Author: KPB Stevens
My Week with God – Living within Ecclesiastes
Professor Fredal was talking about Ecclesiastes. Wealth, reputation, accomplishment, none of these things matter, he said. The ultimate and only reality is death. Everything else is vanity and the chasing after winds. The wise and the foolish both die. It doesn’t matter how you live your life.
In the third row, a girl with blonde hair raised her hand. “Why is this book even in the Bible?” she asked.
I had an answer. I often worry about raising my hand in class. It’s a Bible survey class, and I have a distinctly unfair advantage. I’m learning amazing things every day, but maybe I can listen for them easier because I understand the material that they emerge from. The literary structure of the psalms is instantly interesting to me, because I hold some of the psalms in my mind, and can begin examining that structure right away. But the undergraduates in the class are being assailed with fact after fact, ideas and thoughts that they’ve never encountered before. It must be bewildering. And if they enrolled for reasons of faith, it must be deeply confusing to find that the Bible argues with itself, that it’s multi-voiced, that Ecclesiastes disagrees with Proverbs.
“Ecclesiastes is a corrective,” I said. Proverbs assumes that rich people are rich, and healthy people are healthy, and successful people are successful, because they’re virtuous. There’s a nasty tendency in Proverbs to blame all suffering on foolishness. If we could only be wise enough, we’d never know pain or loss. But Ecclesiastes doesn’t allow for that kind of thinking. Everyone experiences pain and loss, it says. It doesn’t matter if you’re wise or foolish.
Yes, Professor Fredal said, that is a corrective. But there’s more to Ecclesiastes than that. If we can’t rely on our own wisdom, or prominence, or reputation, what can we rely on? If our actions in the world will ultimately be forgotten, if one generation ignores the generations that proceeded it, if every thing we do has been done before and originality is a vacant category, what is the purpose of being alive? Grace, Professor Fredal said. We cannot rely on ourselves. We can only rely on, fall back on, rest in, God’s grace.
I’m learning, slowly, to do this. My work is tenuous and rootless at best, and I find myself drifting through my days without a large sense of where my actions are leading. My priesthood has become a work of art, and I’m following my instincts, and sometimes going far astray, producing bad art with my life and with my vocation. I often long for familiar settings and roles. What I really want is to have a list of actions and ways of being that I could strive to fulfill, and by fulfilling them be assured that I am good and wise. I’m living within Ecclesiastes, and I long for Proverbs.
But I’m learning to rely on God’s grace. At a retreat several weeks ago, a woman who has been battling cancer read this poem by Denise Levertov:
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
Living within Ecclesiastes means learning to attain free fall. It means learning to accept all-surrounding grace.
Drawn Meditation
My Week With God – The Face in the Tortilla
The smudge on the conference room table didn’t really show a lion’s face. But I’ve been drawing lions lately, and have begun to know the pattern of their faces, and so I was predisposed to see eyes and muzzle staring up at me from the dark, burnished wood. I was so taken with it that I got out my sketchbook and drew it, even though I knew I was being rude, and seemed to have checked out from the conversation in the room. And I thought about the woman who saw Jesus’s face in the tortilla. I thought about her without cynicism, because I felt that I understood her. It wasn’t that she needed a miracle. She didn’t need Christ’s face to appear to her in a burn pattern on flat bread. If something miraculous was happening, it was happening inside of her, because she was so focused on Jesus that she could see him everywhere.
We see the things that we’re already concentrated on – they become visible to us in the world. I’ve always loved this tendency towards saliency, our ability to make meaning by narrowing our focus. But these days I’ve become wary of forcing my meanings on the world around me.
I’ve been reading nature poetry, Mary Oliver especially, and I love the turn that her poems take about three quarters of the way through. She’ll be doing nothing more than describing a scene in nature and then, suddenly, she lets insight break in like a break in the clouds. I admire this, but I also wonder about its merits. Should we inflict our insights onto the environment, onto swans and frogs and herons?
