Shape and Substance

is a knife-like ridge at the mountain’s crest, slicing
the atmosphere; clouds teeter at the precipice
before plunging—which way?—down
slopes past boulders bleeding out
into deep brown gullies on
the desert floor: either
before or afterward
east- or westward
hope-ward or
to despair.

is creation’s monument to its own excellence.
At its apogee earth sublimates into sky.
In this rarefied realm there are
only ends, not middles,
truth and falsehood
right and wrong
good and evil
yes and
no.

But stand beneath the ridge and watch
the cost of absolutes chip away at
the arete’s fragile, faultless edge.
Sharp perfection refuses any
hint of negotiation with
rain and storm. So
the rock, friable,
fractures,
falls,

rolls
downslope
to come to rest in
wadis where torrents
buck and boil and bear,
grain by grain, excellence’s
final testament away, toil and
tumble until virtue, purity are at last
washed away, and rock and water come
to terms of compromise in the maybe of mud.

Note: The word “arête,” is derived through old French from the Latin arista,”ear,” and which, in the Middle Ages, described the jagged backbone of a fish. The same letters arranged in the same order denote the Greek philosophical notion of nobility, moral virtue, and excellence.

Ps. 19:1-4

The night’s as silent as the shrouded dead.
We mime our parts in plays we did not write.
Stars applaud the empty stage instead.
The curtain falls. We bid you all goodnight.

We mime our parts in plays we did not write.
The cast bows low and utters not a sound
as the curtain falls. We bid you all goodnight;
ushers, pass the offering plates around.

The cast bows low. Is uttered not a sound
in praise or parody of our feeble play,
while ushers pass the offering plates. Around
you are the words; no one will say

if praise or parody. Our feeble interplay
is all the rage in fashionable conversation.
But you are the words. How can one say
what’s written on the day before creation?

And so we rage in fashionable conversation.
But still no match for chaos, storm, and spark.
What’s written? On the day before creation
we meet no gods awaiting in the dark.

We’re no match for the chaos, storm, or spark
the stars applaud. On the empty stage, instead,
we meet no gods. But, waiting in the dark,
the nights are silent as the shrouded dead.

Note: I’ve been exploring apophatic theology lately: building a theology not from what we can say about God, but from what we cannot; not from what we supposedly know, but from that which is veiled in mystery and darkness; not from what is revealed, but from what hides from revelation. It seems to me the pantoum is a nearly perfect form for such explorations. Its repeated lines circle back on themselves, exposing unexpected nuances in their stair-step repetition. Its rigid structure requires the poet to stay within strict limits and not run loose in flights of metaphorical fancy. The result is a series of stanzas fairly bursting with possibilities for meaning, while never quite tipping their hand.

Matt 6:19-21

Dust and ashes, dust and ashes
gleaned from hearth and window sashes,
cross their pathways on my brow.
I am dust and ashes now.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Remind me of it if you must:
that I will lose this mortal frame,
lose my grip on place and name.

You are dust, to dust return.
The dead are so taciturn.
Whence we come is where we go:
at last that’s all we have to show.

Shake off the dust, wipe off the ash;
take out your pride with last night’s trash.
The dawning day will start anew
the circle of the false and true.

Dust and ashes, ash and dust;
all that’s left is moth and rust
and what the thieves have left behind.
We have to lose before we find.

Moving her to nursing care has proved
more complicated than anticipated,
though anticipated it surely was,
and complicated. There is no room
for furniture, or for the bed she slept in
at his side until the end, and after,
alone but for the ghost of him—a wisp
of memory in a haze of ache: victims
of the tyranny of shrinking space.
Save the pictures, she begs, and so

into boxes go the portraits group shots
smiling cousins, cheap images of Paris
and canals in Venice she has never seen,
lives lived and lost long before hers came
and went. And the Boatman: that most of all.

She means the print of “Boatman and Child,”
by Robert Reid, a sentimental scene
that hung above her mother’s hearth, and hers,
and now in this last apartment above her bed.
A storm at sea, an ancient boatman, one hand
on the tiller while the other hauls the sheet
against the wind. Huddled in his lap
a little girl, nestled in the shelter of his slicker,
safe from harm. When I was small, she says,
I thought he was my grandfather, and smiles.

