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| "I am a wolf that follows the sun, and I will catch him ere day be done." |
Today is Friday, December 15th, 2017, the 12th day of Advent. Yesterday was the Memorial of St. John of the Cross, who, if you ask me (and who's asking me?) is an appropriate figure to memorialize during Advent. Advent, that time of waiting, for Christmas, for God - is it real waiting? Or is it make-believe waiting? Is it something in between or is it the sort of waiting that makes us question if there even is a difference between the real and the make-believe? Christmas will come, but things will mostly be the same. We all know it.
We'll give presents and drink Starbucks Christmas blend and maybe some eggnog. We'll visit with relatives we aren't sure actually like us but probably have to love us because we've been around so damned long, doing this Christmas thing over and over, with grandma, and big dinner spreads, and sometimes snow and sometimes not, throwing wads of freshly torn gift-wrapping paper at each other until someone gets hit in the eye or a stray shot knocks over a candle or a can of Diet Coke.
Yes, things will be the same. And another Christmas will come and go, we'll all be older, and we'll do Advent again next year. Then we'll wait, through Christmastide, and Epiphany, and Lent, and Holy Week, and Easter, and Ordinary Time, until we're back here, waiting again, even older, with another wrinkle on the forehead - Advent, the waiting, shoots through all the seasons like a root. This all makes no sense to me, but it also makes complete sense and I love it with every fiber and cell and atom of whatever it is that I'm made of. I suspect that you do, too, which is why you're here.
But why St. John of the Cross? Well, if you've been reading these meditations/mediCATIONS/journals, you're aware that I've talked a bit about the Dark Night. Talked about it more than I'd like, since it's not easy to talk about. The writing gets disjointed and you're never really able to say what you've felt or experienced. The best word for it all is "oblivion," which St. John uses at the end of his well-known poem.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
Oblivion is the best word, but it's still not right. That's why we have poetry and song, so we don't get tripped up on the "facts" and lose sight of the truth. The best any word can do is provoke the same sorts of feelings in the reader as the writer also feels. But I am guilty, I believe, of "expressing myself with too great fullness and detail," as Thoreau calls it. "It is the fault of some excellent writers [...] They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness." I'm not an excellent writer. I'd be satisfied just being a writer, but I'm not sure I'm that, either. I'm definitely not a poet. But somehow god/God/g-d saw fit to give me the gift of speech, of language, and so I owe it to my existence to use that gift responsibly, to use it well, to put it in the employment of truth-seeking. It is, in this light, a tragic thing to mistake "fact" for truth.
St. John of the Cross dug deep. He was a mystic. His preoccupation wasn't with the "facts" or the perfect description, but the life, the spirit, the creation, and the durable things behind all that. Thoreau talked about nuttiness in writing. By nuttiness he meant sentences pregnant with morals, suggestions, hints, and provocations (although you could say he was nutty in other ways, too). Back in college, my old history professor, Paul Michelson (also nutty), made us look for "snappy quotes," a punchy line from the author that really drove home the point, a sentence that did a lot with a little. Thoreau's journals and books are full of snappy quotes and nuttiness, which is an accomplishment given that he spent most of his time growing potatoes and watching bugs (or perhaps potatoes and bugs have more to tell us than we think).
C. S. Lewis had names for men who could see nothing but cold facts, who would look at the Atlantic Ocean and see only "so many millions of tons of cold salt water," or look at a horse and see merely "an old-fashioned means of transport." Trousered apes and urban blockheads, he called them. These masters of "fact," these men of "science," claim the mantle of "intellect," but in fact, according to Lewis, "their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
"We must dig deeply in Christ. He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures: however deep we dig we will never find their end or their limit. Indeed, in every pocket new seams of fresh riches are discovered on all sides." - St. John of the Cross
The chest. The home of nuttiness. Where we mine for treasures, where search the recesses of lived experience and squeeze them like lemons, chew on them like roots, drink them down slowly like a hot, bitter cup of winter morning coffee with whiskey for grip. The chest is where we come to terms with existence, with God or Dog or Glob or Blog or god or g-d or whatever it is that made poetry and cats and Advent. The trouble with nuttiness is the same trouble with Advent. It's slow. It doesn't engineer in us politically correct reflexes or hysteria. It forms in us a different way of seeing. It is the work of St. Lucy, the patron saint of eyes. It is the work of St. John of the Cross, the patron saint of the contemplative life. There's nuttiness all around. "Pay attention to detail," as my father always says. "Details matter," as I've started saying. "Football is a game of details," as Michael Lombardi says.
"Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools." - C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader
I punched "Eustance Clarence urban blockhead" into my Google machine and clicked on the first link. Ironically (or not) it took me to a paper by Dr. Michelson (who can be seen from time to time dressed up as Bilbo Baggins). Here's how he describes the "urban blockhead."
