Holy Thursday 2012 and a Russian

Where have you gone, my Beloved? Do not leave us alone.

He did not leave us alone. He gives us his own self, whole and entire, in a little host.

And then we abandon him to his tears in the Garden.

The Garden of Gethsemane

~Boris Pasternak (in Dr. Zhivago), trans. John Stallworthy and Peter France



Indifferently, the glimmer of stars
Lit up the turning in the road.
The road went round the Mount of Olives,
Below it the Kedron flowed.

The meadow suddenly stopped half-way.
The Milky Way went on from there.
The grey and silver olive trees
Were trying to march into thin air.

There was a garden at the meadow’s end.
And leaving the disciples by the wall,
He said: ‘My soul is sorrowful unto death,
Tarry ye here, and watch with Me awhile.’

Without a struggle He renounced
Omnipotence and miracles
As if they had been borrowed things,
And now He was a mortal among mortals.

The night’s far reaches seemed a region
Of nothing and annihilation. All
The universe was uninhabited.
There was no life outside the garden wall.

And looking at those dark abysses,
Empty and endless, bottomless deeps,
He prayed the Father, in a bloody sweat,
To let this cup pass from His lips.

Assuaging mortal agony with prayer,
He left the garden. By the road he found
Disciples, overcome by drowsiness,
Asleep spreadeagled on the ground.

He wakened them: ‘The Lord has deemed you worthy
To live in My time. Is it worthiness
To sleep in the hour when the Son of Man
Must give Himself into the hands of sinners?’

....

The course of centuries is like a parable
And, passing, can catch fire. Now, in the name
Of its dread majesty, I am content
To suffer and descend into the tomb.

I shall descend and on the third day rise,
And as the river rafts float into sight,
Towards My Judgement like a string of barges
The centuries will float out of the night.’

Hopkins in Lent: Transcience.

March weather is back. After two weeks of June warmth and sun, we are rudely awakened by a gray, cold front. A good start to the last full week of Lent.

"There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth."

Something about March--perhaps its Novemberishness--makes me think of Dead Poets.

And here's Hopkins for today.

54. On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

A Brother and Sister

O I ADMIRE and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years. A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves, And beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears. Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast: 5 Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest In one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast, Creatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest. And are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams Their young delightful hour do feature down 10 That fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams Or ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown. She leans on him with such contentment fond As well the sister sits, would well the wife; His looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond, 15 Gaze on, and fall directly forth on life. But ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are Of favoured make and mind and health and youth, Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star? There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth. 20 There ’s none but good can bé good, both for you And what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid; None good but God—a warning wavèd to One once that was found wanting when Good weighed. Man lives that list, that leaning in the will 25 No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess, The selfless self of self, most strange, most still, Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes. Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye May but call on your banes to more carouse. 30 Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry, To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs? Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe. What need I strain my heart beyond my ken? O but I bear my burning witness though 35 Against the wild and wanton work of men.

Miscellania on Mardi Gras. 2012.

I'm thrilled (that's the best word I can find) that it's the Eve of Lent. After all the noise--internal and external and online (whatever online is)--I'm ready to keep some serious silence. After thinking it over seriously, though, I have decided to actually try to write more here at the Philosopher Mom. Writing is not chatter for me--it breeds silence and recollection. It's a Lenten discipline.

Good-bye Facebook. (But these posts will still show up automatically!)

I'm trying to empty my head of all the loose threads: hence, the Mardi Gras Miscellania post.

1. As I was kneading some bread (you have to have good bread for Ash Wednesday), I listened to a fabulous interview on Ancient Faith Radio with Warren Farha, the owner and founder of Eighth Day Books. He had some interesting things to say about the advent of the electronic book. "Knowing" him as I do through his lists and lists of books, I don't think he's just being self-interested: He suggests there are serious theological reasons to resist throwing out the hardcovers and converting to Kindle. "We are incarnate. Our liturgy is a bodily experience." He's saying that, as human beings, we don't just encounter ideas or words in our minds or "spirits," but we encounter them in our flesh. There's something very physical about my memories of books in my life--certain covers, pages that smelled a certain way, spending an afternoon browsing along my parents' bookshelves. Some of the most forceful lines I ever read--the most formative lines--I encountered because I picked up a book and thumbed through it. I think he's on to something.

