You, Mary, Are More Than Welcome Here

By Robin Bates | Published: June 1, 2024
Albertinelli, The Visitation (1503)

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Sunday

This past Friday, May 31, was the Feast of the Visitation. This is moment when, two months after becoming pregnant with Jesus, Mary visited her maternal aunt Elizabeth, soon to be mother of John the Baptist. Given the society’s strictures against unwed mothers, one can imagine Mary’s anxieties and how grateful she must have been for Elizabeth’s positive encouragement. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!” Elizabeth told her (according to Luke). And a little later, “As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”

In “A Blessing Called Sanctuary,” writer and ordained Methodist minister Jan Richardson imagines Elizabeth recalling Mary’s visit. “You hardly knew,” she tells her niece,

how hungry you were
to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome
that invited you to enter
entirely—
nothing of you
found foreign or strange…

In Richardson’s telling, the house becomes a sanctuary—Mary stayed three months before returning to Galilee to marry Joseph—and Elizabeth remembers how Mary settled in, “leaning into the blessing that enfolded you.” At this point in the poem, this blessing is both Elizabeth’s blessing and the pregnancy itself. As Mary leans into both—they are described as “unimagined grace”—she is able

to breathe again,
to move without fear,
to speak with abandon
the words you carried
in your bones,
that echoed in your being.

You learned to sing.

The song she sings is “The Magnificat,” also known as “The Song of Mary.” The blessing Mary has received, Elizabeth tells her, cannot stay private. “The deal with this blessing,” the aunt asserts,

is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger
in safety,
in stasis.

In other words, Mary cannot continue to hunker down in Elizabeth’s house. Just as that house and the pregnancy have become sanctuaries, so Mary’s words must go public becoming a sanctuary for the world. As Elizabeth puts it, Mary will need

to speak your word
into the world,
to tell what you have heard
with your own ears,
seen with your own eyes,
known in your own heart…

What Mary has heard, seen, and known during the time spent with her aunt is that she is blessed among women. That message, which is true of all of us, is summed in Elizabeth’s closing words:

[Y]ou are beloved,
precious child of God,
beautiful to behold,
and you are welcome
here.

I love how, with the final “you are welcome here,” the poem folds back around to Elizabeth’s welcoming hospitality. When we, like a newly pregnant and frightened Mary, are moving through a hostile and uncomprehending world, unsure of ourselves and not knowing where to turn, God opens Her arms to us.

Here’s Richardson’s poem:

A Blessing Called Sanctuary
By Jan Richardson

You hardly knew
how hungry you were
to be gathered in,
to receive the welcome
that invited you to enter
entirely—
nothing of you
found foreign or strange,
nothing of your life
that you were asked
to leave behind
or to carry in silence
or in shame.

Tentative steps
became settling in,
leaning into the blessing
that enfolded you,
taking your place
in the circle
that stunned you
with its unimagined grace.

You began to breathe again,
to move without fear,
to speak with abandon
the words you carried
in your bones,
that echoed in your being.

You learned to sing.

But the deal with this blessing
is that it will not leave you alone,
will not let you linger
in safety,
in stasis.

The time will come
when this blessing
will ask you to leave,
not because it has tired of you
but because it desires for you
to become the sanctuary
that you have found–
to speak your word
into the world,
to tell what you have heard
with your own ears,
seen with your own eyes,
known in your own heart:

that you are beloved,
precious child of God,
beautiful to behold,
and you are welcome
and more than welcome
here.

And in case you need reminding, here’s Mary’s “Magnificat,” which assures us all that we are indeed precious children of God:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him 
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.

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Responding to the Verdict: Trump & Fagin

By Robin Bates | Published: May 30, 2024
Cruikshank, Fagin in Oliver Twist

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Friday

I’m still trying to process the “guilty on all counts” verdict brought against Donald Trump yesterday. Above all, I’m impressed with how the American justice system rose to the occasion, in spite of the unprecedented attempts by Trump and Trump sycophants to tear it down. The judge brought a sense of gravitas and dignity to the proceedings, and the jury took their job seriously. Instead of a circus we saw the rule of law.