Stuffed into a mirror box, sealed for storage.
But the space is small, and something cracks.
Frames and paintings are frail, human things,
they tend to break when under too much strain.
Even ancient boatmen and little girls.

Leave the tape secure, the box unopened,
the painting whole and sound at least in memory,
until this farce of normalcy wears thin,
until at last we can no more pretend
that shore and shelter are but over there,
and huddling tight we make it safely home.
Truth becomes the last indignity.
Close the storage door and wind the lock,
replace the flatbed cart beside the stairs,
turn off the light, and breathe, and walk away.

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem….”
Luke 2:15

What proximate apocalypse arrives tomorrow?
Lost key lost love cancer butterfly extinction
blood on the floor of schoolyards sanctuaries—
must we endure yet more of heaven’s plan?
Do you dare to raise your eyes, peek between
the stars to see the angels turn for home
after they have rearranged your dreams?
After the dream comes the dark.

“Be not afraid”: why do the blessèd say this
when the only reasonable response is fear
or maybe flight if you can make your feet work?
Are you not supposed to fear the beast?
When you meet a bear—or host of angels—
and your back’s against the wall, will you stand
your ground before the feral claws of glory?
After the glory comes the dark.

Do you yearn to leave the sheep and wander
into town to search for manger mother
child aglow with heaven’s subtle light;
leave the eastern palaces to track a star,
offer homage at the hard world’s fraying edge;
leave the boats and nets and trail a migrant
preacher pinned like a butterfly to a cross?
After the cross comes the dark.

And who knows what might happen in the dark?

* “Adventus” is a Latin word meaning, “arrival” or “coming.” It is the word from which English draws the term, “Advent.” Christians use the latter term to describe their expectant hope for the arrival of God’s kingdom’s arrival raises more questions than it answers.

This poem was originally published at ecclesio.com on 12 December 2017. PKH

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD,
and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. –Genesis 4:16

What innate imperative of manhood
drives us to the shedding of this blood?

Grand porch’s balustrade for seats,
backs against the pillars, planted feet,
pellet rifles rest on knees and aim at creatures
who otherwise would have no cause to see us
as executioners. His the better mark–
natural inclination honed by work,
practicing with weapons that seem to suit him
like old clothes. Teacher, teach us how to shoot.
Relax your grip; breathe in a bit and hold;
slow and steady trigger pressure; don’t
jerk; don’t squint; keep both eyes on the target. This
is not a lesson learned. A try. A miss.

Startled by a shot.
Got to get at least one, he said. And one is got.
A writhing length of fur and tail
in the grass beneath the oak. He vaults down from the rail
and saunters over. By now the squirrel has found
its feet, its forepaws clawing at the ground,
pawing to return to branch and shelter,
but its hind legs won’t move; the pellet
has struck mid-spine.
Half a squirrel is bound to earth; half desperate to climb.

Finish him. But even at short range
the pellets won’t find home. How strange
to follow in slow motion as it drags its body, small and grey,
a bloodstained furrow on the ground to mark the way.
Come on, can’t leave it; do it;
we have to see this through; it’s
not humane, this suffering. One shot, muzzle pressed
behind the head, more blood, and it is finished.

See from the upstairs window how she surveys the scene.
What have you done? She knows. He is being
torn from her again. Blood is the evidence.
The land is choking on the blood of innocence.

He pokes the carcass to the gutter with his toe,
nudges it down the storm drain. He bends low
over the hard steel grate, lingers there
like a Muslim bending to his daily prayer,
like a gardener nestling a seed to its rest beneath the sod.
Like a wanderer staggering beneath the weight of God.

And faintly, oh, so faintly comes
the sound of retching.

Listen to the world as it weeps beneath your feet.
Darkness falls in silence in the street.

1 Kings 19 

Wind howls in the pines, and rain
drives birds and squirrels to their nests
and copperheads to unseen dens.
A limb falls, crackling through its kin
like distant gunshots. Make a note.
Cut and dried, it soon enough
could sit beside the hearth to wait
its turn to burn. That’s how it is
on my imaginary mountain.

Nothing’s wasted here. Not limbs
or lines. Or love. Things in short
supply must be hauled up from
the bottom land. The road’s a bog
on days like this and slick as glass.
Use what’s at hand; it is enough.
Better not to be spendthrift
with things like faith. That’s how it is
on my imaginary mountain.

