Ways to Reduce the Heating Bill

I wrote this poem two years ago, in late January/early February. As I literally cannot stop shivering today (despite my long underwear and space heater) I thought it would be an appropriate repost.

"Ways to Reduce the Heating Bill"

It's time to add another quilt to the seven already on the bed. I'll plastic all the windows and you can dig out that box of old sweaters. We'll keep the thermostat at sixty degrees and can fill hot water bottles and put them between the cold sheets. We have that old space heater, but you're afraid it will burn the house down, so let's just leave it in the basement. After we move the electric teapot and peppermint tea next to the bed we'll stuff towels into the crack underneath the door. Then we'll pile on sweaters and long underwear, get under the covers, and read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to one another. Although, we're probably more likely to slip out of our sweaters, crawl between the covers, and find other ways to keep warm.

Sagatagan Seasons Article

The Saint John's Arboretum asked me to write a "spiritual reflection on listening." This is the draft.

I was 20 years old, fresh from a shower and chatting with my roommate at Saint Ben’s. My phone rang and I picked it up. It was my Pa. “Listen, Kel. I need to tell you something.” He sounded serious, but Pa is the kind of man who always sounds serious. “Kel. Your granddad died last night.”

After I hung up the phone, I dressed found my way to a reconciliation service and while I’ve never really liked to go to confession, I was compelled to go talk to a priest. As soon as I saw him, I broke down weeping. I told him I feared that I wasn’t as good of a granddaughter as I had wanted to be, that while I was Christian I was still frightened by death and worried about what would happen when I died, I was concerned about my mother, and a million other things. Eventually, I couldn’t choke out anymore words and just sat there sobbing. When my eyes were so puffy I couldn’t cry anymore the priest said: “Are you familiar with the Rule of Benedict?” I replied that I was—I was thinking of joining the community in St. Joseph eventually so I was in the process of learning it. “Good.” He replied. “Then you know the opening line…Listen. I think that’s what you need to do now. You need to listen.” I followed his instructions and went upstairs to the empty Abbey Church and sat, silently, listening and crying.

I didn’t hear a darn thing.

But I kept listening. I listened during the viewing ceremony and again during the funeral mass. I listened while we were at my grandfather’s graveside and for weeks after. I waited and hoped for some sort of message from God—something to reassure me that my granddad was in heaven, that he wasn’t angry with me, that my mom would make it through this loss, that God still loved and cared for me despite my doubts. After awhile I became exasperated and stopped listening. I wasn’t hearing anything, so what was the point? It wasn’t until four years later, after another loss, that I really tried again. I was visiting Saint John’s during the spring and tramped out to my favorite spot on the Arboretum. “All right, God, I’m not moving until I hear something.”

I sat in that hill for hours—almost an entire day. Listening to the chickadees chirping, the trees groaning in the wind, and the soft rustle of a fox returning to her den. I listened and listened and listened, like that Benedictine priest had told me to do years earlier. Just as I was about to give up, it occurred to me—maybe this was it. Maybe in the face of loss, of huge emotional pain and heartache, God has nothing to say except for compassionate silence. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Had I heard anything from God during those first months of raw grief, it would have sounded like nothing more than a platitude. For my entire life I had been waiting to hear what God was saying when perhaps what I should have been listening for was what he wasn’t. I realized then that what I was given in the gift of silence was worth much more than any other response. It taught me to listen closely—with the ear of my heart, as Benedict says—for God’s instructions and love. It taught me that perhaps silence is something which should be pursued, cultivated, loved.

Since that day, “listen” has become something of a mantra for me. I repeat it when I’m frustrated with a coworker and need to look beneath her words to what she’s really saying. I repeat it when I’m stuck in traffic and need to be reminded of God’s presence. I say it quietly to myself when I’m out for a run and feeling exhausted. When I try to pray, I mutter it under my breath. Listen. While most of the time, I don’t hear a thing, I’m reminded that sometimes it’s just as important to stop and realize what God isn’t saying.

