I wanted to write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to watch a meteor shower
and commune with the universe
Then I looked at that sentence
"commune with the universe"
and realized that it makes me sound
like an asshole. Like someone who believes
in healing through energy fields and crystals
instead of antibiotics and good hygiene.
Instead I will write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to a cabin my family has had for generations.
Where for many summers, I swam
and ate raspberries off the bush,
fished and grew sunburned.
And how this time I drank beer.
And my oldest friend came
and some new ones joined us
and we watched a meteor shower.
And how, for the time, it was enough.
I've spent years trying to come up with justifications to myself about loving romance novels as a feminist, fiction loving author whose shelves are filled with Kate Millet, Eve Ensler, and Betty Friedan. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and Dostoyevsky. With literary giants and women at the forefront of sexual politics surrounding me on a daily basis, with a reading list full of acclaimed authors, why do I spend two days every month devouring trashy, escapist fiction?
I've tried on a couple different excuses, everything from "I'm planning on writing a romance novel to cover my student debt and this is research" to "I'm reading it to format a crushing feminist critique of the commodification of women's sexuality."
The plain truth of the matter is that I love romance novels.
***
I have a comfortable life.
I have a job I enjoy and find meaningful, enough money to pay my bills, and a quiet, if a little solitary, life. During the week I go to work, grab a drink afterward, make dinner, chat with friends online, watch television, occasionally write a little. Friday-Saturdays I read, watch movies, visit friends in other parts of the state. I date. Sometimes I see the same guy twice. Sundays are always reserved for the New York Times in bed with a pot of coffee. It's a life that satisfies the independent streak that caused me to move to Minnesota when I was eighteen. It's a life that's uncomplicated and almost entirely drama-free. I spend my spare time pursuing my interests, whether those are a love for art museums, a desire to learn particle physics, or writing narrative non-fiction. I have friends whom I find challenging and enjoyable. I actually still believe that I'm going to change the world.
***
I once had a friend tell me that one of the most charming aspects of my craziness is that I am fully aware of and occasionally apologetic for it. I recognize and own up to my social anxiety and obsessiveness about ingredients for recipes. I alert people to my personal space bubble and my OCD tendencies. I freely admit to being bombastic for the sake of making a story more entertaining.
As if that wasn't enough charm, I'm a bit of a control freak. When I travel I have an itinerary. When the weekend rolls around, I have a To Do list that I have to get accomplished or I feel like the world is going to end. I don't do well at unplanned or uncoordinated social events. I can be pretty inflexible.
As a result, I find the prospect of long-term relationships terrifying. I have a hard enough time relinquishing control of a shopping list to another person, why on Earth would I want to let someone else plan a second date to say nothing of having a say in where we should go on vacation or with which family we should spend Christmas. This is why I do my damnedest to avoid relationships. An amazing man to be the father of my eventual children and companion for the rest of my life? Yeah, that sounds pretty good. But spending Sundays in my pajamas until noon listening to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and reading the New York Times Book Reviews? That sounds even better.
***
It's a childish and erroneous way of looking at relationships, I know. But it's also one I can't seem to shake. This is why I love romance novels. Sure, there's the sex and saccharine romance and fantasies of broad-shouldered lumberjacks who secretly read Rumi and are looking for a feminist firecracker of a girl, that's all part of it. But more than any of those things, what gets to me is the fantasy that smart, educated, independent women find someone with whom they not only relinquish control but happily gives up her independence to her lumberjack, WWII soldier, or seemingly caddish but secretly honorable aristocrat. During the three hundred or so pages of the book, I can stop asking questions about agency, or whether or not the relationship is unhealthy or sexual politics, and fantasize about what it would be like to give up a little of my independence and solitude. I have three hundred pages where I can imagine what it would be like to give up the New York Times and Friday independent movie nights and always getting to decide what to have for dinner for having a companion who understands and loves me despite the social anxiety and particle physics.