One would think this place is close
to God, more visionary than
the push and shove of word and hymn
that claim to know the way. But no.
Just wind and rain and limbs that fall
exploding through the trees. Enough
perhaps, but barely. Live for what
the storm will bring. That’s how it is
on my imaginary mountain.

We feebly struggle; they in glory shine.
“For All the Saints” – William Walsham How

…Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
“Ozymandias” – Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is too glib to promise glory;
saints are not made to shine.
Were they exempt, immune
to primal urges, nagging fears
that hound us on the road to pain?

Overcame, then; resisting all temptation,
running the race, staying the course,
keeping the faith, holding onto hope…?
Insipid metaphors, one and all,
false as fool’s gold glittering in streams.
These days, even gold reverts to dross
in the alchemy of the evening news.

Confessed, received forgiveness, started new
with slate wiped clean of stain and story?
No one leaves the past behind; it lives
and peers through every windowpane,
and knocks each night at the door of dreams.

Who sees a wildflower in a field of weeds
and rejoices just because it grows there,
who hears a laughing child
and is glad of happiness, even though in sorrow,
who witnesses beauty
and does not yearn to grasp it with soiled hands,
who speaks a quiet truth
and has no need of congratulation–
these are the saints.
The ones who leave no trace.

On 18 April 1521, Martin Luther stood before The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to defend himself against charges of heresy. As he rose to his conclusion, he supposedly uttered the famous words, Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott hilf mir (Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. So help me God). In fact, he didn’t actually say that, but instead offered a prosaic disclaimer about not being convinced from Scripture of the need to recant his views. But since when have the facts kept us from rewriting history to suit our taste for the dramatic? So it is with a sense of irony that I, five hundred years later, rise to this occasion to say what Luther never said: Hier stehe ich. Here I stand.

It’s actually the next phrase Luther didn’t say that fascinates me: Ich kann nicht anders – “I cannot do otherwise.” The way we tend to read them, these words are a defiant declaration, a martyr’s confession, the lone rebel spitting in the imperial and papal eye. And that is certainly one way to translate them. But the words will permit another rendering, and since Luther didn’t actually say them, I feel a certain freedom to retranslate them. Ich kann nicht anders can also mean “I have no other choice,” as though one’s back was against the theological and existential wall, and all the options have fled.

The subtitle for this series is “What I Believe, and Why.” That works pretty well if what you mean by “believe” is something like “agree with” or perhaps, “think.” There’s a certain intellectual elbowroom in that. One can state a proposition and defend it with argument, give a little ground as necessary to satisfy one’s interlocutors, and come away with the sense of having made one’s point. That’s the way, I suspect, most of us think about believing. But for me, believing is not an intellectual exercise, not even a faith claim. Rather, it’s an involuntary reflex, an internal upwelling always slightly out of control. When I say ich kann nicht anders, I mean, I have no choice.

About six months ago, I wrote a poem entitled “Mr. H’s Ordination.” Madison Andrews has been kind enough to publish it last month in Kairos. In my mind, the poem is a sort of internal ordination examination: broken-down old me, relic of the ecclesiastical wars of my lifetime, is examining 25 year-old me, a fresh-faced young graduate of Union Seminary in 1979, ready to take up the task of ministry. In truth, though, old me does all the talking (no surprise there, I guess). I suppose I’m trying to tell myself what I wish I had known all those years ago about what believing means, and what it will cost. The poem begins with the first question everyone ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) answers. It’s an important question, one that asks what you “believe”: Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Well, do you?

It’s not a choosing, or a being chosen,
not a choice but the end of choices.
It’s the wild mounting desperation
of holding your breath under water
until the will submits, is overcome
by the mindless lungs’ irrational demand.
Even if it drowns you like a rat.
Do you trust like that, Mr. H?

I think that’s as close as I can come to what I mean by “believing.” Believing isn’t thinking. Believing isn’t choosing a position. Believing, as the question suggests, is trust. But even trust itself is not a choice. It’s a reflexive irruption of self-investment in God or in someone I love, as mindless and unrestrained as that ineluctable desperation to breathe when you’ve tried too long to hold your breath under water and you just can’t hold it any more. You cannot not breathe. Even if it drowns you like a rat. I cannot not trust, even if it means harnessing my life to a God far beyond my control.

