innocent America. Dorothy echoes the legendary pioneer women, venturing out to restore the American Dream. (Laura Ingalls Wilder would later write in this vein.) I’ve noted in the past about how Wizard reflects confidence in an America that can rediscover its head, heart, courage and idealism as it emerges from the Long Depression. Baum believed that a fresh new start was possible.
James, on the other hand, didn’t. Longing for an innocent America is like longing for the Puritans’ pure “city on a hill” or the founders’ shining republic. True believers shut their eyes to the fact that the world is never as innocent, pure or reasonable as we want. Often we look to children to embody our hopes, attempting to preserve their innocence (and ours) by sheltering them from stories with “horrible and blood-curdling incidents.”
James’s children are little angels until they aren’t. Flora has “the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael’s holy infants” and the governess sees in Miles “something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy.” And yet these same children appear (at least to the governess) to be interacting with malevolent ghosts that, when alive, corrupted them in unmentionable ways. Turn of the Screw is the most horrifying and frightening ghost story I know.
This past Monday I took a quick glance at the Southern Gothic, even though it doesn’t contain supernatural elements. What is America repressing, I asked, that would generate a fiction filled with grotesques and haunted venues? The answer: a belief in a golden age of gentility, swept away by the Civil War. (Check out Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind for cinematic images.)
The white South of the early 20th century wouldn’t admit how this golden past, not to mention its current iteration, was built upon oppression of blacks. Violence lurks in the decaying house of Miss Emily Grierson (Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily”), and it roams the countryside in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” It resides within Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” (a rapist hiding out in a southern freak show), it erupts and kills an innocent family in cold blood (Truman Capote), and it threatens to float to the surface in James Dickey’s Deliverance. The southern past that is never past, in Faulkner’s famous phrase, is a past of unacknowledged white violence.
Next week I’ll look at contemporary gothic stories, including the work of Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates. As always, I will begin every work with the question, “So what repressed truth led to this story?”
Film producer Harvey Weinstein descends the courthouse steps
Tuesday
New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino recently applied the Booker-award-winning novel Disgrace to the rape trial of film producer Harvey Weinstein, set to go to the jury today. South African author J. M. Coetzee, she says, understands at a deep level how white men in positions of power simultaneously believe that they have become disenfranchised and that they have a sense of entitlement to a woman’s body.
Having
been fired from a university for “what he regards as a lusty affair with a
student” and for what she “regards as coercion, perhaps rape,” David Lurie is
unashamed:
[T]here is an icy near-clarity to the way he experiences the act of overpowering her. When he calls Melanie on the phone, he hears in her voice “all her uncertainty. Too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something.” He shows up at her apartment, uninvited, and Melanie is “too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her.” Her limbs crumple, and she struggles, tells him no. But “nothing will stop him,” and Lurie carries Melanie to her bedroom. “She does not resist,” Coetzee writes. “All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. . . . Little shivers of cold run through her. . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration. . . . So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.” After it’s over, she asks him to leave, and in his car Lurie has “no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. . . . running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker.”
How Melanie feels, Tolentino observes, feels “immaterial”
to Lurie:
If his desire is real, how could it be wrong? When, later, he recalls the university’s investigation, he identifies his age as the real crime, and his decaying body the punishment. He believes himself guilty not of raping a student but simply of growing old, becoming one of those men from whom a prostitute might shudder “as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night.”
Tolentino reminds us of the case against Weinstein:
He’s the disgraced producer, the disgraced mogul. His sexual-assault trial in New York is completing its fourth week. Six women have testified that he assaulted them. The defense’s first witness, a friend of Weinstein’s, was confronted in court with texts he’d written to Weinstein saying that there was “likely a bunch of truth to the claims that you behaved like a cad and more,” and that, if “a lot of these girls had been my daughter, I would have wanted to beat the shit out of you.”… Outside the courtroom, the verdict has already been handed down: a hundred women have accused Weinstein of assault or harassment, ninety-four of them on the record.
Weinstein sounds somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock in that, according to people who know him, he is filled with “self-hatred, that he thought of himself as a deeply unattractive man and was tortured about that.” Hitchcock made actresses pay in his movie plots (think of Janet Leigh in Psycho or Tippi Hedrun in The Birds) whereas Weinstein did so off set. As Tolentino observes, “A man fixated on the supposed injustice of his own lack sometimes concludes that he is entitled to what he doesn’t possess.
