“We shall not always plant while others reap.” This is the first line of Countee Cullen’s poem “From the Dark Tower.” I first read the poem last year, during the election and after having been active in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Cullen wrote the poem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The Dark Tower itself was a building in Harlem where writers and intellectuals frequently met. As I read it, I wondered why it is that, ninety years later, the plaintive hope of the poem still seems so distant.

Cullen’s poem helps me remember, as I read the Book of Exodus, that the forty years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness is as nothing compared to the centuries that African-American people have been waiting for justice. Yet it’s the poem’s hope that most deeply effected me when I first read it. I made this image to reflect that hope, and the question that lingers behind the hope: how long must people wait for justice? In Cullen’s words, how long must people “wait, and tend our agonizing seeds”? Here’s the whole text of the poem:

From the Dark Tower

Countee Cullen

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Encountering scripture in the company of artists and authors.

You can join the Bible study in person on Tuesdays at 1:00 PM in the EASE Gallery at Saint Stephen’s, 30 W. Woodruff Avenue.  Or you can enjoy it here.  Please feel free to comment if you’d like.

We’ve been doing about two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew a week, but now we’re going to slow down and lavish our time on the Beatitudes, the ten verses that begin the Sermon on the Mount.  They speak volumes.  There are hundreds of ways to think and feel about the beatitudes, and no doubt this Bible study will leave out a lot.  The beatitudes are poetry in and of themselves.  Some commentators say that the first clause of each beatitude, the “blessed are the…” part, comes out of very standard cultural ideas about who should be blessed: the poor in spirit, the meek, etc.  For these commentators, the radical nature of Jesus’s method becomes clear in the second clause.  Everyone can agree that the poor in spirit are blessed, but it’s a wild idea to think that they’re the ones who will get to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.  But Frederick Buechner thinks that every part of the beatitudes is radical, both first and second clauses.  Here’s what he writes in Whistling in the Dark:

IF WE DIDN’T ALREADY KNOW but were asked to guess the kind of people Jesus would pick out for special commendation, we might be tempted to guess one sort or another of spiritual hero—men and women of impeccable credentials morally, spiritually, humanly, and every which way. If so, we would be wrong. Maybe those aren’t the ones he picked out because he felt they didn’t need the shot in the arm his commendation would give them. Maybe they’re not the ones he picked out because he didn’t happen to know any. Be that as it may, it’s worth noting the ones he did pick out.
Not the spiritual giants, but the “poor in spirit;” as he called them, the ones who, spiritually speaking, have absolutely nothing to give and absolutely everything to receive, like the Prodigal telling his father “I am not worthy to be called thy son,” only to discover for the first time all he had in having a father.
Not the champions of faith who can rejoice even in the midst of suffering, but the ones who mourn over their own suffering because they know that for the most part they’ve brought it down on themselves, and over the suffering of others because that’s just the way it makes them feel to be in the same room with them.
Not the strong ones, but the meek ones in the sense of the gentle ones, that is, the ones not like Caspar Milquetoast but like Charlie Chaplin, the little tramp who lets the world walk over him and yet, dapper and undaunted to the end, somehow makes the world more human in the process.
Not the ones who are righteous, but the ones who hope they will be someday and in the meantime are well aware that the distance they still have to go is even greater than the distance they’ve already come.
Not the winners of great victories over evil in the world, but the ones who, seeing it also in themselves every time they comb their hair in front of the bathroom mirror, are merciful when they find it in others and maybe that way win the greater victory.
Not the totally pure, but the “pure in heart;” to use Jesus’ phrase, the ones who may be as shopworn and clay-footed as the next one, but have somehow kept some inner freshness and innocence intact.
Not the ones who have necessarily found peace in its fullness, but the ones who, just for that reason, try to bring it about wherever and however they can-peace with their neighbors and God, peace with themselves.
Jesus saved for last the ones who side with heaven even when any fool can see it’s the losing side and all you get for your pains is pain. Looking into the faces of his listeners, he speaks to them directly for the first time. “Blessed are you;” he says.
You can see them looking back at him. They’re not what you’d call a high-class crowd-peasants and fisherfolk for the most part, on the shabby side, not all that bright. It doesn’t look as if there’s a hero among them. They have their jaws set. Their brows are furrowed with concentration.
They are blessed when they are worked over and cursed out on his account he tells them. It is not his hard times to come but theirs he is concerned with, speaking out of his own meekness and mercy, the purity of his own heart.