I think that’s why I love Mark’s story of the woman with the hemorrhage who touches the hem of Jesus’ garment as he passes in the crowd. She is a metaphor for what it means to believe. She doesn’t know Jesus and she doesn’t have access to effective medical treatment for her condition. She can’t prove that touching Jesus will work. But she does it anyway, because she has no choice, because there is no other course of action left, because something in her persuades her that this hail-Mary of a cure will work when every other cure has come a-cropper. She sneaks up behind him and brushes the hem of his garment, and mirabile dictu she is cured, and Jesus turns and says to her, “Your faith”—your believing—has made you well – has saved you” (it’s the same word in Greek). How did that work, exactly? What theological commitments does one make in order to move from hemorrhage to hem to healing? I don’t know, and I suspect she didn’t know either. She trusted, even when there was no reason to do so, because there was nothing left to do. Ich kann nicht anders. I have no other choice.

This notion that believing is an involuntary thing, a movement beyond my control, has taken root in my poems. Poetry is a curious thing: I find I can get closer to the marrow of things in verse than in prose. A lot of my poems are efforts to come to terms with the question: what does it mean to believe—to trust—at its most basic, most elemental levels? We embed our faith in churchly vocabulary—words like “love” or “justice” or “grace.” But what if that vocabulary is stripped away, and we rely instead on naked experience or even silence? What I’ve discovered about myself is that I am impatient many of our churchly words for and about God, words we use to commoditize faith and justify our politics. But if you don’t use that language, what’s left to say?

I think that’s what I’m struggling with in the third stanza of “Mr. H’s Ordination.” It begins with the central doctrine of our experience of God—the Trinity—but pretty quickly moves from the sublime to the subterranean. Who is “the only Trinity we trust?”

Three in one and one in three: an axiom
of theology. But the only Trinity
we trust is world and death and fire
(as often smothered as smoldering).
In the pitch-black cave-dark, we intuit
light. Reach out and touch the triune rock:
creation’s basement, our prison, and reprieve.
Is that what you believe, Mr. H?

“World and death and fire” are, I suppose, another way of talking about our experience of the triune God: God who creates the world, Christ whose death delivers us, the Spirit whose fire ignites the witness of the Church. But while I don’t deny those connections, I want to get beneath them, too. It’s the woman with the hemorrhage again. It’s not her theology that saves her; it’s her down-in-the-gut trust. Sometimes the only Trinity I trust is not the God of rarefied glory, but the one visible in the grit and grime of this world, the one whose grisly death is my own death writ large, the one whose fire burns beneath the boiling pot of my anger no less than it shines in the sunrises of my inspiration. Most of the time, that’s the God I know, not the beatified trio on a Russian icon. That’s the God I trust. Ich kann nicht anders.

Once, a thousand years ago, I went on a Boy Scout trip to Cumberland Caverns. The group of us made our way through the main entrance and down into the earth, descending along the well-lit path until we reached a large open chamber about a quarter-mile in. We were told to sit down and turn off our flashlights. I happened to be situated on the edge of the group near the chamber’s rock wall. Without warning, the leaders turned out the lights. We froze—except for those of us who screamed. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I froze, because I couldn’t see anyone else. I couldn’t see anything at all. As far as my eyes could tell, I was alone in the infinite darkness. All the light was gone, and there was only the fast-fading memory of light, the flickering, fleeing hope of light. The darkness was palpable, as though I were submerged in a vat of black paint. It was a living thing, monstrous, absolute, uncompromising. I put my hand to my face and felt a bolt of terror when my fingers touched my nose, because the blackness was so complete that I could not imagine my own hand. I felt I was falling through endless, empty space. I began to feel that I was losing my balance, with no reference points to steady me. Instinctively I reached out, and there beneath my hand was the cool, wet rock. The rock steadied me, calmed and oriented me. I knew again where I was. I was saved. In that moment, I learned to believe. In the dark, light is only an intuition. In the cave, with all the lights off and the darkness darker than any dark has ever been, I put my hand on the rock. In the sub-basement of creation, with no visible way to freedom, the rock was the only God that mattered. This, I think, is what I believe, stripped down to the most basic level. I don’t believe anything. I trust the rock in the darkness. Ich kann nicht anders.