2. Getting ready for Lent. Every year, I think of at least 26 sacrifices that would be so good for me to make. Every year I end up violating even the three or four I choose to keep. Am I ready for failure again? Yes! Bring it on. Because: Did you get a load of St. James this morning? Holy Lenten failures, Batman!

3. I found this wicked cool schedule of readings in the Church Fathers. There's even a Church Fathers Readings LITE for moms like me. Check it out!

4. Does anyone know where I can get a good dose of Irenaus of Lyons? A dear friend (the same guy who told me to read Cassian) assigned him next, and it turns out that Irenaus is just not that accessible.

5. Homeschooling has been a blessing this year. Far from isolating us, it has given us a sort of home and community ready-made for us here in CT. I'm hoping to have some time to organize my thoughts on Ages of Grace and other various curricula I've been working with. Suffice it to say: do not let anyone tell you that homeschoolers are alone or without support. Sometimes you have more options and more company than is actually good for the children! When strangers ask me if I'm going to "keep doing this," I can only reply, "I hope so, with all my heart."

Time to slice strawberries and defrost that fabulous Red Velvet Cake.

Have a blessed Mardi Gras and a glorious beginning to the Great Fast. Here's Thomas Merton's poem of the Christ Child going into the desert to start you on your way.

The Flight into Egypt - 1944

Through every precinct of the wintry city
Squadroned iron resounds upon the streets;
Herod's police
Make shudder the dark steps of the tenements
At the business about to be done.

Neither look back upon Thy starry country,
Nor hear what rumors crowd across the dark
Where blood runs down those holy walls,
Nor frame a childish blessing with Thy hand
Towards that fiery spiral of exulting souls!

Go, Child of God, upon the singing desert,
Where, with eyes of flame,
The roaming lion keeps thy road from harm.

Image: StudiObrien.

A little Hopkins for a Thursday.

The words are wild.

'The child is father to the man.' How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: 'The child is father to the man.' No; what the poet did write ran, 'The man is father to the child.' 'The child is father to the man!' How can he be? The words are wild!

~GM Hopkins

(Not)Dead Poets Month: a guy named Brandon.

This was floating around Facebook. Thank you, Melanie!

A Bit of Thanksgiving

I thank you, Lord, for fruitful fields,
for wide and healthful skies,
and for the fact not everyone
who is out at war will die;
and for the limits you have placed
on corruption and despite,
that we need only deal with them
a dozen times each night.

I thank you, Lord, for cheerful suns
that rise at every dawn,
and that my students learn to hide
the sound and sight of yawn,
that education is a joy,
filled with love and awe,
and, on those crazy grading days,
that there are murder laws.

I thank you that we live here free
in houses without bars,
that there are things that we can own,
that no one owns the stars,
that joy and virtue freely flow
without a market price
while we have markets fully full
of grain and fruit and spice.

I thank you, Lord, for politics,
for presidents and such,
that they work so hard to get their way,
that they never get it much,
who teach us that the foolish thirst
to rule and reign on high
dishonor brings upon our hearts
when to ourselves we lie.

Thank you, Lord, for infant smiles
and children bright at play,
for all the crabbed and silly souls
who annoy us every day.
(We appreciate those most, O Holy Lord,
those crosses that we bear,
and we thank you that we are not bald
from pulling out our hair.)

Thank you, Lord, for mirrors,
for when I most despise
the follies of my fellow man,
I look, and see pride's lies.
And thank you, God, for mysteries
you have left for us to solve
upon this strangely floating ball
that rotates and revolves.