Now that Buechner has provided us with some introductory thoughts, let’s see what authors and artists have to show us about the beatitudes.

Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “I wake to feel the fell of dark, not day,” to accompany Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

In 1884 Hopkins, a Roman Catholic Priest, was sent to Ireland to teach at University College Dublin.  Hopkins was very petite, only 5’2″ tall, and full of personal idiosyncrasies.  The students mocked him and the other teachers didn’t like him.  He was a great poet, but no one had noticed or acknowledged this fact.  The experience of isolation and rejection led to the period of deep depression in which he wrote what are called his “terrible sonnets.”  They were called “terrible” because of the psychic terror invoked by their content, not because they were bad.  ‘I wake to feel the fell of dark, not day’ is one of the most powerful statements of spiritual despair that I’ve ever encountered.

I’m accompanying it with a painting by Eric Holmes, who’s work is in NAEMI‘s collection. NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions of the Mentally Ill) is based in Florida, and seeks to promote the art of people with mental illnesses.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ series, to accompany Matthew 5:4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’

On April 26, 1937, the Luftwaffe bombed the Spanish town of Guernica.  This wasn’t a German invasion, but a German interference in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of Francisco Franco.  Picasso was living in Paris at the time.  He saw pictures of the bombing in the newspaper, and began sketching images for his famous painting, titled after the town.  After he completed the painting, he began making portraits of his lover, the photographer Dora Maar.  These portraits play on the idea of the Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin Mary, which was common artistic theme in Spain.  They’re a continuation of the sense of grief, anger, and protest that’s present in Guernica.

George MacDonald’s ‘Blessed are the Meek for They Shall Inherit the Earth,’ and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s ‘The Rolling Saint’ to accompany Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.’

Blessed are the Meek for They Shall Inherit the Earth
by George MacDonald

A quiet heart, submissive, meek,
Father do thou bestow;
Which more than granted will not seek
To have, or give, or know.

Each green hill then will hold its gift
Forth to my joying eyes;
The mountains blue will then uplift
My spirit to the skies.

The falling water then will sound
As if for me alone;
Nay, will not blessing more abound
That many hear its tone?

The trees their murmuring forth will send,
The birds send forth their song;
The waving grass its tribute lend,
Sweet music to prolong.

The water-lily’s shining cup,
The trumpet of the bee,
The thousand odours floating up,
The many-shaded sea;

The rising sun’s imprinted tread
Upon the eastward waves;
The gold and blue clouds over head;
The weed from far sea-caves;

All lovely things from south to north,
All harmonies that be,
Each will its soul of joy send forth
To enter into me.

And thus the wide earth I shall hold,
A perfect gift of thine;
Richer by these, a thousandfold,
Than if broad lands were mine.

 

The Rolling Saint
by Aimee Nezhukamatathil

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation.
—Reuters

He started small: fasting here and there,

days, then weeks. Once, he stood under

a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting

            for nothing—not even to sleep. It came

            to him in a dream: You must roll

            on this earth, spin your heart in rain,

                        desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab

                        any cuts from the day before, and lay prone

                        on the road while his twelve men swept

            the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.

            Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man

            rolling through puddles, past storefronts

where children would throw him pieces

of butter candy he’d try and catch

in his mouth at each rotation. His men

            swept and sang, swept and sang

            of jasmine-throated angels

            and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.

                        He rolled and rolled. Sometimes

                        in his dizzying spins, he thought

                        he heard God. A whisper, but still.

Jorge Luis Borges ‘Lamed Wufniks’ from The Book of Imaginary Beings, and Thomas Merton’s ‘Louisville Epiphany’ from Conjectures of a Guilty By-Stander, to accompany Matthew 5:6, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Borges was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.  His stories strongly influenced all of the post-modern literature that followed him.  What he calls the “lamed wufniks” are called the Tzadikim Nistarim in Judaism.  His term for them comes from the Yiddish, Lamedvavniks.  But his understanding of the term is essentially right.  Rabbi Raymond A Zwerin says of them that: “In our folk tales, they emerge from their self-imposed concealment and, by the mystic powers, which they possess, they succeed in averting the threatened disasters of a people persecuted by the enemies that surround them.”  The idea of them is drawn from the Book of Genesis, and Abraham’s argument with God before Sodom and Gomorrah.  God is going to destroy the cities, but Abraham convinces him that the presence of only a few righteous men within the city walls is reason enough to leave the cities standing.  The Lamedvavniks represent a fascinating idea of righteousness, but also a somewhat disturbing idea of God.