But in the end, romance novels are always escapism, aren't they? Because giving up major Civil War battles as dinner conversation doesn't always equate to a torrid vacation to Fiji or even the promise that your boyfriend will give up some equally irritating habit. Relationships aren't like romance novels, but they're not soul-crushing series of compromisesI've made them out to be either. Somewhere there has to be room for both Kate Millet and Danielle Steele, the acknowledgement of mutuality and partnership as well as the desire to let everything go and trust in another person.
At least, I hope it's true. Just like I hold out hope that somewhere there's a broad-shoulder physicist who chops wood in his spare time. Someone who keeps The Essential Rumi next to his collection of X-Men comics.
This
essay is, for me at least, the emotional companion to one I wrote a few
months ago called “My Heart Don’t Wish to Roam” and posted here.
By emotional companion, I mean that when I finished both pieces I cried and felt absolutely empty. I also struggled with posting both of them, because they involve deep feelings for people who are still in my life.
When I posted "My Heart Don't Wish to Roam," I was sick with nervousness. Lauren tried to
calm me by saying, “Writing is by nature a pouring out of the heart” and
assured me that people would understand my vulnerability in that post.
The
nerves involved in posting that essay pale in comparison to anxiety I
have surrounding this one. The things that are in this essay have been a
part of my private life for such a long time that I am hesitant to make
them public. The anger and frustration I talk about here have been an
on-going part of my life for the past eighteen months. I cannot remember
I time in my life that I wasn’t filled with doubt or skepticism. It’s
now, finally, that I can begin to give these things a voice.
***
The Star-Gazer
Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved stargazing.
Standing
in my childhood backyard, far from any significant light pollution, I
could look up and see thousands of stars. An insomniac for most of my
life, I would often slip out of the house in the middle of the night to
sit in the backyard and look at the sky. I was terrible at identifying
or remembering constellations, but something about the night sky moved
me beyond words.
Read
mystical literature or talk to a person of faith and you’ll almost
inevitably hear about a person’s conversion experience—the moment in
their lives when they knew¸ definitively,
that there was a God and that God loved and cared for them. Conversion,
for all people of faith, is supposed to be an ongoing process rather
than a specific moment in time. In my experience though, there are
moments that stand out for many people. For Paul it was getting knocked
off his horse. Augustine heard someone reading from the New Testament. I
saw the Perseid meteor shower for the first time.
My
best friend’s parents live in an even more remote location than mine. I
spent so much time at their house that it became a second home to me.
They had this beautiful backyard and a pier that Michelle and I spent a
great deal of time on. During the day we would lie out and read and talk
about boys and books. After her folks had gone to bed we would grab a
blanket and go out and look at the stars and talk about what we wanted
from our lives and our partners and our families. Late one August, she
called and said, “the Perseid meteor shower peaks around 2:00 AM. Want to
come over?”
If
you’ve never seen a meteor shower at its peak, there’s nothing I can
say to describe it accurately for you. It is, in a very literal way,
breath-taking. When you’re in your early 20s, watching a meteor shower
peak with your very best friend, it’s the kind of experience that sears
itself into your heart. I don’t know if it was the emotional high of
being with someone I loved tremendously during this intensely beautiful
moment, or if it was actually a moment where God broke through the thin
space, so to speak, but for the first time in my adult life I was
utterly convinced of God’s presence in my life.
I
wasn’t entirely sure what happened that night, but I knew that
something inside of me had changed. I was, to use a phrase I hate, “on
fire for God.” But easily three-quarters of the priests I knew as a
child and young adult were Jesuits, and their personal charisms tended toward the intellectual. Consequently, I grew up with a
“There is something herethat doesn't make sense… let's
go poke it with a stick” approach to Christianity rather than a
strictly evangelical or deeply prayerful approach. God was Unknowable, certainly, but that
didn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what we could while we
were alive. Understanding God intellectually seemed at least as
important to me as worshiping God or spreading the Good News. The best
approach, then, would be to learn to know God through intellectual
inquiry and the rest would follow.