As I try to imagine Donald Trump responding to the verdict the moment it was delivered, I think of Fagin at the end of Oliver Twist. Of course, there’s much more at stake in Fagin’s case: if he is found guilty of running a gang and fencing stolen goods, he will be hung. Nevertheless, Trump may well have experienced some of the same excruciating waiting. Here’s Dickens’s account of Fagin in court:

The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man—Fagin. Before him and behind: above, below, on the right and on the left: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.

He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was delivering his charge to the jury. At times, he turned his eyes sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight in his favor; and when the points against him were stated with terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that he would, even then, urge something in his behalf. Beyond these manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot. He had scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.

A slight bustle in the court, recalled him to himself. Looking round, he saw that the jurymen had turned together, to consider their verdict. As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising above each other to see his face: some hastily applying their glasses to their eyes: and others whispering their neighbors with looks expressive of abhorrence. A few there were, who seemed unmindful of him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could delay. But in no one face—not even among the women, of whom there were many there—could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be condemned.

As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the deathlike stillness came again, and looking back he saw that the jurymen had turned towards the judge. Hush!

They only sought permission to retire.

He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one when they passed out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was fruitless. The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair. The man pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.

He looked up into the gallery again. Some of the people were eating, and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place was very hot. There was one young man sketching his face in a little notebook. He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any idle spectator might have done.

In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost, and how he put it on. There was an old fat gentleman on the bench, too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back. He wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner, what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused another.

Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could not fix his thoughts upon it. Thus, even while he trembled, and turned burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was. Then, he thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold—and stopped to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it—and then went on to think again.

At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all towards the door. The jury returned, and passed him close. He could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone. Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.

For all Trump’s bravado, which often took the form of attacks against the judge, the judge’s daughter, the district attorney, various witnesses, jury members, Joe Biden, and others, he was unusually subdued when he emerged from the courtroom at trial’s end. Perhaps, like Fagin, he was overwhelmed by being finally held to account. The very solidity of Judge Merchan’s courtroom signaled to him that here at least was one reality he couldn’t ignore, gaslight, or talk his way out of.

And so it was that, for the first time in American history, we saw a former president awaiting a verdict in a felony trial. “Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.”

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Awaiting the Verdict

By Robin Bates | Published: May 29, 2024
Tenniel, Illus. from Alice in Wonderland

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Thursday

I write this post as the jury in Donald Trump’s business fraud/election interference trial is in recess, to resume deliberations tomorrow. Like so many, I am wondering whether the former president will, for once in his life, be held criminally accountable for his behavior. In the past I’ve compared him to John Gay’s Mac the Knife, a romantic rogue who miraculously escapes punishment whenever the authorities attempt to bring him to justice. Will we see yet another miraculous escape here?

Speaking of rogues, Trump has attempted to play the rogue card and even to surround himself with rogues. Recently, while angling for Libertarian votes at the nominating convention, he promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, a Libertarian hero who was sentenced to a life in prison for operating an online marketplace where illegal drugs were bought and sold. (Ulbricht tried to have five people killed while six deaths resulted from drugs bought on his website.) In the past, Trump has lionized and pardoned Eddie Gallagher, the Navy Seal who was indicted for war crimes and who, in the words of fellow Iraq war veterans, was “okay will killing anything that moved.”  Of course, Trump is also promising to pardon the rogues who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and last week he invited two rappers charged with murder to join him on stage at a Bronx rally. As Trump sees it, being a rogue gives him a leg up with the Black community: he has been telling African Americans that he’s just like them because of his run-ins with the law.

Trump, it must be said, is much less engaging than Mac the Knife, who while dodgy is also open-hearted and magnanimous.

In the Manhattan case I’ve seen hints of the trial in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Knave of Hearts has been accused of stealing a tray of tarts, as reported in the Mother Goose rhyme:

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
    All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
    And took them quite away!”

The evidence, as in Trump’s case, is circumstantial. As with Trump, there’s written documentation, and as with Trump—who is famous for never leaving a paper trail himself–the Knave points out the absence of his signature: “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

In the end, however, there’s no question that the knave stole the tarts—they are returned after the king “beat the knave full sore” (according to the nursery rhyme) or “returned from him to you” (according to a letter obtained by the White Rabbit). And we see the tarts themselves, just as we are seeing checks signed by Trump and reimbursement notes signed by his Chief Financial Officer.