"Your urban blockhead is a person who has training but not education or learning, whose information is technical without being real knowledge -- a person with an engineering mentality. The urban blockhead is a person who reads books, but not for enjoyment. He is usually spiritually impoverished, often stunted in imagination. He is one who has been taught to mindlessly debunk anything that smacks of sentiment or philosophy or moral reasoning. In short, he has learned to be rationalistic without being truly rational."
Last year I substitute taught for a middle-school science class, and even though it's not in the Official Education Standards of the State of Indiana, I sang to them Tom Bombadil's nutty poem. It's a poem that saunters, (if a poem can saunter).
Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!
Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.
Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,
Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,
There my pretty lady is, River-woman’s daughter,
Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.
Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing
Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o,
Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!
Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!
Tom’s in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.
Tom’s going home home again water-lilies bringing.
Hey! come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?
The students gave me an ovation. Clapping, shouting, hooping and hollering. Something about the nuttiness connected with a piece of their souls, it settled in their chests. What the hell is Bombadil talking about? Who cares? Students need nuttiness. Human begins need nuttiness. As a young man, I needed it, and I found a blend of nuttiness, scholarship, spirit, and heart in the Huntington University Department of History. As I write this, I'm surrounded by good books, Walden and The Abolition of Man on the floor, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by my leg, Walking by Thoreau and an Orthodox Bible spread open on the table next to me, Virginia Wolf and Madeleine L'Engle by my armchair (well, not them literally, but you get the nuttiness of what I'm saying). It's taken some time, and some life, but I think I finally get the nuttiness (the richness, the flavor) of what the liberal arts is about.
I subbed again last week, this time for a reading class. I read them a poem by C. S. Lewis called "Satan Speaks," which he wrote immediately after his service in the First World War, before his Christian conversion. I informed the students that this poem has a sense of irony. It's upside down. It's not what Lewis believes, but it conveys a truth.
I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law: ye have none other.
I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.
I am the battle’s filth and strain,
I am the widow’s empty pain.
I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.
I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason.
I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.
I am a wolf that follows the sun
And I will catch him ere day be done.
That's a poem with nuttiness. "I am a wolf that follows the sun, and I will catch him ere day be done." With a little imagination, that is I think the best description of the Dark Night which I have ever read. You are lost. Hunted. Tracked by something ferocious, but also twisted, something ironic. A wolf that follows the sun. Folks have a life story. There's a place for that. The facts matters, but the facts don't tell the truth. For a time, I was hunted by a wolf. You know what I mean. Where the only escape is a good nap, or a sleep you hope you don't wake up from. Because when the sun rises, the wolf is there, at your bedside, smiling, licking his lips. Waiting. Like Advent, but upside down. I can talk about divorce, chronic illness, anorexia, feelings of betrayal, years and dates, names and places, and on and on. But when I tell you that I spent years running from a wolf that follows the sun, dammit if you don't know what I mean. There's nuttiness there. You know it with your chest, if you've still got a chest. because that's exactly the part of you the wolf sinks his fangs into. I am grateful tonight for Thoreau, for poetry, for the liberal arts, which produces men with chests, and plants deep within them the soulful nuttiness to move forward, to soldier through, to keep with their sauntering, even after suffering a nasty wolf bite. We are Holy Landers. No one ever made it to the promise land without a few scars.
But why St. John of the Cross? Well, if you've been reading these meditations/mediCATIONS/journals, you're aware that I've talked a bit about the Dark Night. Talked about it more than I'd like, since it's not easy to talk about. The writing gets disjointed and you're never really able to say what you've felt or experienced. The best word for it all is "oblivion," which St. John uses at the end of his well-known poem.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
Oblivion is the best word, but it's still not right. That's why we have poetry and song, so we don't get tripped up on the "facts" and lose sight of the truth. The best any word can do is provoke the same sorts of feelings in the reader as the writer also feels. But I am guilty, I believe, of "expressing myself with too great fullness and detail," as Thoreau calls it. "It is the fault of some excellent writers [...] They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness." I'm not an excellent writer. I'd be satisfied just being a writer, but I'm not sure I'm that, either. I'm definitely not a poet. But somehow god/God/g-d saw fit to give me the gift of speech, of language, and so I owe it to my existence to use that gift responsibly, to use it well, to put it in the employment of truth-seeking. It is, in this light, a tragic thing to mistake "fact" for truth.
St. John of the Cross dug deep. He was a mystic. His preoccupation wasn't with the "facts" or the perfect description, but the life, the spirit, the creation, and the durable things behind all that. Thoreau talked about nuttiness in writing. By nuttiness he meant sentences pregnant with morals, suggestions, hints, and provocations (although you could say he was nutty in other ways, too). Back in college, my old history professor, Paul Michelson (also nutty), made us look for "snappy quotes," a punchy line from the author that really drove home the point, a sentence that did a lot with a little. Thoreau's journals and books are full of snappy quotes and nuttiness, which is an accomplishment given that he spent most of his time growing potatoes and watching bugs (or perhaps potatoes and bugs have more to tell us than we think).