I
threw myself into the study of theology with all the zealousness of a
first convert. I was lucky enough to attend a college that encouraged
questions and wrestling with your faith. Unfortunately for me, an
inherent part of those questions and that wrestling was a deep-rooted,
nearly unshakable skepticism about everything from the primacy of the
Roman Catholic Church to the historical necessity of the Incarnation. It
was an exciting, if frustrating time in my life. Every time I began to
grasp something intellectually, if felt like that experience with the
Persid’s was slipping just a bit further away.
Thankfully,
I also attended a college in a place where star-gazing could still very
much be a part of my life. I still took quiet, late-night walks and if I
couldn’t quite see the same number of stars I could in my backyard in
Wisconsin, I could still see enough to remind me of that moment when God
was so present to me.
I
pursued theology through two Master’s degrees, for a total (including
undergrad) of seven years in the same place thinking about God and the
Church. I found myself taking fewer and fewer nighttime walks.
When I
did manage to slip out, I was usually accompanied by another student.
Instead of looking up, I would argue with them about something from
class or an issue raised by a text we had just read. I was still chasing
down that feeling I had on the pier, but it seemed to be getting
inexplicably further from me with each passing year.
I
told myself that the problem was with me. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I
was clearly faking this whole thing. I had a passion for the subject,
certainly. But it was an intellectual passion more than a spiritual one.
I loved arguing with students and professors who were clearly more
intelligent than I was and earning their respect. When someone told me
that I offered a good point or an excellent critique I felt dizzy. The
part of me that was spiritually or emotionally connected to God shrunk
every day, but I thought--I was convinced-- that if I could just get to a
point where I could understand God and the Church intellectually
everything else would fall into place. So I did what I had always done. I
argued. I argued for things I was unsure of myself. I argued for the
sheer joy of the intellectual challenge. I argued because I was
terrified to admit to these people I loved and respected that I wasn’t sure if I believed in any of this.
I argued with a vehemence and an unwillingness to bend that shocked me
then and embarrasses me now. It was as though if I admitted my own
doubts out loud, if I began to give even a little, the whole
construction of the past seven years would come tumbling down. If I
admitted that I didn’t know if God was Triune or when the human developed a soul, I wouldn’t know where to stop.
During
that last year at grad school I was, frankly, a disaster. I was
unspeakably angry most of the time. The worst part of it was that I
wouldn’t—couldn’t really—talk about what was going on with the other
budding theologians. With the other students, God was the first premise.
They were all already (seemingly) past that question. Why waste time
talking about it when we could talk about Cardinal Ratzinger’s
eschatology or our dreams for what the Church could be? I had spent so
long trying to convince myself that I believed this by convincing them
that I believed it, that I was afraid of what would happen if I started
to talk about doubt.
Try
as I might to keep it together, I began to slip, bit by bit. The
non-academic writing I did exhibited a great deal of my frustration. Any
poem I tried to write was about doubt or God’s absence in my life.
Prose pieces that I did were a conglomeration of invective against
higher education and theology. I opted out of arguments with my atheist
friends that I would have welcomed before. My mass attendance slackened
and then stopped all together.
And
then. Somewhere into this immense swirl of doubt, a friend emailed me a
picture. That’s it. Just a photograph with the message: “I remember how
much you like meteor showers. Thought you would enjoythis. It’s a meteor in the Mojave desert.”
When
I opened it, I cried. Sitting alone in my crappy little grad school
apartment in the middle of winter, I cried harder than I had in years.
The memory of that night on the pier hit me stronger than it had in a
long time and I just lost it.
The
essay that I would like to write ends here, with me returning to church
and to my studies with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and knowledge of
God’s presence in my life.
That is the essay I would like to write.
The
truth is that what I felt when I opened that picture was a deep and
terrifying sense of loss. The God who was so present to me on that pier
in August had now become a series of abstractions—definitive statements I
could make in the presence of others without really believing in them
myself.
I
squeaked out of grad school with very little enthusiasm for my last
months and with negligible Church attendance. For a long time, I felt
incredibly guilty about this. I would try to go, and would sit in the
back of Church feeling like I was radiating anger and hostility that the
people around me could feel. I would go and leave early. I would go and
wonder if anyone else in the church was feeling the same way. I would
go because I was staying with friends and knew it was expected.