Putting aside the details of the trial, however, I find myself wondering if, finally, justice will be served to a man who has spent his whole life thumbing his nose at the rule of law. Every time he has been caught red-handed (inviting Russian election interference, pressuring election officials, goading his followers to attack the Capitol, stealing government documents), he has been able—like Mac—to evade or postpone judgment. I thus find myself like the perpetually frustrated speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “I many times thought peace had come.” Substitute “accountability” for “peace” and you’ll see my state of mind:

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At center of the sea,

And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shores
Before the harbor lie.

Is the shore close at hand or will it prove once against fictitious? We’ll know soon.

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Brave New World and Cellphones

By Robin Bates | Published: May 28, 2024
Aldous Huxley

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Wednesday

My dear friend Rebecca Adams sent me a fascinating article on Gen Z members who are pushing back against “phone-based childhood.” In “The Youth Rebellion is Growing,” Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt profile seven leaders who are actively working to reduce the serious harms associated with cellphones.

One of these leaders, Ben Spagloss, could be a poster child for better living through literature. Thanks to a mentor he met in high school, Spagloss went from non-reader to voracious reader. Now, as an adult, he uses TikTok to persuade people to get off their phones. He also wants us all to pressure Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which tech companies are fighting with a $60 million a year lobbying effort.

 As Spagloss describes his outreach to his 190,000 followers,

I will try to get people interested in books, or post at night to help people to power off and sleep. I will also try to teach different behavioral change skills to help people navigate some of the internal barriers that can make change so hard.”

It’s ironic that Spagloss uses his phone to persuade others to abandon theirs, but how else would he do it? As he puts it, “My generation’s world is online, so I thought I’d try to reach people there.” 

Spagloss reports that books received no respect in his high school, where

“reading a book” was a joke. The laugh-out-loud kind of funny. The reality was SparkNotes, CliffNotes, your friend’s notes, or whatever you found online to get the assignment done. The real school we went to every day was the Internet. The social media platforms had a perfect attendance rate, but what they were giving to the kids, nobody knew at the time.

What changed him was an after-school tutor who became a father figure. The man saw through Spagloss’s tough and uncaring act, teaching him “that loving others and aspiring to change the world was a much better philosophy.”

Imitating his mentor, Spagloss turned to books, reading 50 his first year and “a couple hundred” the year after. Reading changed the way he saw his phone.

It was in part this new perspective that drew him to dystopian or speculative fiction. While bookish adolescents are generally attracted to this genre—after all, they’re beginning to think beyond their family and peer units to explore the broader world—Spagloss was most fascinated by a work that is sometimes overshadowed by 1984, The Road, The Stand, Handmaid’s Tale, The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games, and the Oryx and Crake trilogy. Looking at his concerns, however, one can see why Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would strike a chord.

As Spagloss points out, in Huxley’s work “the typical antagonist of the tyrannical government isn’t present. Instead, the protagonist is the antagonist. The people oppress themselves.” Because the authorities encourage consumerism and endless entertainment and freely allow both sex and drug use, the citizenry doesn’t aspire to anything more. As Bernard Marx, a discontented character, observes, people used to read and think, whereas now

the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labor and distraction, scampering from feely [movie] to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…” 

Spagloss sees Brave New World as even more relevant now than it was in the early 1930s, when it first appeared. He observes,

It pointed to a world where the books don’t burn, but the libraries are left unchecked. Where information is not deprived from people, but given in incomprehensible abundance. Where the culture is not controlled but instead trivial, comedic, sexual, or roasted. In this world, people are not controlled by inflicting pain, but pleasure. It was a world without pain, poetry, truth, or meaning. I saw pleasure, when Huxley and later [Neil] Postman, pointed from their graves to my phone with their stories.

American culture critic Postman, whose 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, saw Brave New World rather than 1984 as our future in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I wonder what he’d say now, what with the rise of Donald Trump in this country and of authoritarian regimes around the world. Orwell seems only too relevant, especially the dictum, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

As I think about this further, however, one can combine both dystopias: what we are currently experiencing is a reality television host performing Big Brother wannabe for the entertainment of his fans. Trump has become the drug of choice for a swath of the American public, some of whom saw invading the U.S. Capitol as freedom fighter cosplay. (Meanwhile some of Trump’s enablers in Congress have described them as “tourists” and “hostages.”)