Loving the Lord, Loving the World: The Comparative Theopoetics of Rumi and George Herbert

A draft--and certainly not my best writing--but a paper which I thoroughly enjoyed writing. Comments, edits, etc. would certainly be appreciated.

What can poetry say to inform, compliment, and critique the realm of theological writing? What can theological writing say to inspire and ground poetic reflection? What is the appropriateness of an intersection between literature, poetics, and theology? These are just a few of the questions which theopoetics attempts to answer. Theopoetics, a branch of theology which explores the intersections between narrative, poetry, theology, and philosophy claims that these intersection illustrate to necessity for theology to branch out into interdisciplinary work. Theology, it argues, is more than a series of dogmatic pronouncements about the hypostatic union or the meaning of Christ’s scream from the cross. Indeed, theology is something which must be examined through narrative in order to understand the faith struggles in which an ordinary person engages. In her poem “Thirst” Mary Oliver exemplifies the theopoetic and writes a love letter to God. She explains many of her struggles and frustrations with her recent conversion experience and her desire for transcendence versus her love for the world as it exists. She writes: “Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” This conversation between love for the world and love for the Lord has been reflected in myriad traditions for ages. It has been brought up in writings by authors as diverse as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Gilbert. It is a tension which is often located in the work of theopoetics or at the intersection between theology and literature. This is an unsurprising phenomenon, as systematic theology is, at times, ill-equipped to handle this kind of question. While systematic theology may tell the questioner the methodological assumptions he/she makes while asking these questions or how these questions affect one’s ecclesiology or theology or grace, it does not always provide an adequate means of expressing the emotional tension which exists when one tries to love for the created order and love for God is one that need not exist, but does, and has been struggled with for centuries. What, then, can one do to attempt to alleviate some of the tension between the two?

During the 13^th century, Sufi-mystic poet Rumi struggled with many of these same difficulties. His poetry reflects both this tension between loving the world and loving the Lord and the ways in which he transcended it to realize that the tension is needless. While four centuries and thousands of miles away from Rumi, Anglican priest and poet George Herbert attempted to do the same thing. While these two poets could not be more different in culture, religious traditions, age, or writing style, both struggle with the same tension, seemingly inherent to the human religious condition—how does one learn to live in and love the world while simultaneously engaging in a profound love for and relationship with God? Ultimately, both Rumi and Herbert create a space within their poetic life that allows for them to not resolve the tension between loving the Lord and loving the world, but to see that such a tension is, when fully realized, ultimately not only unnecessary, but a detriment to loving God as they should. Nowhere is this more clearly exhibited in Rumi’s poem “On Gambling” and George Herbert’s “Love Bade Me Stay.” In each of these poems, the author illustrates that it is not the world which keeps the person from loving God. It is an unnecessary attachment to things which are decidedly not God (particularly, for Herbert, human sinfulness) which keeps the soul from reaching full realization of the mystical relationship between God’s love and the world.

Rumi’s poetry is transcendent and profound. As a mystic, he understands the union between God and the world and attempts to draw it out through his poetry. As transcendent and profound as his writing is, however, it can be difficult to digest initially. It may be a problem of culture and time, or it may be that mystical writings are always difficult to understand, but his writing can at times be slightly obtuse. Yet, while Rumi dabbles in the esoteric, his poems have the capacity to astound the reader with their beauty, poignancy, and trueness. In his poem, “On Gambling,” Rumi writes of the phenomena of falling in love, and while this poem can and has been read on a meditation on romantic love, that particular reading is both limiting and wrong-headed. Rumi’s words are beautiful, and may tell the reader something about romantic love, but ultimately the poem is about ties to the world and the desire to love the divine as best as a person can. The love which Rumi describes is not merely an emotional love or affection. It is a searing, blinding, difficult love that will shake one’s very conception of oneself. He begins by describing the two traps into which people can fall regarding their worldview: “If you want what visible reality / can give, you're an employee / If you want the unseen world / you're not living your truth.” For Rumi, it is not enough that we are not preoccupied with the material world and all of its entanglements. Rather, it is equally dangerous and possible to become overly involved with the spiritual, or unseen, world. What Rumi urges his readers to is nothing less than an integration of love for the world and love for the divine. One cannot genuinely love only the world or only the divine. These two loves must inform and support one another. Rumi continues by illustrating that while we are drawn into preoccupation with either the material world or the unseen world, we should not despair: “Both wishes are foolish / but you'll be forgiven for forgetting / that what you really want is / love's confusing joy.” Rumi allows that humans are drawn into the drama of the moment, whether that moment is an obsession with the unseen world of forms or the petty dramatics of everyday existence. Not only does Rumi allow that humans are drawn into this, but he maintains that all these obsessions will be forgiven. What humans really want, even when they forget and lie to themselves about their desires, is to be drawn into all-encompassing love for God. Humans must learn to recognize that their desires are disordered, and must learn to truly desire to shake off this obfuscation and desire Love. Yet Rumi’s poetry suggests that it is perhaps because of the esoteric nature of this love, the fact that this love even when communicated to us, is Unknowable in its deepest sense.

