Shape and Substance

Rapture

… 	Rapture joins the world
and irony divides, and unaware of either
the osprey desperately undresses every bone
and then unbuttons both the eyes.
—Jennifer Grotz, “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon”

I don’t believe in the Rapture, but if I did,
(What does it mean to “believe?”) I would require
a Raptor of sufficient size, with fire
behind its eyes and talons furled and hid

biding its time in some aerie high above
the stürm und drang of my petty part
(because such fortunes do not touch its heart
nor curry sympathies that smell like love)

until with pinions spread and hackles splayed
it falls upon me, merciless, with pure
intent to kill and eat and to all else inured,
until with bones denuded, flesh a-flayed

I am at last consumed, transmogrified,
and nothing left that I might call my own
and given to the raptor’s brood to feed
a future’s hunger yet unsatisfied
but fledging, soon to fly from home,
an accidental grace, a holy need.

—Paul Hooker, 2024 (unpublished)

            Whether or not poet Jennifer Grotz intended to inspire such imagery (I suspect not), her poem “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon” landed on my eyes at a moment when I was (and am) struggling with the remnants of my religious life. I am not and have never been a fundamentalist or evangelical Christian; my bent is toward the progressive side of theology. But even that has worn threadbare in recent years, a beloved garment donned too many times without regard to the ultimate intolerance of its seams or the wear patterns in the crotch. Her image of the osprey—a raptor par excellence—“desperately” tearing apart its piscine victim seemed perfectly situated to invite exploration of another view of the metaphysical. It is not, I would caution, intended as a final or conclusive statement, but rather an angle of vision, a clearing seen between the trees while passing above or through them.

            I live in a culture on the verge of drowning in evangelical foolishness, propped up (for the moment) on the waterwings of overinflated individualism. Its adherents think that at the appointed moment some divine avian will swoop down and catch them up, delivering them to heavenly bliss in a realm far above the quotidian struggles they are certain are hampering their joy. I think they have the imagery wrong. I imagine a rapture considerably less comfortable and comforting.

            Mark Jarman, in his poem “Soften the Blow, Imagined God, and Give,” writes: “Still I believe a part of me is bent/to make your grace look like an accident…” What, exactly, is an “accidental grace?” I find myself increasingly inclined to think that everything I might call a “grace” from a “God” who overarches my existence with some benign omniscience is in fact an accident born of the conjugal gathering of place and time and perspective. If I understand Jarman, he is trying to see deeper into the apparently random pattern of “punishment” and “pressure” (his words) in his life, which “might be meant/ to kill me in the end or help me live.”

I wonder if I am coming at it from the opposite direction. I have heard all my life the Pauline predestinarian refrain that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), a dictum that sees grace as anything but accidental. And yet I am increasingly suspicious that we assign far too much benevolent succor to the heart of the Holy. What if the Rapture (to the extent that such a metaphor can be trusted) is not nearly so much about deliverance as dissolution? What if the good toward which all things supposedly work is not a good for us or me or you but some larger aim under which all other more proximate goods are subsumed and in which they are finally consumed? What if the need served by some purported eschatological denouement is not any need of ours, but a need felt deep within the Holy itself? What, to be less prolix, if it is finally not about us at all?

            A word about the prosody of this poem. Those who know the structure of the sonnet will immediately recognize that this is a stanza too long to fit the standard Italian sonnet form, and that the rhyme scheme departs from the norm. The sonnet, for centuries a fixed form in either English (Shakespearean) or Italian (Petrarchan) modes, is lately coming in for some renovation. Rhyme schemes are being abandoned, rhythmic patterns overloaded. My reconstruction here is a bit more modest. I’m not so much redrawing the blueprint as expanding the house, converting the back porch into a third bedroom by adding a stanza to the octave so that it is no longer truly an octave but a 12-line statement of the theme before turning in the verso to a different way of reading the moment. I do this for the same reason anyone adds on the back of a house: to create new rooms where thoughts only yet aborning might have a place to play.