Spiritual Sunday
The lovely lyric “My Cathedral” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church.” Her own church-going, she notes, has “a Bobolink for a Chorister –/And an Orchard, for a Dome –.”
Longfellow’s poem also brings to mind Harold Bloom’s observation about what he found to be the central tenet of religion in America, whether it be Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Mormon, Roman Catholic, or mainline Protestant. According to Wikipedia,
Bloom’s view is that all of these groups in America are united by requiring that each person may only truly meet with the divine when experiencing a “total inward solitude” and that salvation cannot be achieved by engaging with a community, but only through a one-to-one confrontation with the divine.
Like Dickinson, Longfellow finds that the one-to-one confrontation occurs best in nature:
Like two cathedral towers these stately pines
Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;
The arch beneath them is not built with stones,
Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,
And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;
No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,
No sepulchre conceals a martyr’s bones.
No marble bishop on his tomb reclines.
Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,
Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!
Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds,
In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,
Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,
And learn there may be worship without words.