There are on earth, and always were, thirty-six righteous men whose mission is to justify the world before God. They are the Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very poor. If a man comes to the knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, perhaps in another part of the world, takes his place. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing it, the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are our saviors.

Thomas Merton had his Louisville Epiphany after he had become a Trappist monk.  He was struggling with celibacy, attracted to women on the street, and yet clinging to a sense of his own righteousness in order to fight that attraction.  But he knew that there was something wrong in this, that if we claim that we’re righteous but look down on other people, it becomes a false claim.  His epiphany led him into a much truer sense of righteousness.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.
Thomas MertonCertainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Frans Francken II’s Chirk Cabinet, to accompany Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

Frans Francken the Younger was a Flemish baroque painter from Antwerp, and very popular in his day.  The seven allegorical images that he painted onto the Chirk Cabinet depict the seven corporeal works of mercy that are part of Roman Catholic belief and are derived, mostly, from Matthew 25:34-46.  The only one of the seven acts that doesn’t come from this passage is the burial of the dead, which comes from the Book of Tobit.

The Chirk Cabinet

To shelter the stranger.

To feed the hungry.

To give drink to the thirsty.

To clothe the naked.

To visit the prisoner.

To visit the sick.

To bury the dead.

John Keble’s ‘Blest are the pure in heart’ to accompany Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

John Keble is an Episcopal saint.  He was one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, which brought old forms of liturgy back into the Anglican church.  The distinction between low and high church became prevalent during his life time, and he and the other members of the Oxford Movement were definitely on the high church side of the divide.  As a poet, he’s most famous for having written The Christian Year, which has poems for every Sunday and for major feasts.

Blest are the pure in heart,
For they shall see our God;
The secret of the Lord is theirs;
Their soul is Christ’s abode.

The Lord, Who left the heavens
Our life and peace to bring,
To dwell in lowliness with men
Their Pattern and their King.

Still to the lowly soul
He doth Himself impart;
And for His dwelling and His throne
Chooseth the pure in heart.

Lord, we Thy presence seek;
May ours this blessing be;
Give us a pure and lowly heart,
A temple meet for Thee.

Denise Levertov’s “Making Peace,” and Mark Brunner’s photograph of Keshia Thomas, to accompany Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Denise Levertov was one of the great 20th century English poets, and one of the great religious poets during a period of increasing secularism.

Tom Sleigh’s poem “Fable,” to accompany Matthew 5:10, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

A little village in Texas has lost its idiot.
-Caption on a protest sign

Let us deal justly.
-Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, from Shakespeare’s King Lear; act 3, scene 6

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar

of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,

homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie,

its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant’s

quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind

for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses’ quivering, skittish

haunches into the demonstrators’ faces?
Oh little village among the villages,

the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone,
and nobody, now, knows where to find him…

Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots?
Some poor mad Tom roving the heath

for a warm soft place to lie his body down,
his speech obsessed with oaths, demons,

his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet
as the horses back slowly, slowly into the crowd

and he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth—
and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay

and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself
with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown

of fumiter weed and holds his scepter
of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.

Here are poems and painting that I’ve collected to accompany our study of the Gospel of Matthew.

William Drummond’s “For the Baptist,” to accompany Matthew 3:1-10

John the Baptist’s preaching isn’t given much love by contemporary poets.  In fact, I had to go all the way back to the 17th century to find a poet who had given much thought to John’s particular plight – alone in the wilderness, preaching repentance but with few people repenting.  William Drummond was a Scottish laird and contemporary of Shakespeare’s.  I think it’s nice that John gets his own sonnet.

For the Baptist

The last and greatest herald of Heaven’s King,
Girt with rough skins, hies to the deserts wild,
Among that savage brood the woods forth bring,
Which he than man more harmless found and mild:
His food was blossoms, and what young doth spring,
With honey that from virgin hives distilled;
Parched body, hollow eyes, some uncouth thing
Made him appear, long since from Earth exiled.
There burst he forth; All ye, whose hopes rely
On God, with me amidst these deserts mourn,
Repent, repent, and from old errors turn.
Who listened to his voice, obeyed his cry?
Only the echoes which he made relent,
Rung from their marble caves, repent, repent.

Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, to accompany Matthew 3:13-17

This is a beautiful image, and the people at SmartHistory can expound on it a lot better than I can.  Follow this link for a YouTube video of their commentary.

Robert Graves’ “In the Wilderness,” to accompany Matthew 4:1-11

Robert Graves lived to be ninety years old.  Born at the tail end of the 19th c., his life spanned two world wars.  He was a friend of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and with them emerged as a major poet of the first world war.  Later he would write one of the greatest historical novels of all time, I, Claudius.  This poem was published in 1917, and you can feel something of the devastation of the war in it.  It certainly is morally ambiguous.  It’s the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” before there was a Rolling Stones.  The title hints at this ambiguity.  Although we immediately think of Christ in the wilderness, it’s clear by the poem’s end that the wilderness sojourn of the devil is the poem’s subject as well.

In the Wilderness

Christ of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering,
Walked in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk
That listened wondering.
He heard the bitterns call
From ruined palace-wall,
Answered them brotherly.
He held communion
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,
With monstrous barbéd slings,
With eager dragon-eyes;
Great rats on leather wings
And poor blind broken things,
Foul in their miseries.
And ever with Him went,
Of all His wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs—poor innocent—
Bleeding foot, burning throat,
The guileless old scapegoat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behind Him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.

I wanted a way of reading the Bible in the company of artists and poets, of paying attention to their commentary on scripture.  I couldn’t find any one book that did this, so I decided to start collecting resources here.  We hold a weekly Bible study in the EASE Gallery, and today we’ll be looking at the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew.  Here are some paintings and poems I’ve collected to accompany our study.

The Jesse Tree from the Capuchin Bible, to accompany the genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17

Jesse Trees began appearing in Medieval manuscripts like the Capuchin Bible in the 11th century.  They soon showed up in stained glass windows, most notably in Chartes Cathedral.  You will notice Jesse lying at the base of the image, with the tree growing out of his belly.  It’s trunk grows up through depictions of King David and King Solomon, to a depiction of the Virgin Mary, to Christ himself.  Those figures to the sides, draped with scrolls of text, are the prophets.

 

“The Temptation of Joseph,” an excerpt from W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being, to accompany Matthew 1:18-25

For the perpetual excuse
Of Adam for his fall—”My little Eve,
God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,”
For his insistence on a nurse,
All service, breast, and lap, for giving Fate
Feminine gender to make girls believe
That they can save him, you must now atone,
Joseph, in silence and alone;
While she who loves you makes you shake with fright,
Your love for her must tuck you up and kiss good night.

For likening Love to war, for all
The pay-off lines of limericks in which
The weak resentful bar-fly shows his sting,
For talking of their spiritual
Beauty to chorus-girls, for flattering
The features of old gorgons who are rich,
For the impudent grin and Irish charm
That hides a cold will to do harm,
To-day the roles are altered; you must be
The Weaker Sex whose passion is passivity.

For those delicious memories
Cigars and sips of brandy can restore
To old dried boys, for gallantry that scrawls
In idolatrous detail and size
A symbol of aggression on toilet walls,
For having reasoned— ”Woman is naturally pure
Since she has no moustache,” for having said,
“No woman has a business head,”
You must learn now that masculinity,
To Nature, is a non-essential luxury.

Lest, finding it impossible
To judge its object now or throatily
Forgive it as eternal God forgives,
Lust, tempted by this miracle
To more ingenious evil, should contrive
A heathen fetish from Virginity
To soothe the spiritual petulance
Of worn-out rakes and maiden aunts,
Forgetting nothing and believing all,
You must behave as if this were not strange at all.

Without a change in look or word,
You both must act exactly as before;
Joseph and Mary shall be man and wife
Just as if nothing had occurred.
There is one World of Nature and one Life;
Sin fractures the Vision, not the Fact; for
The Exceptional is always usual
And the Usual exceptional.
To choose what is difficult all one’s days
As if it were easy, that is faith. Joseph, praise.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” to accompany Matthew 2:1-12

The Journey Of The Magi
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Flight Into Egypt, to accompany Matthew 2:13-15

Tanner was raised in the African Methodist Church, and turned to religious painting in the 1890s.  The Flight into Egypt was his favorite biblical story, echoing, as it did, the black experience in America of danger, oppressions, and flight.