In Brave New World, meanwhile, John the Savage, seeking to escape a world in which constant drugs and entertainment numb the senses, engages in self-flagellation with a ceremonial whip—but that just becomes a new form of entertainment for the jaded multitudes. What are the feelies and soma to spectator sadism?

“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”

Then, in unison and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We-want-the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We-want-the whip.”

Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot- fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth reiteration, no other word was being spoken. “We-want- the whip.”

They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours almost indefinitely.

When Lenina, a sexually charged woman who has been trying to seduce John, rushes out to him, he turns the whip first on her and then back on himself. The crowd has gotten what they came for:

With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke; there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic center of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.

Their subsequent behavior is akin to all those MAGA bullies who, inspired by Trump, confront people in supermarkets, shopping malls, parks, and other venues. It’s as though they have been given permission to lash out, and they turn on each other and on Lenina, who is on the ground: 

Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet. 

I can’t help but see the storming of the Capitol in the scene. 

Tom Nichols, a former Republican who writes for the Atlantic, has been calling America “an unserious country” for close to a decade now, seeing us “in the grip both of trivial silliness and dead-serious psychosis.” When people are more interested in being entertained than in governing, we have a Huxley society. Unfortunately, Huxley is only a step away from Orwell since there are authoritarians-in-waiting who are more than eager, with a Trump victory, to install a Christo-fascist state. And if that happens, the reality television show that is American politics will turn deadly serious. Actual pain will ensue.

Can literature stop this? Well, if it alerts Gen Z leaders like Ben Spagloss to these dangers—and if he can persuade his fellows to put down their phones and pay attention to what’s happening—then at least there will be pushback.

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Pinocchio and Appalachian Hunger

By Robin Bates | Published: May 27, 2024
Illus. from Pinocchio

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Tuesday

I never cease to marvel at how small scenes from a novel read in childhood—scenes that others might overlook—are woven into our understanding of the world. When the scene intersects with something we encounter in real life, we have a powerful framework for processing this new information.

Today I’m thinking of my first encounter with real hunger. Having been raised in a middle-class household, I have never experienced deprivation. But Sewanee is located in the Southern Appalachians, where Hunger exists—or at least it did so in my childhood. Two incidents come to mind.

Before recounting them, however, I share a passage from Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), which primed me for what I was to witness. The novel, I hasten to mention, is nothing like the Disney movie. For one thing, early in the book Pinocchio throws a hammer at the talking cricket that functions as his conscience, killing it (“With a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!”). After that, the mischievous marionette can receive guidance only from the cricket’s ghost. Pinocchio is unexpectedly grim for a children’s book—at one point Pinocchio barely survives after the Fox and the Cat hang him by the neck from a tree—and part of the grimness involves starvation.

In the scene I remember, Pinocchio has been frantic with hunger until Geppetto returns home with three pears, at which point he gets picky. What transpires is a lesson in not wasting food:

“If you want me to eat them, please peel them for me.”

“Peel them?” asked Geppetto, very much surprised. “I should never have thought, dear boy of mine, that you were so dainty and fussy about your food. Bad, very bad! In this world, even as children, we must accustom ourselves to eat of everything, for we never know what life may hold in store for us!”

“You may be right,” answered Pinocchio, “but I will not eat the pears if they are not peeled. I don’t like them.”

And good old Geppetto took out a knife, peeled the three pears, and put the skins in a row on the table.

Pinocchio ate one pear in a twinkling and started to throw the core away, but Geppetto held his arm.

“Oh, no, don’t throw it away! Everything in this world may be of some use!”

“But the core I will not eat!” cried Pinocchio in an angry tone.

“Who knows?” repeated Geppetto calmly.

And later the three cores were placed on the table next to the skins.

Pinocchio had eaten the three pears, or rather devoured them. Then he yawned deeply, and wailed:

“I’m still hungry.”

“But I have no more to give you.”

“Really, nothing—nothing?”

“I have only these three cores and these skins.”

“Very well, then,” said Pinocchio, “if there is nothing else I’ll eat them.”

At first he made a wry face, but, one after another, the skins and the cores disappeared.