A teacher of Romantic poetry, Lurie finds Weinstein-like justification in Lord Byron. This allows him to draw a sharp contrast between his own behavior and that of men who, later in the novel, rape his daughter:
After [his daughter] Lucy’s rape, he muses that among the “legions of countesses and kitchenmaids that Byron pushed himself into there were no doubt those who called it rape. But none surely had cause to fear that the session would end with her throat being slit.” That sort of thing, done at knifepoint, is real rape, he—like Weinstein’s defenders—implies.
Tolentino concludes,
Lurie is a more readily visible figure now. He is the man who frets about the overreach of #MeToo while demonstrating the tenacity of the attitudes that make such a movement necessary. (In Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, published in 2018, the narrator describes a character as “one of several Lurian friends I’ve known: reckless, priapic men risking careers, livelihoods, marriages—everything.”) Lurie believes that he is the victim of a purge.
A few weeks ago, someone—not a Donald Trump fan—penned a Washington Post column thanking the president for sparking “one of the greatest surges of American citizen action in half a century.”
“For decades,” wrote Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and executive director of the Aspen Institute Citizenship & American Identity Program,
civic educators and activists have wondered what it would take to get a greater number of Americans more involved in self-government. All it took, it turns out, was a bombastic, authoritarian, nativist president whose erratic behavior and executive overreach made him a vivid threat to democratic norms and the Constitution.
With that in mind, I share a poem that the great senator Daniel Webster wrote in 1801 when he was a Dartmouth student. Although I provide historical context at its conclusion, feel free to apply it to our present situation. We still long for someone, assuming the mantle of our first president, will hush our “mad alarms” and lull “monster faction”:
Washington
Ah! Washington, thou once didst guide the helm And point each danger to our infant realm; Didst show the gulf where factious tempests sweep, And the big thunders frolic o'er the deep; Through the red wave didst lead our bark, nor stood, Like ancient Moses, the other side the flood. But thou art gone,—yes, gone, and we deplore The man, the Washington, we knew before. But, when thy spirit mounted to the sky, And scarce beneath thee left a tearless eye, Tell what Elisha then thy mantle caught, Warmed with thy virtue, with thy wisdom fraught. Say, was it Adams? was it he who bare His country's toils, nor knew a separate care, Whose bosom heaved indignant as he saw Columbia groan beneath oppression's law, Who stood and spurned corruption at his feet, Firm as "the rock on which the storm shall beat?" Or was it he whose votaries now disclaim Thy godlike deeds and sully all thy fame? Spirit of Washington, oh! grant reply, And let thy country know thee from the sky. Break through the clouds, and be thine accents heard, Accents that oft 'mid war's rude onset cheered. Thy voice shall hush again our mad alarms, Lull monster faction with thy potent charms. And grant to whosoe'er ascends thy seat, Worth half like thine, and virtues half as great.
I’m fairly sure that Webster is speaking in support of John Adams, who had just lost to Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election. Although Jefferson had once been among Washington’s “votaries,” Webster now sees him disclaiming Washington’s “godlike deeds,” and sullying his fame. Thus, the poem is both an encomium on Washington and a warning that our “infant realm” is experiencing “factious tempests” and “big thunders.”
What we want is a leader who has at least half the worth of Washington and “virtues half as great.” Adams seemed to be the hope before he lost the election, and Webster’s description of him is something our own presidential candidates should aspire to. The “rock on which the storm shall beat” comes from “Hail, Columbia,” the anthem written for Washington’s first inauguration:
Say, was it Adams? was it he who bare
His country's toils, nor knew a separate care,
Whose bosom heaved indignant as he saw
Columbia groan beneath oppression's law,
Who stood and spurned corruption at his feet,
Firm as "the rock on which the storm
shall beat?"
Oppression and corruption are things we can relate to. How refreshing to imagine a leader whose greatest concern is for his country’s toils. More than ever, we need Washington’s spirit to break through the clouds.
Today I will be delivering the following talk to our church’s Adult Forum. The theme of this year’s program is “Practicing Our Faith in a World of Need.” Not surprisingly, I claim that reading literature is a form of spiritual exploration.
In this year when the Adult Forum is examining ways to “practice[e] our faith in a world of need,” I am suggesting one spiritual practice that may not come immediately to mind: reading great literature. To explain, I begin with a story.
