Tag: faith

The Anointing at Bethany

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is the last of my posts on the three poems published by As Surely as the Sun Literary Journal. Click here to read the poems.

Illumination

In many ways, this is a very simple poem about the desire to live in gratitude in the present moment. Judas’s complaint against Mary is unfair for many reasons. Perhaps he is a thief, as John’s Gospel states, and is reacting to seeing the money he could steal poured out as oil. But even if he is honestly concerned for the poor, his comments mark him as one of those people who believe that poor people should never enjoy any luxury or pleasure, and that they should never be allowed to give gifts, only receive charity. Such people walk around with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tattooed on their brains, questioning why anyone would spend resources on the high levels of the pyramid while the base level of fulfilling physiological needs goes ignored. Who needs love and belonging and esteem when sleeping outdoors, begging for money, and wearing mud-splattered clothes? And if one were to somehow receive a gift of a few hundred dollars, shouldn’t they horde it for themselves instead of using it to throw a party or buy a present for a friend? Judas acts out of this logic, but ignores one basic fact: Jesus and his disciples are poor people. The scented ointment is being spent on the poor. Just not in a way that meets with Judas’s approval or his plans for thievery.

There is a freedom in Mary’s gift of oil that is based in holy poverty. I’ve used this term with friends who, like me, have lived through moments of material want, small paychecks, worry about making rent or paying for utilities, days spent scrounging for food and selling off possessions. I find that when I say the words “holy poverty” I then need to explain what I mean by it, since past experience of material deprivation makes it hard to think of poverty as holy, or as anything beyond a spirit-crushing slog through life. Yet great saints like Francis or Ignatius embraced poverty, and in doing so they made, with their lives, a spiritual claim. One can detach from wealth and comfort, and even come to see such things as detrimental to spiritual health. One can rely on God, and imitate Christ’s impoverishment. And yes, I know that there are arguments that Jesus, the son of a carpenter, grew up in a tradesman’s house and might have been considered middle-class at the time, if they had such conceptions of class. But as a teacher and miracle worker, he was poor and indigent, and although he attracted some wealthy followers, he himself owned nothing. He urged his followers to make gifts of their possessions, even to their enemies.

So Mary, if it is Mary of Bethany who pours the ointment, is doing nothing more than enacting holy poverty. She has come into possession of an expensive luxury. She does not keep it for herself, but pours it out extravagantly, a gift for the person she loves. It isn’t a gift with any strings attached. It’s an outpouring of gratitude, a recognition of the healing and resurrection that has already taken place. More than that, a recognition of the world’s beauty, the fact that trees and plants give forth fragrance, and that we can gather that fragrance and adorn ourselves with it. That nature, and seasons, and God, are all indifferent to our wealth and status. That gifts of beauty belong to everyone.

On Martha and Mary

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the brief illumination on the second poem that As Surely as the Sun Literary Journal published on August 4th. Follow this link to read all three poems in full.

How much of our annoyance with each other, our bitterness, our complaint and silent suffering, is due to busyness? Every great story has some element of sabbath in it. Because sabbath is the moment of reconciliation and peace. Not the performative peace of atonement and forgiveness. The simple peace of being being with someone in some shared space, and joining thoughts, smiling at shared hope, shared desire, feeling the boundaries of self thin. This is the truest ending to any story. It doesn’t come from vanquishing an enemy or completing a quest. It arrives unbidden, within an insistence on rest.

Martha and Mary have been turned into types, and then those types have been set against each other. As if to say that we must always live in competition, and that people can’t exist in any other mode. But we can, of course. Martha does not need to be chastised for her bitterness. Mary does not always have to symbolize those who refuse to help with the work. When their brother dies and Jesus comes to visit, it is Martha who asks questions, who sits and speculates, who asks for solace in her grief. Mary remains with the other women, mourning in ways that are expected of her. Both sisters take turn being wild, being thoughtful. Both know how to sweep a floor. They are not types. They are real people, shifting through the different modes of life.

Sabbath must be one of those modes. We cannot know God if we don’t know how to rest. God is more present in our rest than our busyness. But God will not hurry away while we make dinner and sweep the floor. God waits for us, for the finishing of our tasks, for the moment when we sit down at the table, in a state of peace, with all variations of ourselves present and at rest.

