Spiritual Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading concerns Jesus’s awakening as he was being baptized by John. That moment was his own epiphany, when the membrane between the sacred and the profane was penetrated and he realized that God dwells within us (Luke 3:21-22):
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Borrowing from Rilke, Denise Levertov describes a similar awakening. To set up her poem, here’s the Rilke original, from The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1):
The hour is striking so
close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
And now for Levertov’s version, in which she imagines being knighted by the vision:
Variation on a Theme by Rilke
A certain day became a
presence to me;
there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
I think also of a stanza from songwriter Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, which seems to succumb to despair but then detects a crack in the firmament:
Here are the words in full:
The birds they sing, at the break of day
Start again, I heard them say.
Don’t dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be.
Yes, the wars, they will be fought again
The holy dove she will be caught again
Bought, and soul, and bought again
The dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Moments of awakening are always momentary, but in the cracks we see the light, we hear the bell, and everything changes.