Back when I was a young professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I didn’t see the point of going to church. Julia and our children were attending the Episcopal church adjacent to the college, but as I told the rector at one point, I didn’t need religion because I had literature.
Needless to say, I no longer believe this to be the case. Later in the talk I’ll explain why I see both as essential, but for the moment I note that I wasn’t altogether wrong. There’s a lot of overlap between religion and literature, with both operating as rich symbol systems that strive to express that which is beyond expression.
Both religion and literature address life’s fundamental questions, and both rely on narrative and figurative language in their search for answers. Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet and critic, observes that “poetry…requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception.” Alluding to Christ’s vision of manifesting the kingdom of God here on earth, Arnold wrote that in literature and art, as in religion, “the human spirit has manifested its approaches to totality.” Literature and the arts, Arnold said, envision a “full, harmonious perfection,” and in their envisioning, they stimulate and help forward “the world’s general perfection.”
I didn’t use exactly this language as a young literature professor, but I sensed Arnold’s point. I knew that, when one is immersed in the power and beauty of a great poem, play or novel, one leaves behind the material realm and touches the stars. At the time, literature engaged and inspired me and attending church did not.
When one argues for an overlap between religion and literature, however, one encounters problems. The other day Sewanee’s English Department chair Jennifer Michael said that poets with strong religious agendas are seldom great poets because their allegiance is elsewhere than to their poetic vision. I think this is definitely true if religion is seen in its traditional sense. Those poets who attempt to be orthodox or to conform to official church doctrine can put blinkers on their poetic exploration. Many who have refused those blinkers, meanwhile, have encountered trouble with church authorities.
Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, felt the need to recant Canterbury Tales and other works towards the end of his life, either because the church objected or because he himself was fearful about getting into heaven. Moliere’s Tartuffe, a brilliant satire of religious hypocrites, cut too close to the bone for church authorities in 17th century France, who banned it.
My favorite novel, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which as one point contains a 50-page spiritual reflection by Father Zosima that is so powerful I wish it would go on for another 50 pages, nevertheless incurred the wrath of state censors because of its graphic depictions of child abuse. Dostoevsky pleaded that the passages be retained because he knew that, if we are to fully explore sin and redemption, we must see the full darkness. The spiritual brother Alyosha, if he is to hold his own against his brilliant, rational brother Ivan, must be prepared to look at what humans are capable of. Ivan won’t let him get away with cheap grace.
And then there’s Paradise Lost. What are we to make of a work in which generations of readers—certainly my college students—fall in love with Satan? Satan is so charismatic—far more so than God and Jesus, who pale in comparison—that William Blake famously opined that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. But with all respect to Blake, who has his own profound meditations on the relationship between religion and secular society, Milton had to create Satan as he did. The demands of his drama required him to show sin in all of its attractiveness.
By the end of the epic, Satan has been exposed as a shallow narcissist who can’t move beyond his inflated self-image, and the real heroes of the epic turn out to be the less glamorous but more substantive figures of Adam and Eve. Their willingness to look within themselves, to make sacrifices, and to repent are far more inspiring than Satan’s theatrics. I can report as a teacher, however, that it’s harder to sell my students on them. A spiritual journey is required, and it is through such journeys that our spiritual life is deepened.
The Milton example helps us see that poetry and institutional religion have different agendas, at least initially. If we think of literature as “virtual life,” then we are plunged into all the challenges and heartaches of life when we pick up a book. A great work takes us into ambiguous terrain that allows no easy answers. And while I think we should grapple with this terrain no less in our worship services, the two operate very differently.
For an example, I turn to one of my favorite poets, someone who writes about religion yet still manages to be great. Yet I wonder if the poetry of George Herbert would have been embraced wholeheartedly by the church if it has been published during his life. That’s because his doubts about God are taken up in poem after poem. Take “The Flower,” for instance, which begins on a confident note of devotion, encounters doubt, finds reassurance, experiences doubt again, and finally concludes with a declaration of faith. Herbert refuses to settle for anything that is not entirely true, even when it comes to his feelings about God.
Or imagine church authorities responding to the opening of “The Collar,” where Herbert feels his clerical collar has become a slave collar, a burdensome yoke carrying such high expectations that it threatens to defeat him:
I struck the board and cried, “No more; I will abroad! What? Shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I still be in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit?