The Jordan is Not Too Far Away

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

I have just had three poems published in As Surely As the Sun Literary Journal. You can read them by following this link. I’m going to publish commentaries on each of them in the next three weeks, starting today.

Sometimes I simply want to be inside of a story as if I were inside of a painting. The colors, the scene, the shape of clouds on a far horizon, the figures in the foreground, they all invite me in. But my participation is enhanced by noting the artist’s skill, the way that one color speaks to another. The way that an array of tones and tints leads the eye around the canvas, and gives it balance. When I sit to practice *lectio divina* with a scripture story, my prayer is enhanced by whatever small knowledge I’ve gained of the story’s artistry.

The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is beautiful, as much for its craft as its meaning. Jesus and the disciples are on the other side of the Jordan, where they are safe from Herod, who is seeking Jesus to take his life. The Jordan, of course, is the river that the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land. Moses died within sight of it but never crossed it himself. John the Baptist called the crowds from Jerusalem to come to the river and cross it again, and have that crossing be their baptism, the entry into a promised land of new life. He baptized Jesus there, and Jesus came up out of the waters, like a new creation. Given all of this, the disciples’ retreat to the safety of the other side of the Jordan feels like a surrender, as if they are giving up on the promise and the possibilities of living in a new way.

Mary and Martha don’t know where Jesus has gone, but the Jordan River is still part of their story. After all, water circulates. It evaporates. It comes down as rain. It flows. The waters of the Jordan are in the air around us, particulate and unnoticed, there to be breathed in, or to condense so that we can drink them. Lazarus lays dying, and his sweat contains some atom of the Jordan, the most minute promise and possibility. The allegory of rebirth.

Water. It flows everywhere in this poem. Sweat and tears are returned to the air. The river marks a boundary and a passage. Water flows from mothers at birth. It seeps slowly from the body after death. It washes away the dust of the grave. It is the blue of the painting. It is in the painted sky, in the embroidered flowers on the sister’s robes, in the flow of the river, in Jesus’s robes as he wades across. In the droplets that linger as he steps along the road, making his way into the hills. Its movement is its explanation, its need, and purpose. The poem serves nothing less than water.

The Birth of Longing

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

My poem, “The Birth of Longing,” has just been published in Braided Way, a wonderful online journal. You can link to the poem here. I wrote a very short essay on it years ago, which I offer below.

Illumination of “The Birth of Longing”

When I was seventeen, I found myself in the John Muir Woods outside of San Francisco. I have tried, for many years, to write about what I encountered there. It will never find adequate expression in words, but this poem is the closest that I have come. Yet I wrote it more than twenty years afterwards, when time had worked its distorting force on the memory, and an accretion of spiritual and religious meaning had grown around it. This is the problem with youthful mystical experience — the systems of meaning that we use to make sense of such experiences haven’t been encountered or absorbed yet, or at least they hadn’t been for me. I was left with an experience of the divine that existed in a vacuum, and once I started filling that vacuum with theology and Christian practice the experience itself seemed to change. It had to rattle against everything I was learning. At first it was a word shouted into the void. Now there was a landscape of thought in that void, and the word echoed against that landscape, and became inseparable from that echo.

This poem is full of a sense of loss. The loss of the original freshness and inarticulate nature of the experience itself, and then the loss that comes from the limitations of experience, and the fact that, try as I might, I have never been able to experience the power of that day in the John Muir Woods within the context of my Christian faith. I don’t blame my faith for this. It has led me to other mystical experiences, different in kind and intensity from that day in the woods, but full of grace and power, nonetheless. And I no longer want to experience a repetition of that day, although that was something I wanted very badly for many years. As I age, the restlessness begins to fade, or becomes less of a constant, so that even this poem, the truest expression of an ineffable moment that I can manage, grows less truthful in its closing lines. And that is the problem with memory, and with poetry. It tames experience. Yet without it, the experience would be lost, a fading echo disappearing into the trees.