C. S. Lewis had names for men who could see nothing but cold facts, who would look at the Atlantic Ocean and see only "so many millions of tons of cold salt water," or look at a horse and see merely "an old-fashioned means of transport." Trousered apes and urban blockheads, he called them. These masters of "fact," these men of "science," claim the mantle of "intellect," but in fact, according to Lewis, "their heads are no bigger than ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."
"We must dig deeply in Christ. He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures: however deep we dig we will never find their end or their limit. Indeed, in every pocket new seams of fresh riches are discovered on all sides." - St. John of the Cross
The chest. The home of nuttiness. Where we mine for treasures, where search the recesses of lived experience and squeeze them like lemons, chew on them like roots, drink them down slowly like a hot, bitter cup of winter morning coffee with whiskey for grip. The chest is where we come to terms with existence, with God or Dog or Glob or Blog or god or g-d or whatever it is that made poetry and cats and Advent. The trouble with nuttiness is the same trouble with Advent. It's slow. It doesn't engineer in us politically correct reflexes or hysteria. It forms in us a different way of seeing. It is the work of St. Lucy, the patron saint of eyes. It is the work of St. John of the Cross, the patron saint of the contemplative life. There's nuttiness all around. "Pay attention to detail," as my father always says. "Details matter," as I've started saying. "Football is a game of details," as Michael Lombardi says.
"Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools." - C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader
I punched "Eustance Clarence urban blockhead" into my Google machine and clicked on the first link. Ironically (or not) it took me to a paper by Dr. Michelson (who can be seen from time to time dressed up as Bilbo Baggins). Here's how he describes the "urban blockhead."
"Your urban blockhead is a person who has training but not education or learning, whose information is technical without being real knowledge -- a person with an engineering mentality. The urban blockhead is a person who reads books, but not for enjoyment. He is usually spiritually impoverished, often stunted in imagination. He is one who has been taught to mindlessly debunk anything that smacks of sentiment or philosophy or moral reasoning. In short, he has learned to be rationalistic without being truly rational."
Last year I substitute taught for a middle-school science class, and even though it's not in the Official Education Standards of the State of Indiana, I sang to them Tom Bombadil's nutty poem. It's a poem that saunters, (if a poem can saunter).
Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!
Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.
Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,
Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,
There my pretty lady is, River-woman’s daughter,
Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.
Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing
Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o,
Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!
Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!
Tom’s in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.
Tom’s going home home again water-lilies bringing.
Hey! come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?
The students gave me an ovation. Clapping, shouting, hooping and hollering. Something about the nuttiness connected with a piece of their souls, it settled in their chests. What the hell is Bombadil talking about? Who cares? Students need nuttiness. Human begins need nuttiness. As a young man, I needed it, and I found a blend of nuttiness, scholarship, spirit, and heart in the Huntington University Department of History. As I write this, I'm surrounded by good books, Walden and The Abolition of Man on the floor, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by my leg, Walking by Thoreau and an Orthodox Bible spread open on the table next to me, Virginia Wolf and Madeleine L'Engle by my armchair (well, not them literally, but you get the nuttiness of what I'm saying). It's taken some time, and some life, but I think I finally get the nuttiness (the richness, the flavor) of what the liberal arts is about.
I subbed again last week, this time for a reading class. I read them a poem by C. S. Lewis called "Satan Speaks," which he wrote immediately after his service in the First World War, before his Christian conversion. I informed the students that this poem has a sense of irony. It's upside down. It's not what Lewis believes, but it conveys a truth.
I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law: ye have none other.
I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.
I am the battle’s filth and strain,
I am the widow’s empty pain.
I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.
I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason.
I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.
I am a wolf that follows the sun
And I will catch him ere day be done.
That's a poem with nuttiness. "I am a wolf that follows the sun, and I will catch him ere day be done." With a little imagination, that is I think the best description of the Dark Night which I have ever read. You are lost. Hunted. Tracked by something ferocious, but also twisted, something ironic. A wolf that follows the sun. Folks have a life story. There's a place for that. The facts matters, but the facts don't tell the truth. For a time, I was hunted by a wolf. You know what I mean. Where the only escape is a good nap, or a sleep you hope you don't wake up from. Because when the sun rises, the wolf is there, at your bedside, smiling, licking his lips. Waiting. Like Advent, but upside down. I can talk about divorce, chronic illness, anorexia, feelings of betrayal, years and dates, names and places, and on and on. But when I tell you that I spent years running from a wolf that follows the sun, dammit if you don't know what I mean. There's nuttiness there. You know it with your chest, if you've still got a chest. because that's exactly the part of you the wolf sinks his fangs into. I am grateful tonight for Thoreau, for poetry, for the liberal arts, which produces men with chests, and plants deep within them the soulful nuttiness to move forward, to soldier through, to keep with their sauntering, even after suffering a nasty wolf bite. We are Holy Landers. No one ever made it to the promise land without a few scars.
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