I wonder about this because I’ve realized that I’m not a nature poet. I’m not really a poet at all. The focus of my writing is on people. Yesterday morning I was standing in line at Buckeye Donuts. It was early, and the restaurant had that sparse, clear feeling of a well-lit place in the predawn. The man in front of me was deaf, and obviously a regular. He pointed to what he wanted with great precision, and the man behind the counter was fluent in reading his gestures. There was a young black man in a vest and a trilby hat standing against the far wall, waiting for his order to be handed to him. The deaf man gestured at him, and the man responded with words, smiling, because it was a conversation that they’d obviously had many times before. I watched all of this and felt a great inner joy, the same joy that Mary Oliver seems to feel when watching a loon rise from a lake. But I couldn’t say what the meaning was, because the deaf man and the man in the trilby hat have their own meanings, and who am I to superimpose my meanings onto them?
Perhaps its enough to simply observe their gestures. And yet, I have Christ in mind when I do so. An image rooted in my consciousness, a tendency to see His face swimming up to the surface of things. Sometimes its the face of a lion. I will not say that the deaf man and the man in the trilby hat were Christ, the Christ that
plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Hopkins)
They may have been, and Christ’s face may emerge from their own. I will always be watching for it. But I want things, and people, to have their own meanings, too. Maybe it is only a statement about myself, the specificity of my concentration, the direction of my saliency, when I say that I see lions in tables and Jesus in people. Maybe that is enough. And maybe there is something miraculous about it, in a small way, because it points to a change in me, if not the world.
My Week with God – Mysterious Divine Life Form
Maybe it was the sunlight on the turning trees that made me think of animism as I drove north to the Hermitage on Saturday. I was remembering an old argument I’d had with some conservative catholic students over whether or not animals had souls. Of course they have souls, I’d said, and I still believe it, and will go farther and say that plants have souls, and soil, and maybe even rocks. I’m not alone in this. Many of the early church fathers saw nature as ensouled. Trees had to have souls, they reasoned, because we have souls, and when we die we decay and become the soil itself and the root-matter for trees. But I know that this comes close to animism, the belief that the natural world is full of spiritual beings.
I was going to the Hermitage for a poetry and spirituality retreat. It was led by my friend John Holliger, a retired priest and photographer. He’d gathered almost twenty people together, and we read poems to each other throughout the day. Some of us were artists, and shared our art in whatever form it took.
We had long rest periods in which we could go and wander through the forested hills. The autumn light was crisp and cold, and the leaves patterned the ground. I kept catching sight of the sunlight, of different beams falling at different angles through the canopy, and I kept grinning and taking pictures. And, inspired by the day, I found myself writing a poem, something I haven’t done for a very long time. Here it is:
The sunlight on stacked firewood
is thick, although its cold.
I go deeper into the woods,
past the choral mumble of the chimes
beside the lake, and the voice
of the bald psychologist,
stopped to talk beside two women.
Stones and moss and the stalactite sag
of an insect’s egg sac, distended
from a creviced rock.
All these things, the insects waiting
at the start of autumn for spring,
the shell pattern of leaves,
brown and dry on the wet and cold ground,
all these things are shaped to mean
something, only what they mean
would require the right words.
And I am only wondering, like them,
perhaps, when the hard white sunlight
might release the world, and let it,
until spring, at least, sleep.
This poem surprised me, because it seems to intimate that natural things could use a rest from my desire to flood them with meaning, or to name meanings that go far beyond words. Animism only works if our imaginative minds are ready to impose themselves on nature, and I found myself oddly reluctant to do so.
After one of these rest periods, John read William Stafford’s poem “Vocation,” which begins with the line “This dream the world is having about itself.” I heard that line and didn’t listen to the rest. Is the world really dreaming, I wondered. Is it sentient? Despite all my morning thoughts about the souls of plants and stones, this didn’t seem believable to me. Maybe it was simply that Stafford’s poem wraps all of nature up into some greater entity, “the world,” and that I’m more comfortable with separated mysteries, the single mystery of a fallen leaf’s soul, than I am with one, powerful, overreaching mystery.
And yet I believe in God. Perhaps this is the single greatest reason that I believe in God as an entity, separate and greater than nature, certainly separate and greater then myself. Perhaps this is why I believe that God acts in history, even our history, even now. It seems kinder to nature. Kinder to not demand that nature speak with a single unified voice, but to listen as it speaks with many little voices, individual voices that aren’t necessarily prodded into a chorus. I would rather think of the world as a stage which God walks across, important and beautiful, certainly, but not divine within itself. Divine as we are divine, divine when aligned to God, when allowing the touch of divinity.
KPB Stevens 