Trees, Figs, Gardens, and Cities

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

“Happy are they who wash their robes so as to have free access to the tree of life.” – The Revelation to St. John

Eve ate with tiny teeth, the seeds like gravel in her mouth, and sweet.
You are naked said the syrup when sliding down her throat.
Take my leaves, said the tree, and learn to sew.
This was the first tree, that grew the fig of knowledge,
the tree with wide leaves, cursed for lacking winter foliage.

Adam, wandering, with fig leaves chafing his nether regions,
wished that they could begin again.
When he watched one son kill another he thought,
surely this deserves to be called the first sin.
He knew, then, how hard it is to be a father,
and wished that when Eve had acquired all reason,
she had told him not to bother.

All this long life, learning how to atone,
generations on this earth with an uneasy sense of home.
Cloth from flax, cloth from cotton, cloth from wool,
cloth from oil found outside the garden
where we wander over ancient bones.

There is a fig tree in the city
that the garden’s tree loves dearly.
He sheds his dust of pollen onto a wasp’s vibrating wings,
clothing it with purpose beyond its painful stings.
A wasp was buried in the fruit that Eve first gave to Adam,
it laid its eggs among the seeds and sweet flesh made a home for them.
When Adam ate he ate this mother’s grave.
As this was the first taste, can anything be saved?
The trees stand fat and fruiting in the garden and the city.
They see me standing in the distance, wondering what I know.
We see you loitering there, they say. Approach, but first,
you must wash your clothes.

Illumination

It is honest to meet God in a state of bewilderment. And if the divine is reflected in creation, bewilderment is also an honest response to the world. Imagine this. Someone, once, realized that the fibers within flax plants could be spun together and then used for weaving. Later, someone discovered that you could soften the husk of the flax plant in order to access those fibers sooner. Someone once looked at a sheep and said, “It looks dry and warm despite the rain. How can it be enticed to share its warmth and dryness?” In the very recent past, someone learned to make cloth from oil. Human imagination encountered creation and spun fabric from bewilderment. A coat is a concrete, realized thing. But the innovation that shifted and sorted and manipulated materials across countless generations is the result of accident, surprise, desire, conversation, coincidence. A string carries a story that we’ll never know. Put on the coat. Put on bewilderment.

Bewilderment is very close to wonder. But it carries within it a knowledge of being lost, led into the wilderness, an environment that is unknown and unreadable, where it is very easy to lose your way. I once got lost in the woods. I encountered a large turtle lumbering along. I followed it, marveling at the pattern of its shell. When I looked up, nothing was familiar. The path had disappeared. If you follow wonder for long enough, you will find bewilderment.

When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were sent into the wild. Knowledge became bewilderment that quickly. What kind of tree was it? Rabbi Yosei provided a midrash. It must be a fig tree, he said, because all the other trees in the garden rejected Adam and Eve for having deceived their creator. Only the fig tree clothed them, to atone for being responsible for their plight. It is more complicated to bite into a fig than it is to bite into an apple. Many different textures arrive in the mouth, and you have to account for the seeds. Imagine that bite. So sweet and syrupy and full of things, including the wasp. Bewildering.

Its leaves were the first cloth. As Adam and Eve wore fig leaves and the leaves chafed them, did they resent the fig tree? Nudity is so uncomplicated, once you get past the social hindrances. Somewhere along the line, Adam and Eve discovered fashion. Now they not only needed to be warm, they needed to look good. The shame they first encountered when they discovered all reason became part of their daily reality. Glances on the street, worrying about which set of clothes would go with which dinner reservation. Knowing that this person has status because of their hat, and this person doesn’t, because of their socks. Bewildering.

Why does John of Patmos insist on a laundry day prior to encountering the Tree of Life? He urges those who read his visionary account to wash themselves in the blood of the lamb. Christ’s blood. Take on misery, he says, take on sorrow. Take on the sins of others. Know their loves, their hatreds, their tastes. Hear unkind words echoing in your ears, interspersed by shouts of joy. Let the weight of the world settle on your shoulders like the weight of a sodden coat. Life is better than knowledge, but there’s so much of it. Yet the Tree of Life beckons us home. An end to wandering in the woods. Only we have to bring the bewilderment home with us.