The poem goes on in this vein, with the poet becoming more and more angry with God and the responsibilities that go with faith. The message is accentuated through a quadruple pun going on with the title: clerical collar, slave collar, choler (anger), and caller. But it ends with a shift in tone that overwhelms me whenever I read it:
But as I raved and grew more
fierce and wild At
every word, Me thought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord.
In other words, rather than being put off when we thrash around in our doubt and misery, God calls out to us as if to an upset child. Herbert’s choler melts when he hears the still small voice of the caller.
So far I have been focusing on works that explicitly deal with religious themes, but I want to shift now to some that don’t, at least to the same extent. For many years now, my blog Better Living through Beowulf has shared a Mary Oliver poem each Easter Sunday. Most people think of Oliver as a nature rather than a religious poet—for years I did—so it came as a surprise to me when our rector, in one of his sermons, mentioned that she was Episcopalian. After I noted my surprise, he humorously noted that this is fairly typical of Episcopalians—we can be pretty good at hiding our faith. In any event, take a look at “Egrets,” which many would see only as a poem about a walk in the woods:
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.
If we see this as an Easter poem, Oliver is walking the road to Calvary. Torn with thorns, she faces a black and empty tomb, only to suddenly experience “a shower of white fire.” At this moment, doubt is dispelled as, unruffled and sure,
by the laws of their faith not logic, they opened their wings softly and stepped over every dark thing.
Do you see in these lines the Easter promise? Oliver’s faith is influencing how she sees the world around her.
Or to take another example, in Flannery O’Connor’s disturbing short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” an extremely disagreeable grandmother finds grace only in the final seconds of her life. Up to this point, she has been a self-absorbed narcissist whose selfishness manages to get her family lost and in a car wreck. Then the family encounters “the Misfit,” a killer who has escaped from prison, and the grandmother sees him murder her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.
The Misfit has been sharing with her his religious doubts. If Jesus could in fact transcend death, he says, everyone should drop whatever they are doing and follow him, whereas if he couldn’t, then life is meaningless and it makes no ultimate difference whether one kills people or not. In her panic, the grandmother has a Peter betrayal moment—“Maybe he didn’t raise the dead,” she mumbles—but seeing his misery at this possibility, for the first time in her life she steps out beyond her self-absorption:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
This action of genuine compassion,
reminiscent of Jesus’s forgiveness from the cross, so unnerves the Misfit that
he instantly shoots her. Then we get from him one of the most bizarre but
spiritually weighted observations to be found anywhere. First, the shooting:
The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
And then the line that resonates:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Gruesome though the conclusion
is, we see a moment of grace offsetting a selfish, petty life.
When I teach literature, whether it’s overtly religious, covertly religious, or lacking in any religious allusions at all, I don’t proselytize. St. Mary’s, despite its name, is a state school, but I wouldn’t proselytize at Sewanee either. Our students don’t need to have religion forced upon them.
That’s because they hunger, not for ready-made rituals, but for substantial conversations about spirituality and the meaning of life. I don’t know how many have told me, over the years, that they are “spiritual, not religious,” and I take that self-characterization seriously. They have all their lives to find a faith tradition that speaks to them, but at the moment they need immersion in the big questions. Literature can provide them with the immersion they crave.
I’ll conclude with one last
example to make my point. My favorite Shakespeare play is King Lear, a nihilistic
tragedy in which God is not mentioned once. To be sure, the recently blinded Gloucester
mentions “the gods,” but that’s just to point out the senselessness of
suffering:
Yet I find Lear to be one of the most spiritually uplifting works that I know. Earlier in the play, of course, good daughter Cordelia has refused to play her father’s love game, even though he disinherits her as a result. He wants to dictate the conditions of love—love on his terms, in other words—and she refuses to desecrate something so sacred.
By the end of the play, however,
he has discovered what love truly is. As they are being taken away to prison
and to their deaths, Lear tells his daughter,
Which would you rather have, I ask my students—a lifetime of self-absorption or 24 hours of ecstatic connection? King Lear, like our Christian faith, restores perspective.
I mentioned at the start of my talk that I no longer prefer literature to religion but embrace both. Literature, for all its beauty and complexity, is not only spiritual. We look at the language, the themes, the historical context, the gender dynamics, and countless other things. When I’m in church, by contrast, I focus on one thing. Literature is so much like life that we can get lost in it the way we get lost in life, whereas worship concentrates the mind.