Rumi’s poem takes a different turn in the next stanza. He exhorts his readers to “Gamble everything for love / if you’re a true human being.” Learning to love the Unknowable is risky, and of this Rumi is fully aware. If we are to be “true human beings,” however, we must learn to take the risk and to gamble on loving God, without any real hope of comprehending God. Despite the fact that this Love is unknowable, and despite our own disordered desires, we must learn to take the gamble on Love. Rumi, in a seeming departure from the first stanza, harshly declares that if we are unable of even making the gamble, there is no room for us in the world: “If not, leave this gathering / Half-heartedness doesn't reach / into majesty.” While Rumi realizes that we are not always as attentive to the love that occurs when one manages to love both the world and God, we must attempt to love all the same. If we are unable to make the change, to make the gamble, we are unable to live whole-heartedly in the world. Indeed, we are unable not only to live whole-heartedly in the world but also to live authentically in it. In Rumi’s schema, there is no room for the half-hearted attempts to love one another or to love God. Distractions and getting sidetracked certainly happen, but when we take the gamble for love it must be whole-heartedly conscientious or else we will never be able to reach the kind of transcendence to which we are all called. Rumi writes of this half-hearted attempt to find God: “You set out / to find God, but then you keep / stopping for long periods / at mean-spirited roadhouses.” Juxtaposed with the first stanza of the poem, this admonition seems particularly harsh. If we are necessarily going to forget that we are searching for Divine Love, why should Rumi admonish us for stopping along the way? It is not, however, the stop that Rumi is admonishing, but the nature of the stop. We step out of the house in order to find God. That is the purpose of the journey, but we become distracted. It is not the distraction that Rumi relates in the first stanza. We are not involved in daily drama or in contemplating to the world of the unseen. Rather than stopping along the way to look at the daffodils or give a meal to a stranger, we stop stops at “mean-spirited roadhouses.” At these roadhouses, we mimic real desire and are filled by mere imitations. We are filled by imitations of those things for which we so desperately long: here, we encounter not the authentically beloved, but the “mean-spirited” who care about us because of the commodities that we can share. Instead of the soul-raising music Rumi so often references, loud, tinny music from a jukebox will have to do. Finally, instead of gambling on love—the very thing that makes us genuinely human—here we gamble for the sake of gambling. We can, ultimately, earn nothing from the exchange. Rather than participate authentically in the love that makes us human, we can choose to participate in mere mockeries of those things to which we are called and that are ultimately the most fulfilling.