“Ah! Now I feel fine!” he said after eating the last one.

And then this very didactic book delivers its message:

“You see,” observed Geppetto, “that I was right when I told you that one must not be too fussy and too dainty about food. My dear, we never know what life may have in store for us!”

 Now for my childhood stories. Appalachian poverty runs deep, and in some of the communities around Sewanee were people living in tarpaper shacks. There were no free-lunch or free-breakfast programs in those days, and I remember a couple of boys in seventh grade leaving morning classes early in order to sweep out the dining hall in exchange for lunch money.

At one point in fifth grade we had an Easter egg hunt, with the prize being a large popcorn rabbit held together by some sweet, sticky substance, maybe caramel.

I took the hunt very seriously and am pretty sure I found the most eggs. But classmate Curtis (not his real name) claimed that he had found the most and, without counting what was in our bags, the teacher presented him with the rabbit.  I remember feeling cheated and aggrieved.

Or I felt that way until I saw what happened next. Curtis grabbed the rabbit and bit into it with ferocity such as I had never seen before, devouring it to the last kernel. There was no dainty nibbling around the edges. I knew—in part from having reading Pinocchio and in part by the intensity of the moment—that I was in the presence of Hunger. At that moment, I was glad that, whether fairly or not, Curtis had won that rabbit. My own desires and needs were secondary.

This experience was reenforced a couple of years later in seventh grade. We had some kind of bread or rice pudding for lunch one day, into which the chef had much so much sugar or something that it was too rich too eat. Kids will eat almost anything sweet, but in this case no one could get it down. We all left it on our plates.

Well, almost all of us. I remember seeing Curtis, back behind the lunch counter, shoveling down the food from the large bowl out of which it had been served. He was using one of the large serving spoons and appeared to be (as the expression went) “in hog heaven.” Once again, I recognized I was in the presence of Hunger.

I’m not sure I would have connected the dots had I not read Pinocchio. The story had lodged in my head because of my strong initial response—I had been torn between feeling sorry for the marionette and ashamed at his antics—and now a life incident was prompting me to recall it.

All of which is to say that, whether at home or at school, children must be introduced to a constant stream of books. Adults cannot always predict what they will take away with them.

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The Heartbreak in the Heart of Things

By Robin Bates | Published: May 26, 2024
A World War I cemetery


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Monday – Memorial Day

British poet Wilfrid Wilson Gipson, who saw two years of action in World War I before an injury sent him home, wrote “Lament” immediately after the war ended. In some ways, he appears to be suffering from survivor’s guilt, or at least shock at how it no longer seems possible to enjoy the small things of life.

The poem is powerful in its quiet simplicity, which is not easy to achieve for someone who has experienced war firsthand. One reviewer of the time wrote of Gipson, “Under the impact of the greatest crisis in history, he has been not stunned to silence or babbling song, but awakened to understanding and sober speech, and thereby has proved his genius.” Another said that, although his poems are “nothing more than etchings, vignettes, of moods and impressions,” they nevertheless “register with a burning solution on the spirit what the personal side of the war means to those in the trenches and at home.”

In other words, Gipson struck a chord amongst those who were still reeling from “the Great War.” By attaching words to feelings that seem to defy language, poetry gives us a place to rest. And to remember.

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?

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Christ Be with Me, Christ within Me

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2024
Celtic cross

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Trinity Sunday

Church friends of mine inform me that clergy often dread giving the sermon for Trinity Sunday.  With the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal entry into the world, an explanation was needed for who exactly it was that Christians were worshipping: God, Jesus, or this inner spirit? Out of this arose bitter debates, not to mention more than a little confusion. As John Gatta explains in Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, there is a supposition “that the Trinity is a forbidding abstract and abstruse doctrine—hence one that might best be left unmentioned in public discourse.”

Gatta’s book contends that Christianity provides us with powerful guidance in how to honor the natural world, and this includes the concept of the Trinity. Yet Gatta observes that people often see the Trinity as

inherently problematic rather than illuminating. If regarded mainly as an esoteric puzzle beyond our capacity to solve, then this doctrine looks indeed to be a barrier rather than a breakthrough to fuller understanding.

