In the Cleft of the Rock: Of Mystics and Mountains

My second hike since moving to Arizona:

My asthmatic Midwest lungs aren’t used to the mountain-desert air.  So I wheeze along in the elation of the climb and the frustration of breathing.  I find hiding places off the path to catch my breath, read a little; and my mind is full of phrases and lines from poetry and Scripture which contain imagery matching the scenery around me.

Humankind should ponder God…

recognize God’s wonders and signs.

Let these signs and wonders be

the firmament on which to build,

            so as not to be shaken by fear,

            or distracted from the love of God.

                                                            Hildegard of Bingen

Dillard couldn’t understand why mystics sought God on mountaintops, knowing He is fearsome and powerful.  She declared she would hide in a cave into which only slivers of God could shine in as light through the cracks.  I think I understand the mystics’ approach more than hers.

Gravity

Truly we speak of the Curse
  As the Fall;
Man has been bound and grasped
  By gravity ever since.

The body grows in shape and mass;
  Each passing year gravity gains force.
The accumulation of years
  Bends the shoulders to the earth.

The human heart finds sorrow
  And trouble in time perennial
Till it fills over-full and ever-heavy
  Weighing the soul ever lower.

Time and age are merely formality—
  We are forever pressed into the earth's embrace.

Fragility

I am the pond in the early morning sun

Slant of rays against ice.
Step on the borders
Where water meets grass
And the ice is thick.
This you know and trust
Because I am reliable
And I like to have you there.
But be careful of the center:
The water is deep beyond knowing,
And the ice grows thin.
The waters move,
The waters still.
You are welcome here:
Only please remember
The waters exist.
Calm, I am a pond
Glinting with ice in morning sun.

Handel's Harpsichord

Can music be specific to any one particular season? Perhaps and perhaps not.  Yet Vivaldi seemed to think so, and Handel's Harpsichord Suite No.2 in F major seemed to me to appropriately represent Winter's fragile finery.


In a rush of harpsichord joy
Are scales of flowing snowflakes,
Trills of brave morning birdsong.

Brief rests between movements
Are the pauses between puffs of white breath;
Chords the crunch of footfall.

Staccato notes are surely
Bare tree-tips reaching thin point
Perplexed in persistent effort
To pierce the low-hanging sky.

Stark brittle beauty
The cold stream singing notes
Of fumbling round ice and rough white-patched rocks.

Thin of ice and harpsichord sounds,
Gracing sweep of covered land:
Enamor
            open eyes and ears.

Snowstorm

Thick empty white sky hanging

   Blank like the face of a vacant stranger

Endless white ground stretching and soaring

  Mounting upward forward backward

     (Deceptively spotless seagull arcs)

Both dissolving, disintegrating

   Into a swirling middle

Shreds from above and below frantically

   Now triumphantly

       (like an eraser scrub the last

        bits of pencil or color scratch markings)

   Gaining inch by foot

Overcoming the space in between.

Whitewashed

O Winter,

when you bleached the color

out of every last inch of the world,

whitewashing walls and windows

to your windy heart's content,

could you not have left

a little more

within my soul?

Upon the Altar of the World

"What if God's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering.  These the priest could raise and offer.

In China again, four years later yet, [Teilhard] rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata.  Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, 'To divinize the new day': 'Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.' " 

                             - Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 128

These words in my reading caught me, held me, compel me.
I get so caught up sometimes in my daily world that I forget about my priest-role.

It strikes me that Teilhard's words and actions are the truth, and what he represents is an act of holiness and love.
But what is a true and good and holy thing, it seems to me, is also a dangerous thing.

To give God thus all the "toil and sorrow" of each day in one's community is to open oneself to seeing the community, one's people, and their toils and cares, as God does.

This too is a holy and beautiful thing, but it is a powerful thing and heavy.  There is undoubtedly significant joy, but O what weight of sorrow is infused in people's daily lives!  To be willing to see them as God does therefore entails great suffering.

Perhaps Teilhard's exercise is a guard against excess heaviness--that in the consecration of the day he simultaneously opens himself to it and hands it over to God.  He recognizes necessarily that it is beyond the scope of his heart or his own two hands.  He must trust the wisdom and compassion of the heart of God and the sovereign control of God. 

Both acts of submission must take place or we become blind and calloused, or else worn down, heavy, and eventually cynical.  Whatever God gives us to see and hold onto in this world is never truly our own and by consecrating all that we see and do not, by opening our eyes and hearts to see the "toil and sorrow" and then offering it back to Him on the altar, we acknowledge His ultimate control.  We learn our responsibilities to what we see, and the ways He would use us to do His work.  But I must never forget that in the end, it is not my work.

In doing this, are we not becoming more like Christ? 

And as always, I have much to learn.

Words

Do we not know,
   you and I,
That we hold the power of the gods
   and not of men?
That in our words are the powers
   of all life and death—

That we speak these words
   and mostly
that rambling idle nonsense
   we think to be
     harmlessly
        in between.

And Death, too
  wears many faces.

Winter Psalm

Winter has unfolded
   in crisp, clean lines
Sharp like the telephone wires
   and bare branches against the sky,
Sharp like the cold stars
   before dawn.

And the world moves and lives on
   in all the bustling human ways,
And in flocks of birds and burning wind.

O sing, you people, and dance;
   hearken, and be still.

For the Lord our God
   who waits for us in stillness
Is a God of stillness but not static;
   He who created our bones to run and dance
Is in the movement as well as the quiet.

His wind burns our hearts like fire,
   with joy, like flocks of birds,
Enduring like the trees
   silent against the sky,
Like stars in the deep before dawn.

A Couple Word-Plays

Hebrews 4

In spite
Of our spite
He is
Respite.



Eternal Mysteries

Inspire
Expire
Holy Fire

Church spire
Funeral pyre
Resurrection higher.