While drawing on a different culture and context, the poetry of George Herbert is equally imbued with a sense of the interrelationship between loving the world and loving the world. The intersection between God’s grace and experience is couched in terms that are decidedly Christian. Despite this particular difference with Rumi, however, many of Herbert’s poems struggle with the same themes. Both poets attempt to understand a human nature that, because of its inclination to confuse its longing for the divine, are decidedly distant from the divine. Herbert would not wish to conflate the divine and the human, but he is also unwilling to declare that human existence and experience is nothing more than profane. In his poem “Love Bade Me Welcome” he writes of God’s expression of love and his own soul’s response to that love beautifully: “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back / guilty of dust and sin.” Within a Christian context, it is easy to empathize with Herbert’s reaction to Love’s invitation. The love which is offered here is no adolescent infatuation. The love that is offered in this poem is the love which, as Rilke wrote: “serenely disdains to annihilate us.” It is a love that knows the beloved in all of his or her shortcomings. It is a love that is overwhelming in its requests of the beloved, and a love that the same beloved knows he or she will never be able to return. Despite the soul’s longing to participate in this profound and changing love, it initially withdraws from that love because of its knowledge of its own guilt. Yet God is unwilling to withdraw the offer of love, even while God knows of our own guilt and sin: “But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in / Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning / If I lack’d anything.” God’s love is such that it recognizes that when a person is presented with it, his or her discomfort is likely to be extreme. Yet, like an excellent host, God’s love seeks for nothing more or less than to put the person perfectly at ease while in its presence. The image of Love as host is particularly important. By imaging Love as such, Herbert creates a poetic space that both feels remarkably familiar and reminds us of the eschatological importance of a relationship with Love. The familiarity allows for the eschatological significance to stand out in sharp relief. The event that Herbert’s soul attends is no mere dinner party or holiday gathering. It is the dinner party, the holiday gathering, and has tremendous significance as such. Here, Herbert’s soul has the possibility to move beyond the earth and the limitations (particularly of sin) it has known and move into a profound and deep interaction with Love.

Herbert’s tension with this offer of a chance for transcendence and salvation is apparent in his response to the question about his needs, which is brutally honest and striking: “‘A guest,’ I answer’d; ‘worthy to be here.’” Confronted with God’s Love, so concerned for his soul’s comfort, Herbert can do nothing more than assert his own trepidation that he does not belong in God’s presence. The love that God is offering is too much and it is too difficult to believe that this love can love him in his brokenness. Nevertheless, despite what seems like Herbert’s soul’s best intentions, his wariness too is a type of sinfulness. He has the offer of forgiveness and love in front of him, but he continues to refuse. Love, however, is unwilling to give up as easily as Hebert’s soul would like. The exchange continues: “Love answered, ‘You shall be he’ / ‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear / I cannot look on Thee’ / Love took my hand and smiling deeply did reply / ‘Who made the eyes but I?’” Again, the love that Herbert experiences is such that it recognizes all of the defaults of the beloved and loves regardless. Herbert’s consternation here is not simply a sort of superficial mea culpa but the deep, existential angst of a person who, when confronted with absolute love, is incapable of seeing anything except for his or her own transgressions. Still, it is essential to note that while existential angst is certainly part of the human experience, in the face of Love, it cannot be our only answer to God. Unless the human is able to overcome this preoccupation with angst and turn from it to Love, it becomes no longer a preoccupation but a sin—a connection to the world that is neither natural nor appropriate, particularly when it is keeping the person from God.

In the face of this love, Herbert tries one more time to escape this all-encompassing love: “Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame / Go where it doth deserve.” In the face of this final plea to remove from Love’s blinding, seemingly shaming presence, Love refuses to allow Herbert to leave with this kind of conception of his soul: “‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’ / ‘My dear, then I will serve.’ / ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ / So I did sit and eat.” In this final stanza, Herbert tries desperately to disengage from God’s love. However, that love is so compelling that he is unable to do it. Love, while acknowledging that Herbert’s soul has been marred by sin, also notes that the very sin that Herbert fears should keep him from the Lord has been forgiven. The chasm has been bridged; the debt has been paid. When confronted with this realization, the soul can have no more objection to God. It must give in to joy and share in the meal with Love.