Yet having said that, I add that, in my life, literature and religion are never apart: my Christianity deepens my understanding of literature, and my understanding of literature deepens my faith. Those students who haven’t embraced a specific faith practice get at least a glimpse of transcendence, and this glimpse can become an integral part of how they see themselves and the world.
Imagist poet Amy Lowell provides us with today’s Valentine’s Day poem. Imagism gives us images without commentary, which makes it ideal for hinting at intimate encounters.
Aubade
As I would free the white almond from the green husk So I would strip your trappings off, Beloved. And fingering the smooth and polished kernel I should see that in my hands glittered a gem beyond counting.
When Republican senators openly announced ahead of Donald Trump’s trial that they would be violating their jury oaths, they guaranteed the proceedings would be a sham. Only Mitt Romney took his oath seriously, earning the applause of (among others) Late Night’s Stephen Colbert. I mention Colbert because, in reflections on the significance of oaths, he quoted Man for All Seasons:
“You know, in my own small way I try to live my faith, and over the years, I’ve made a lot of fun of Mitt Romney,” Colbert said, recapping some of the punchlines. “And I mean this sincerely: After seeing that speech, I would do all those jokes again, because that’s the oath I took. But I do want to say, that was an inspiring speech. Because hearing Mitt Romney taking his oath to God seriously was like finding water in the desert.” He explained how “we know Republicans are lying when they say that Trump didn’t do anything wrong” and should remain in office, then how their votes to acquit condemn them: “Oaths may not mean a lot to some people. But here’s what it’s about: When you take an oath, you can’t think one thing and say another. You are asking God to witness, on the pain of your immortal soul, that what you whisper in your heart is what comes out of your mouth.”
At this point Colbert turned to Robert Bolt’s play. As Thomas More explains to his daughter, he can’t break his oath to the Catholic Church just because it will save his life:
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And if he opens his fingers then-he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.
Apparently no GOP senator outside of Romney
was capable of this.
My friend Glenda Funk surfaced her own literary passage after witnessing Romney’s speech. In Arthur Miller’s Crucible, the fallible but ultimately heroic John Proctor tears up his confession because he too chooses the honor of his name over his life:
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
How will the other senators be remembered, especially given that Trump sees their vote to acquit as permission to keep violating the Constitution? Here I turn to the oath-breaking Dead Men of Dunharrow in Lord of the Rings, who are consigned to a world of perpetual twilight.
Aragorn explains that although,
in days of old, these men swore an oath to join the fight against Sauron, they
secretly consorted with him instead. Think of them as the equivalent of those
who swear to uphold the Constitution while consorting with someone intent on
tearing it down:
[A]t Erech there stands yet a black stone that was brought, it was said, from Númenor by Isildur; and it was set upon a hill, and upon it the King of the Mountains swore allegiance to him in the beginning of the realm of Gondor. But when Sauron returned and grew in might again, Isildur summoned the Men of the Mountains to fulfil their oath, and they would not: for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years.
‘Then Isildur said to their king: “Thou shalt be the last king. And if the West prove mightier than thy Black Master, this curse I lay upon thee and thy folk: to rest never until your oath is fulfilled. For this war will last through years uncounted, and you shall be summoned once again ere the end.” And they fled before the wrath of Isildur, and did not dare to go forth to war on Sauron’s part; and they hid themselves in secret places in the mountains and had no dealings with other men, but slowly dwindled in the barren hills. And the terror of the Sleepless Dead lies about the Hill of Erech and all places where that people lingered.
No one has officially cursed our oath-breaking senators, but they have become all but shadow figures, either groveling before the president, remaining silent in the face of his outrages, or offering (like Sen. Susan Collins) milquetoast rebukes that are never backed up by action.
Can we imagine a scenario in which they leave the Trump cult and once again honor the oaths they swore? Will they emerge from the twilight state of endless denial, avoidance, equivocation and rationalization to stand once again for higher principles. In Lord of the Rings, the oath breakers prove decisive in breaking the siege of Gondor when they finally honor their oath:
The Dead awaken; for the hour is come for the oathbreakers; at the Stone of Erech they shall stand again and hear there a horn in the hills ringing. Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call them from the prey twilight, the forgotten people? The heir of him to whom the oath they swore. From the North shall he come, need shall drive him: he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead.
Who knows, maybe GOP senators will hear the horn and once again rise up to defend the Constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law. My fear, however, is that they will cynically rediscover their love of those precious principles only if there is a Democratic administration.