 

Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents, to accompany Matthew 2:16-18

Study the painting and you’ll see hardly any innocents in it at all.  Where are the children whom Herod ordered killed?  They’ve been painted over.  Bruegel originally painted them, and he painted Herod’s soldiers to resemble the Spanish armies of the Holy Roman Empire who were rampaging across Flanders at the time.  But Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, soon came into possession of the painting.  Understanding that it represented a criticism of his own empire, he had it overpainted.  Screaming children were turned into jugs and livestock.  It’s as if Herod himself had gotten a chance to edit Matthew’s Gospel and alter the story of the massacre of the innocents.

 

Joseph Brodsky’s “Flight into Egypt,” translated by Melissa Green, to mark the return from Egypt to Israel and accompany Matthew 2:19-23

…where the drover came from, no one knew.

Their affinity made the heavens slate
the desert for a miracle. There, they chose to light
a fire and camp, the cave in a vortex of snow.
Not divining his role, the Infant drowsed
in a halo of curls that would quickly become
accustomed to radiance. Its glow would climb—
beyond that dark-skinned enclave—to rise
like the light of a star that endures
as long as the earth exists: everywhere.

When I was a young man, I had a fantasy that when I became an adult, really became an adult, I would have everything all figured out.  That the insecurity of trial and error would go away, and I’d know what to do and what not to do about any situation that might arise.  It never happened.  There was never a moment when I crossed the river into a clear and untroubled adulthood.  I’m calmer and more patient than I used to be.  I no longer think that mistakes say something terrible and permanent about my character.  But I still make them, and sometimes I wonder who I truly am.

These days I tend towards a different fantasy.  What if I could go back and live my teenage and college years again?  Not as the person I was, but as the person I’ve become.  Because even though I still make plenty of mistakes, a lot of the angry posturing of my post-punk college days is gone.  I’ve aligned myself to a faith and a creed, and that’s brought a lot of peace.  But not so much peace that I don’t regret the past, and fantasize about going back and knowing people in a different way, being wise and kind, the rare kid who is honestly interested in taking care of other people.  The rare kid who has the confidence to go off by himself when he needs to, as well, and who knows himself well enough to pursue his own particular interests without caring what other people think of them.

Both of these fantasies are equally meaningless, and therefore bad for me.  Malcolm Guite, in his book Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, talks about Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy.  Imagination is deep.  In Christian terms, to truly imagine something is to enter into God’s vision for it.  Fancy is superficial.  It’s to indulge in goofy fantasies, telling oneself stories that are, ultimately, self-glorifying.  Both of my fantasies are about my being more perfect, either in the future or in the past, and both are equally silly.  All the energy that I put into fantasies of the future or the past is a distraction from my own deepest feelings about the world, and distract my ability to truly think about God’s will, to imaginatively align myself to God.

Back when I was in college, I learned about the four life-stages, or ashrama, of Hinduism.  I find it helpful to think about them now.  I’m in the middle of the householder stage, which is all about duty, taking care of one’s family, doing good for one’s community, and working to make money.  Traditionally, this stage ends when you’re forty-eight, which for me is only six years from now.  Already I find myself drifting towards the next stage, in which one begins withdrawing from the world and concentrates on sharing whatever spiritual wisdom she or he has attained so far.  But I find it reassuring to think that the chaos and confusion of my young life was essentially appropriate to the first stage, when I was a student and therefore meant to learn and make mistakes.  And that the householder stage I’m in now isn’t really about perfection, but a set of purposes and the meanings that I make of them.

The pleasure of thinking about life in this way is that it releases us from the fancy of perfection.  Instead of thinking that adulthood is something that suddenly happens, a single, sharp break in human life, it’s useful to subsume it in other categories.  There are stages of adulthood, and some of them include portions of our childhood.  I am not perfect, and will never attain the pure perfection of God.  But by putting aside my fantasies of perfection, I can free myself to enter into the imagination of God, to go deep and try to see the world the way God does, which means seeing myself through the eyes of love rather than criticism – the kind of love that frees one from regret.