I stopped. I just...stopped. I
gave myself permission to stop attending and not feel guilty about it. I
haven’t voluntarily set foot into mass in nine months.
And,
strangely enough, I’ve started to feel better. I’m not as angry
anymore. I’ve stopped having arguments about women’s ordination or the
place of lay theologians in the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve started
going out at night to look at the stars again. I missed the Perseid
meteor shower but stayed up to see Jupiter next to the moon. I meet with
an astronomical society and look at deep-space photographs of far-off
nebulae and try to wrap my head around the extent of the universe. I
grieve, deeply, for the sense of God’s presence I had.
At
the same time, there’s room here that there wasn’t before. There’s a
calmness and a quietness that comes when I look up at the Aurora or
catch a glimpse of a far off star in a telescope. I hope that, maybe in
that place where questions of the Assumption and open communion are
dwarfed by the birth of new stars and the limits of how we understand
time, that I can start to find my way back.
It began when I was six and wandered into a room where my father was up late, watching The Exorcist. I wanted a glass of water and he didn't realize I was there until I had seen more than I should have. Days later, when I asked my Sunday school teacher if the devil really could live inside of you she said "sometimes." Terrified, I slept in the hallway next to my parents' bedroom every night for two years. I never told anyone why I was so frightened and Mom and Dad--busy working and raising three children--were so tired they never asked. Years later, a Sunday school teacher myself and still sleepless, I finally confessed why I had been so frightened. My mother wrapped her arms around me and stroked my hair. "Oh, Kel," she said. "We never knew."
The theme for this week on my other blog was "Fate." This is a version of the poem I wrote for it originally, but it wasn't coming together in time. I posted a different poem over at Glints and just finished this one today.
***
Anniversary
My daughter calls one night. I am smoking in the kitchen.
Her father puts in a new garden.
Before I can thank her for the card she sent
for our 30th anniversary,
she tells me, breathlessly, I think I'm falling in love.
She doesn't remember--she has called before saying the same thing.
I do not remind her. I listen. Ask the questions she wants me to ask.
I smoke. Make approving noises.
Say it's a nice time of year to be young and in love.
I roll my eyes at her father when he comes in to wash his hands.
He takes the phone, lights a cigarette of his own,
shakes his head at her exuberance.
He says he's happy for her, keeping the doubt from his voice.
We both know it will be enough to tell her, in a few weeks,
that love is never easy. And if it ever seems too simple,
I left a box of things at Susan's for you. I accidentally packed them when I left last Saturday. A few things I took out of spite and now want to return because I feel childish. Little things, mostly. The picture of you, backpacking, your hair tucked away under a bandanna. My key and this month's rent. Your sister's glasses, the ones she left the night I drank too much wine and told you I was in love with you. Your Rufus Wainwright CDs and season five of The Wire. I watched the series finale and it was every bit as good as you said. Some socks and underwear and that favorite tie of yours. The one that matches my polka dot party dress. The dress I wore when we slow danced at Mark's wedding and everyone asked each other if we were next. Some bigger things. Your grandmother's ring, the one you told me keep, your credit card, and the dog's leash and dogfood. Hopefully enough to last until I find something new. Oh, and that Graham Greene novel you always wanted me to read. I finally did. It was all right.
Something about my Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits made you laugh when you pulled it off my shelf. Do people still listen to this? I told you yes, over a glass of bourbon and a broken heart. I don’t remember what we did after that conversation—whether it was make dinner or have a glass of wine or if we just went up to bed—but you did tell me that you didn’t believe in broken hearts or bourbon. Come to think about it, you never really came around to liking Patsy either.
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.
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: “Lovefortheearthandloveforyou 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 13th 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, ultimatelynot 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 astoundthe 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 authenticallyin the love that makes us human, we can choose to participate in mere mockeriesof 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 meaculpa 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 compellingthat 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 detrimentalis 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 consternationevident in his poem is precisely the sort of half-heartedness against which Rumi rails. This fearis 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 17th 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 inveighsagainst 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.