And indeed, other religions have sometimes regarded Christianity as polytheistic rather than monotheistic. After all, how can God be “three in one”? Gatta’s discussion of the Trinity, however, makes it anything but abstruse. Rather, it captures the way that nature lovers actually experience nature.

To explain, Gatta provides us with a Wordsworthian example. He reports that,

as I sit quietly to watch a cascading watercourse somewhere in Yosemite Valley or the Adirondack Mountains, I sense a flow of divine spirit that seems to be at once within and yet beyond the physical scene I am trying to absorb. The way we experience God in these moments cries out for something more than an either/or solution: God beyond us or God within us.

In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity, while appearing to be a logical contradiction, is instead a way of getting at some of the deepest paradoxes of existence. Think of using it, for instance, to describe Tennyson’s experience upon encountering a “Flower in the Crannied Wall”:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

The poet is simultaneously seeing “root and all” and “all in all.” There is something that is both in the flower and beyond it. Wordsworth describes the same experience when, at the conclusion of Intimations of Immortality, he declares, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” We may not to be able to logically explain how something can be both immanent and transcendent but we feel it.

With the concept of the Trinity, Christianity avoids both the idea that God is detached from nature (what theologian John Macquarrie calls “monarchical monotheism”) and the idea that God is the same as nature (pantheism). Rather, God is both the generative force beyond nature and a participant in it. God did not create the universe and then sit back but instead fully entered creation, becoming active in all the wondrous and unpredictable forms that nature takes. Rather than being at odds with evolution, as some creationists insist, God is evolution, even as God is simultaneously the spirit behind and beyond evolution. God became one with a human being—Jesus—and by means of Jesus’s guidance and the breath of the Holy Spirit, God becomes one with all that will open their hearts to Him/Her.

Poetry makes this point clearer than theology, and Gatta quotes from a hymn that we will be singing in church today. “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” is taken from a medieval Irish prayer with Druidic origins, origins that become particularly clear in parts of the prayer that do not show up in the hymn:

Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;
Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.  

There’s plenty in the hymn itself, however, that points to Ireland’s pagan roots, which were never fully eradicated from Celtic Christianity and which help explain its richness. Nature plays a major role in Christian revelation, as Gatta notes when writing about the hymn’s fourth stanza. He notes that the “strong name” of the Trinity, equivalent to a formidable breastplate or a Gaelic protection prayer, is “a name bound up with the force of ‘lightning free’ and those ‘old eternal rocks.’”

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray;
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.

Because the speaker feels kinship with these natural forces—with God’s creation—he or she can confidently assert that Christ is both within and without:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

There is nothing esoteric with how the speaker sees the concept of the Trinity here. Rather, as Gatta writes, there is a joyous dance between Father, Son, and Sprit, a dance of life that we are invited to join, comprised as it is of “a joyous rhythm mirrored in the rush of subatomic particles or in the ongoing symphony of kinesis performed by cosmological bodies.” Gatta notes that it’s a vision captured in the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso, where pilgrim Dante

is privileged to receive at least a mediated glimpse of the Beatific Vision. That vision includes, in addition to the Celestial Rose peopled by the communion of all saints, God’s great book of Eternal Light, binding with love within its leaves all that is or ever was of Creation.

Or in Dante’s concluding words, “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Follow-up note: Gatta quotes priest Michael Mayne as imagining that God’s first question at judgment will be, “Did you enjoy my creation?” I think of Mary Oliver, a poet who makes a concerted effort to drink in nature’s wonders and who sees her felt connection as a gift from God. In her poem about a yellow-breasted chat, a bird that sings at night, God the creator and God the immanent spirit are one and the same:

The Chat
By Mary Oliver

I wish
I were
the yellow chat
down in the thickets
who sings all night,
throwing
into the air
praises
and panhandles,
plains,
in curly phrases,
half-rhymes,
free verse too,
with head-dipping
and wing-wringing,
with soft breast
rising into the air-
meek and sleek,
broadcasting,
with no time out
for pillow-rest,
everything-
pathos,
thanks-
Oh, Lord,
what a lesson
you send me
as I stand
listening
to your rattling, swamp-loving chat
singing
of his simple, leafy life-
how I would like to sing to you
all night
in the dark
just like that.