Herbert’s poetry is concerned less with simple attachment to the world and more with how that attachment to the world keeps the human from an authentic experience with Love. The sinfulness to which Herbert’s soul clings is only partially his previous transgressions. Yet even more detrimental is the continued sin in which his soul participates, even while confronted with the possibility of sharing in the eschatological meal with Love. This sin is the preoccupation with his own sinfulness, and is almost unable to understand the ramifications of that preoccupation. Herbert’s soul, focusing on its own sinfulness rather than the opportunity that Love affords it, indulges in sin. Rather than believe that Love can overcome even our worst transgressions, the soul falls into self-pity and loathing. It requires a gentle reminder from Love that all of these things are known to Love. When this does not work, Love again reminds Herbert’s soul that all of his transgressions have been accounted, and they have been repaid. It is only once Herbert’s soul remembers and realizes the weight of Love’s sacrifice (what is here appropriately read as Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross) that he is ultimately able to renounce the selfish tie to the world that his sin represents. The constant over-attention to his sinfulness is a tie back to temporality, to time, to the created order that he is being asked to transcend in this eschatological meal.

In his mediations on Love, Herbert shares, despite differences of time and space, poetic meaning with Rumi’s “On Gambling.” While Rumi is not concerned with atonement, he is conscious of bridging the gap between the human and the divine. Where Rumi writes of how half-heartedness is unable to reach majesty, Herbert illustrates it concretely. The worry and consternation evident in his poem is precisely the sort of half-heartedness against which Rumi rails. This fear is that which keeps the person from coming fully into communion with God. Where Herbert’s Love exhibits a radical yes to communion with the person, there is a response that is similar in both poems. Rumi’s half-heartedness and Herbert’s soul refuse to acknowledge that they can transcend attachment to the world and personal sin, respectively. Each poet, however, refuses to write Love in such a way that it overpowers and overcomes the person. Acceptance of Love must be a free decision. In Rumi, the person is free to decide against love and often does so in favor of those things that are mere imitations of Love. In Herbert, the soul shies away from the all-encompassing, overwhelming Love and must be convinced of its own merit.

Here lies a point of divergence for the two poets. In Rumi’s poem, the person must make a decision—indeed a series of decisions—that will bring him or her closer to God. In Herbert, the soul longs to be with Love but is blinded by feelings of its own inadequacy. Herbert’s soul has to be persuaded by God that all has been forgiven and that it may join the eschatological banquet. Rumi’s soul must learn to stop desiring things other than God. This soul must learn to gamble in the only way in which gambling is appropriate—when one gambles everything in love for Love. In Rumi, the soul must learn to free itself from the constraints of over-attentiveness to both the “unseen” world and to “visible reality.” This difference reflects the difference of Herbert and Rumi’s disparate religious experiences. For Rumi, a Sufi mystic, atonement was not an immediate thought. For Herbert a 17^th century Anglican priest, atonement theory would have been not only familiar but also something at the forefront of his theology and experience.

Each of these poets explores the ways in which one can be tied to the world and the ways in which the world can authentically contribute to an individual’s relationship with God. While writing from different cultural, religious, and social contexts they say remarkably similar things about the nature of God’s love in the world and our relationship to that love. Each poet says beautiful and moving things about how inauthentic ties to the world can lead to an inauthentic relationship with God. Yet, while not completely disparaging the world, neither of these poets shows the reader precisely what an authentic relationship—a relationship in which one loves both the world and the divine—looks like. This may seem like asking for the poets to illustrate the obvious to their readers, but what is at stake here is exactly what Rumi inveighs against in the first line of “On Gambling.” Without showing the reader how a relationship which takes into account appropriate love for the world and whole-hearted love for the divine, the reader can easily become distracted by the unseen world. It is arguable that these poems illustrate the negative relationships to the world (desiring imitations of Love rather than Love itself). This representation of the negative relationship one can have with the world is certainly valuable and an aspect to spiritual development. Nevertheless, it is only one aspect of that development, and it is vital that there is a positive illustration on loving the world and loving the divine included. While by no means the scope of the entire work of either of these authors, these poems are representational of their work. As such, caution must be used when reading either of these poets as illustrates of authentic and inauthentic relationships between the world and God. Yet, if these poets can be read in conjunction with other writers illustrate a gracious relationship between the world and the divine, they can begin to open every day experiences for people to recognize the ways in which their ties to the world both limit them and allow them access to authentic love for God.