Thank you for your mercy,
which saves us from the brink;
and thank you, Lord, for righteous wrath,
we need it more, I think.
Thank you for all gentle souls
who can their tempers keep;
protect them, Lord, from the rest of us,
lest we kill them in their sleep.

And for all the blissful marriages!
There are three of them, at least,
and given how hard the whole thing is,
that's quite an abundant feast.
And for all the others as well, my Lord;
they stall and sputter and spin
like well-loved cars that barely move,
they're so nicely broken-in.

And also for the ones that fail,
as they might have been worth the try
if they had words that told it straight,
and laughs, and gentle sighs,
and that they in their saddest loss
yet stand as vivid sign
that the commitment is to person there,
not a signature on a line.

Thank you, Lord, for critics
who attack with whip and flail,
and for reviewers and polemicists,
and, because of them, for hell.
And thank you, Lord, for stupid folk,
that we can clearly see
all the things that shock the mind
from which none of us are free.

And thank you for those shocking times
when pedants who lecture all
on every foolish folly
into those follies fall,
for it teaches us the wisdom
of gentleness and restraint,
lest we in turn be painted
with the brush by which we paint.

Thank you for absurdities;
they overflow the bank,
so if I but thank you for each one,
I'll never cease to thank.
And thank you for sweet irony;
it gives the wit to see
that all the things we moan about
may be thanksgiving's seed.

But most of all, I thank you, Lord,
that long before we die,
we can see ourselves with wry regard,
and laugh until we cry.

Dead Poets Month: Joy Davidman.

We have snow, so casual, lovely, for Thanksgiving. I can only think of this poem, by the woman who would later be famous for marrying CS Lewis. A formidable poet in her own right.

Snow in Madrid

Softly, so casual,
Lovely, so light, so light,
The cruel sky lets fall
Something one does not fight.
How tenderly to crown
The brutal year
The clouds send something down
That one need not fear.
Men before perishing
See with unwounded eye
For once a gentle thing
Fall from the sky.

~Joy Davidman

Dead Poets Month: the Psalmist.

I've been fretting.

Christmas songs blaring in the stores. Somehow, "Let it Snow" sets off all my puny rage and I spend the day in a funk over the ills in the world. Everything--from Soviet Russia to Health and Human Services to dirty socks under the couch--brings me to tears.

And then, the psalms step in. Perhaps the greatest poetry of all time, the psalms take all the darkness, name it, and give it over to light.

From today's Office of Readings, here is Psalm 37.

Do not fret because of the wicked;
do not envy those who do evil:
for they wither quickly like grass
and fade like the green of the fields.

If you trust in the Lord and do good,
then you will live in the land and be secure.
If you find your delight in the Lord,
he will grant your heart’s desire.

Commit your life to the Lord,
trust in him and he will act,
so that your justice breaks forth like the light,
your cause like the noon-day sun.

Be still before the Lord and wait in patience;
do not fret at the man who prospers;
a man who makes evil plots
to bring down the needy and the poor.

Calm your anger and forget your rage;
do not fret, it only leads to evil.
For those who do evil shall perish;
the patient shall inherit the land.

A little longer–and the wicked shall have gone.
Look at his place, he is not there.
But the humble shall own the land
and enjoy the fullness of peace.

Dead Poets Month: Isaac Watts for Christ the King.

The liturgical year draws to a close, and the man-God reigns from the cross. My heart is singing "Crown Him," but Isaac Watts' beautiful words and the gentler, peaceful melody fit the November days.

Have a beautiful feast, give thanks for the year, and remember you are a son of the king.

1. When I survey the wondrous cross
   On which the Prince of glory died,
   My richest gain I count but loss,
   And pour contempt on all my pride.
2. Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
   Save in the death of Christ my God!
   All the vain things that charm me most,
   I sacrifice them to His blood.
3. See from His head, His hands, His feet,
   Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
   Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
   Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
4. Were the whole realm of nature mine,
   That were a present far too small;
   Love so amazing, so divine,
   Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Dead Poets Month: George Herbert.