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Swift Foresaw ChatGPT’s Problems

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2024
The device in Gulliver’s Travels used to produce knowledge.

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Friday

I retired from full time college teaching in 2018 at the age of 68, and what I miss most is watching students using literature to grapple with foundational questions. In my final years, after 40 years in the classroom, I was still being surprised and delighted at the variety of ways that students would use poems and stories to find meaning in their lives.

What I don’t miss is having to grapple with the challenges posed by new technologies, whether they be cellphones, zoom classes, or fake essays written by ChatGPT. The best teachers, as they always have, find ways to rise to the occasion, but there comes a point when one becomes tired of always having to rise. It’s enough of a task just to get students to engage with and reflect upon old-fashioned books.

In my defense, I’ll note that my wariness about the potential of new technology to enhance learning is not new. Three hundred years ago a writer was voicing his skepticism on this very issue.

The writer I have in mind is Jonathan Swift. In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, Swift directs his satire against the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a.k.a. the Royal Society. While a remarkable organization, like all such organizations it was prone to excesses and misguided enthusiasms. After all, when you openly invite new projects and proposals, you will see genuinely whacky theories arise. In his book Swift imagines scientists attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, soften marble into pillows and pincushions, replace silkworms with spiders (and having them eat brightly colored flies so the threads will be pre-dyed), mix paint by smell, reassemble original food stuffs from excrement, and build houses from the top down (in imitation of the bee and the spider).

And then there’s a project that anticipates ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence program that produces seemingly acceptable writing from material it pulls from the internet. Swift’s engineer wants to build a contrivance by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” In other words, anyone can be an expert with this gizmo, which is twenty feet square and fills up an entire room:

 The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order.

The engine works as follows:

The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

The inventor explains that he “had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech.” For their part, the students spend six hours a day gathering these sentence fragments, which are then transcribed into a large folio. The inventor hopes that those rich materials will “give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences.”

Of course, like any start-up tech company, he can’t do this without more money. Also, like ChatGPT and other such systems, he plans to make uncompensated use of other people’s written work. Gulliver reports that this 18th century tech bro hopes “that the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections.”

The issues that Swift raises are also being encountered by ChatGPT. As a New Yorker article points out, one only gets an approximation of knowledge from the program, which the author compares to a blurry JPEG image:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way, that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable.

ChatGPT-generated work is acceptable only in appearance. To be sure, an essay produced through such a means can look professional and polished, but often one only needs to look at the footnotes to realize how fake it all is. I don’t know if the story is apocryphal about a lawyer being disbarred after his AI generated brief was discovered to have phony footnoted precedents, but I do know that teacher acquaintances have told me that essays quickly fall apart once one compares footnotes created in this fasion with the actual source material.

Gulliver’s account of a frame filling up an entire room is reminiscent of the early days of large mainframe computers, and certainly we’ve found ways to shrink everything down while automating the scribe work that the narrator describes. But the reason that Swift can anticipate the future problems technology will encounter, along with the abuses that will arise from it, is because he understands that human beings are deeply flawed. For all the promises of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Scientific and Technological Revolutions, he knows that science and technology and social engineering (including “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country”) will founder the moment we start ignoring human nature.

Man is an animal capable of reason, Swift often said, with emphasis on the “capable.” As often as not, people’s soaring ambitions are sabotaged by their own pride and by their capacity for sin. Swift talks about the philosopher who, because he gazes only at the stars while walking, ends up in the gutter.

All of which is to say that teachers should never forget the human element in their profession. To overlook it results in shoddy teaching.

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Do You Have Time to Linger?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2024

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Thursday

Goldfinches have more or less taken over our bird feeders for the past few weeks. They don’t exactly chase away the titmice, nuthatches, and chickadees, but they make it clear that the feeders belong to them. So here’s a poem about them.

In it, Mary Oliver cites a line from one of my favorite Rilke poems. Upon viewing “An Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke is dazzled by its power:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

How should one respond to such an experience? Rilke has a simple and direct answer: “You must change your life.”

Oliver is so moved by this that she borrows it—or as T.S. Eliot would say, steals it—for her own ending (although at least she gives Rilke credit). Like the goldfinches, she sings her own poems “for sheer delight and gratitude”:

Invitation
by Mary Oliver

Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

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