But there is more to say. These days, when I think about trusting God, I also find myself thinking about Qohelet, the brutally wise sage and realist behind the words of Ecclesiastes. Everyone knows the famous poem about times and seasons. But immediately after that poem comes a paragraph about the futility of human efforts. “What gain has the worker from all his toil?” Qohelet begins—and then he drops this little bomb:

“[God] has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

The Hebrew word translated by the clunky phrase “a sense of past and future” is ‘olam, and its meaning is open to interpretation. It means something like “eternity”; the Septuagint translated it with kosmos, the world, the universe. We can argue about this later if you want, but for now, I like the sense that God has given us the capacity to imagine the vastness of time and the emptiness of space, yet has limited us in such a way that we cannot clamber over the barriers of our own brains and bodies to experience it. “They cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end.” Now there’s a sentence for the ages. Qohelet knows that our language—and for that matter, our capacity for reason and thought—will always fail us in the end, that they will never carry us as far as our imagination can envision going. There is always a darkness at the edge of the light, and in that darkness the only faithful response is to put your hand on the rock.

Qohelet, isn’t done, though; he goes on:
“I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves for as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him”.

If we trust, the sage seems to suggest, the trust can be a starting place, a foundation, a baseline contentment with not-knowing. Even if we don’t know what we’re trusting, even if trust means no more than touching the triune rock in the darkness, it will be enough. Just eat your bread and drink your wine and do your work; just be. That will be enough. What was the word Julian of Norwich heard as she agonized over sin and death? “But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Not right, mind you, or just, or happy, but well. All manner of things shall be well. It is enough.

I was trying to say something like this when I wrote “I Seek the Shining Darkness.” Here’s a part of the poem:

I seek the shining darkness,
the basement path beneath believing,
the way that knows but is not known….

I seek the dawn of the second day
not the day of witnessed passion
nor when they found the body gone,

but the last pregnant day of possible,
uterus of a new creation,
with cervix of eternal stone.

Deep inside the shining darkness
believing dies and trust, unborn,
unknown and knowing, waits alone.

As you might have guessed, the image of the second day, Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter is an evocative image for me. The second day is the Sabbath, a day of inactivity and rest, the day after everything we have believed in dies, and the day before the birth of a new creation we do not even know is possible to imagine. It is a day of suspended animation, a day spent in the tomb, in the darkness. Ah, but it is a “shining darkness,” a darkness brimful with possibility, even if ill-defined and unknown. And waiting for us within that shining darkness is trust. When everything else is stripped away, trust is there.

One last passage, and a poem. Tucked in the back of the psalter, amid all the loud lamentations and chorused hallelujahs, is the gentle little lullaby of Psalm 131. Born of humility and perhaps contrition, the psalmist seems to underscore Qohelet’s trust and contentment. As a piece of English poetry, the translation is an unpretentious masterpiece, perfectly balanced alternating pentameter and quatrameter lines. It has become a sort of resting place for me:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with his mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and for evermore.

Last June, I was paging through the collected poems of e.e.cummings, and I stumbled across “I thank you God for most this amazing day,” the poem that contains his delightful phrase, “the leaping greenly spirits of trees.” It was the morning after a storm, and I had been thinking about cummings and about Psalm 131, and the grass in my yard was the shade of green that you only see in the morning sunlight after a rain, and I began to write. The poem is “Green”:

Green is the truest color.
It does not lift its eyes too high.
It does not hate like red, nor rage
with orange
nor put on purple’s kingly pretense,
nor, like cerulean, make promises
it cannot keep.

It has a pulse
like a spring swelling, spilling
over moss-covered stones,
or a tree
planted alongside waters,
grown wise in wisdom’s way;
it does not boast

but knows
green is not the last word;
there will be urgent warnings,
red and orange,
before the nights of ice and brown,
when gray winds growl it bare of truths.
They roil away.

And, too, it knows
a calm slow turning toward morning
on the leeward side of fury,
—not yet but when?—
deep inside the heartwood darkness
there births another green, still furled,
waiting to be true.

I think that’s where believing begins: deep inside the heartwood darkness, waiting for a new green to be true. The wait may be long or short, but green will come in its own time. Our task is to trust. Wir können nicht anders.