From a dear friend, this by George Herbert.

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here."

Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

"My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

So I did sit and eat.

Dead Poets Month: Gerard Manley Hopkins

This one is new to me. I'm leaving in the accents found on Bartleby's website, because Hopkins is so very odd in his emphases. Read it out loud and try bobbing your head every time you say an accented word--it helps with the rhythm.

Line 11 is the reassurance and the reasoned line: The just man "acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is." To do this is to live authentically, to be fully human: to act in accordance with who we are. Do it, momma, do it.

34. As kingfishers catch fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 5 Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; 10 Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Dead Poets Month: D.H. Lawrence

I'm barely familiar with Lawrence, but this poem reminds me of falling in love when I was 16. 

And because he was Todd, the story has a happy continuance.

Letter from Town: The Almond Tree

You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?

 White ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge?      

 Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a pledge    

Of our early love that hardly has opened yet.        

Here there’s an almond tree—you have never seen            

 Such a one in the north—it flowers on the street, and I stand      

 Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers that expand    

At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.        

Under the almond tree, the happy lands      

 Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,      

 And passing feet are chatter and clapping of those    

Who play around us, country girls clapping their hands.        

You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown,      

 All your unbearable tenderness, you with the laughter      

 Startled upon your eyes now so wide with hereafter,     

You with loose hands of abandonment hanging down.

Dead Poets Month: the Wisdom Authors

I often forget the power of the Book of Wisdom, one of the seven Sapiential books in the Old Testament (it is not included in the Bibles of the Protestant communities).

These lines open today's first reading in the Liturgy of the Word.

When peaceful stillness compassed everything

and the night in its swift course was half spent,

Your all-powerful word, from heaven's royal throne bounded,

a fierce warrior,

into the doomed land,

bearing the sharp sword of your inexorable decree.

And as he alighted, he filled every place with death;

he still reached to heaven, while he stood upon the earth.

Wisdom 18.14-16

Dead Poets Month: John Updike

November

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
In its distress,
Displays a certain
Loveliness.

~John Updike, A Child's Calendar

Image Source.

Dead Poets Month.

November is usually my Dead Poets month. Not because I liked the movie (I didn't).

This year, however, we have somehow arrived at November 9 without a single living poem from a dead man. To remedy that, and because all philosophers desperately need poetry in their lives, here is my darling Yeats.

To a Young Girl

My dear, my dear, I know

More than another

What makes your heart beat so;

Not even your own mother

Can know it as I know,

Who broke my heart for her

That she denies

And has forgot,

Set all her blood astir

And glittered in her eyes.

If you came this way.

Here is Eliot for Thursday. Ten years ago, I was studying in England and coping with being abroad for 9/11. I will always think of England as "the end of the world" and of Eliot as my voice of those days.

From "Little Gidding," No. 4 of 'Four Quartets'

"I. .... There are other places

Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always."

Image source.

First Friday.

The madness of the move!

I was convinced that today was the first Friday in July, but found it to be the second. I was sure it was Saturday, but then it was Friday. The second Friday.

I woke up thinking I was in Georgia, but I was in CT (I'm still not ready to try and spell that).

I dressed thinking I still lived in the woods, but Todd reminded me that our bedroom window looks into ... the neighbor's bedroom window. Oops.

It is good to be here and to start what we hope to be our life in a permanent location (Deo gratias), but we are all a little disoriented. So, instead of a blog post weighing the responsibilities and gifts of a Roman Catholic using an Orthodoc curriculum; instead of a post contemplating the meaning of mortal sin; instead of wondering about the human condition, its application to 3-year-old angst, and the repercussions of sleeplessness on my NFP charts...

I give you, TS Eliot:

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

With slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

~"Burnt Norton," s. III

Fiat! A Song for March 25.

I haven't been able to type much lately, and there are about 15 posts percolating in my head. They just never seem to write themselves, though!

But today is a special day, regardless of my--or anyone else's--incoherence. I must mark it!

Here is my beloved John Donne, metaphysical poet extraordinaire (and, in my humble opinion, a witness in his own Anglican way to the theology of the body), on the Incarnation. You really have to read it aloud to get the full effect.

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh

That All, which always is all everywhere,

Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,

Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,

Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie

In prison, in thy womb; and though He there

Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,

Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.

Ere by the spheres time was created, thou

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother,

Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now

Thy Maker's maker, and the Father's mother,

Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

Ash Wednesday.

Part of me wants to say, "Really? Are you serious? Lent?" But mostly, I am so happy to welcome the "purple days," as Miriam named them. After a year of turmoil, it is good to rest in penance and fasting. And there is the promise of Easter.

Somehow, when you are fasting and asking for mercy, all the details and passing dramas fall away. All that matters is the song in my heart, "Lord Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner." That is why I love this bit from TS Eliot's poem for today:

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each

other,

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance."

~TS Eliot, "Ash Wednesday, Part II"

The other cool part? You get to spend 40 days in a desert telling Satan to get lost! Check out this painting:

Yeah, Christ is pretty much saying, "Go screw it somewhere else, Diablo! You lose!"

Me, too, Jesus! Giving those powers and principalities the time of day!

Happy Lent.

Not my will...

~ From Chapter 9: "Imitate Mary's Trust in the Father's Will" ~

Here concludes my month for Caryll. All the excerpts have been from her Little Way, but I just was given (thanks, Mom!) another rocking book: Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings. More Caryll to come!

"Christ in his infancy asks no gift but self from those who love Him. But God does not ask love from His creatures greater than the love He gives to them. On the Cross, Christ Himself was stripped of everything but Himself. In the sacrifice of Himself, He gave Himself to God and to man.

"Just as the mother who is wise knows that if Christ waxes strong in her child, he will go out to meet suffering halfway (and will meet it, but his suffering will redeem and comfort and heal), so those who foster the infant Christ inwardly in the life of their soul know that the same applies to them.

"Christ, wherever He is, in whomever He is, must be about His Father's business."

~from Caryll Houselander's The Little Way of the Infant Jesus

The infant king.

~ from Chapter 4: Fix your gaze on Christ ~

I can't tell you how beautiful this chapter is. Her description here of the way an infant changes us articulates perfectly the radical change that motherhood (and fatherhood) bring: and all this from a woman who never married! Sometimes those outside can best see. The description is meant to show us how our openness to the gift of life and willingness to serve our children brings us a real experience of Christ, who came as the Infant King.

"The first giving of this [Christ] love to a newly born child is the reshaping of our whole life, in its large essentials and in its every detail, in our environment, our habits, ourselves. The infant demands everything and, trivial though everything may seem when set out and tabulated, the demand is all the more searching because it seizes upon our daily lives and every detail of which they are built up.

"The sound of our voice must be modulated -- the words that we use considered, our movements restrained, slowed down, and trained to be both decisive and gentle.

"Our rooms must be rearranged; everything that is superfluous and of no use to the infant must be thrown out; only what is simple and necessary to him must remain, and what remains must be placed in the best position, not for us, but for him...

"There must be a new timing of our lives, a more holy ordering of our time, which is no longer to be ruled by our impulses and caprice, but by the rhythm of the little child.

"We must learn to sleep lightly, aware of the moonlight and the stars, conscious even in our deepest sleep of a whimper from the infant and ready to respond to it. We must learn the saving habit of rising with, or a little before, dawn. The rhythm of our bodies must be brought into harmony with his. They must become part of the ordered procession of his day and night, his waking and feeding and sleeping. Our lives, because of his and life his, must include periods of silence and rest. We must return with him and through him to the lost rhythm of the stars and the seed."

~Caryll Houselander, The Little Way of the Infant Jesus