Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs,
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
The beloved is born.

April was National Poetry Month, which might or might not be a silly thing, but it has prodded me into thinking about poetry and my erratic relationship with it. When I received my two degrees in English, I was emphatically a fiction person. Poetry made me anxious because I could never figure out how to read it or what it was supposed to mean. My poetry textbooks from college and grad school are studded with frantic and useless annotations: cross-references to other poems by the same author, details about textual corruptions or variations, or underlinings directed by the professor that have no meaning for me now. Only rarely did I mark something just because I liked it, and then I worried about having made such a bold declaration. What if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant? What if someone discovered that I just didn’t get it?

I still have no idea what many poems mean, but I more often read poetry than fiction now. I use poetry when I teach and pray. I even read it just for fun. I sometimes write the kind of poetry that gave me brain freeze twenty-five years ago. How did this sea change come about? It began, I think, when I went to seminary and was forced to confront the Bible, a book I had never read and suspected that I wouldn’t like and feared would make me stupid. (I still wonder who was on the admissions committee that admitted me: Groucho Marx?) At first the familiar structure of the classroom allowed me to keep it at arm’s length. Memorize, analyze, parse, criticize. What do you do with a God who smites and punishes and condemns? Who needs his ego massaged with praise all the time? And yet I couldn’t help noticing that many of the psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Jesus who considered the lilies all addressed a force they considered entirely trustworthy, entirely beautiful, the genesis and end of all desire. I could not see what they saw when I read with a lens of suspicion. And, despite my distrust, I wanted to see what they saw.

I began reading aloud, in groups, slowly and repetitively. It was sometimes helpful to have literary and historical information to draw on, but I was more often hobbled when I came to passages like this from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”

It was beautiful. I knew that it was somehow true. I had no idea what it meant. Yet over and over, I found myself run through by the language of scripture, knowing I had been wounded but unable to bind or even find the wound. In the company of similarly riven souls, however, I started finding another way, not so much to read as to be read. Instead of seeking experience—that giddy adrenaline ride of a narrative—I found a place from which to see my own experience, my self in relation to a much greater whole. I was like a one-eyed creature that had been given another eye; reality began to acquire a previously unsuspected dimension.

The April issue of The Sun contains an interview with Philip Shepherd, a British writer and actor, whose career has led him explore the implications of the little known fact that human beings have two brains, one in the head and one in the gut. This is not a fanciful or metaphorical claim. Nuerogastroenterology, a new medical field, studies the web of neurons lining the gastrointestinal tract that send signals to the body independent of the cranial brain. Shepherd is not a medical professional but uses the research in the field to examine the cultural and philosophical implications of this “pelvic brain.” Says Shepherd:

Our culture doesn’t recognize that hub in the belly, and most of us don’t trust it enough to come to rest there. Our story insists that our thinking occurs exclusively in the head. And so we are stuck in the cranium, unable to open the door to the body and join its thinking. The best we can do is put our ear to the imaginary wall separating us from it and “listen to the body,” a phrase that means well but actually keeps us in the head, gathering information from the outside. The body is you. We are missing the experience of our own being.

The intelligence of the pelvic brain is not rational, conscious, analytical or abstract; rather, it arises in the way an enormous flock of starlings alters its course like a single organism. Well, you might say, I’m not a flock of starlings. But we all have an astonishing sensitivity—a sensational sensitivity—to our perpetually changing environments, astonishing in its almost invisible routineness and its capacity to integrate multiple levels of information. It’s an intelligence we often take for granted or don’t acknowledge as intelligence at all, but it allows you to negotiate your way through space, to remember passages of music, to understand arithmetical relationships, to love or know joy. Our task is not to privilege one brain over the other but to learn to coordinate them, according to Shepherd. He uses a lovely analogy to illustrate what this coordination looks like: the astronauts who took the first photos of the earth from outer space brought them back to earth, giving us a new perspective on our planet’s fragility. We responded with environmental initiatives. We were sensitized.

Culturally speaking, though, Shepherd says that those of us who inhabit the “first world” are like astronauts who are stuck in orbit around the head, unable to descend back home to the belly, where the gathered information can be integrated and sensitize us to the great complex flow of the world we inhabit:

Our culture has a tacit assumption that if we can just gather enough information on ourselves and the world, it will add up to a whole. But when you stand back and look at something, there is always something hidden from you. The integration of multiple perspectives into a whole can happen only when, like the astronaut bringing the photo back to earth, we bring this information back to the pelvic bowl, back to the ground of our being, back to the integrating genius of the female consciousness. The pelvic bowl is the original beggar’s bowl: it receives the gifts of the world—the male perspective—and integrates them. As you bring ideas down to the belly and let them settle there, they sensitize you to who you are and give birth to insight. Our task is to learn to trust that process.

The belly brain as begging bowl, receiving the gifts of the world. In some Buddhist traditions, monks are mendicants who own nothing but their robes and their begging bowls, in which they receive offerings of food or other gifts from the lay community. These gifts are not considered alms but rather are part of an exchange in which the community supports the monks physically and the monks support the community spiritually. So quite literally, every human being carries a begging bowl to the world, an intelligence that establishes itself in emptiness, in poverty, in suffering, in sensitivity, in loss. Without that bowl, we have no place for the works arising from the cranial brain to incubate and mature before they enter the world. Without cross-pollination from the pelvic brain, the fruits of the cranial brain are stunted and distorted, rooted in the illusion that we are separate from the natural world and thereby at odds with it. Aligning the two intelligences gives us the opportunity to see holistically, with the depth of binary vision.

Given my initial take on the Bible, it seems poetically just that it should lead me to a less literal, more personally demanding way of reading, one that required some self knowledge before I could make any sense of it. Like scripture, good poetry is a gift in the begging bowl, pressing the reader to claim hunger and absence before the equally great gifts of abundance and presence come to view. In his wrenchingly beautiful volume of poetry, Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (from which the poems at the beginning and end of this post are taken), Gregory Orr looks at the world with at least two eyes, that trinitarian third eye of the heart figuring somewhere in this body of stern and tender wisdom. I don’t mind that I don’t understand it all; reading it, I find that I have been seen, known, understood.

I guess I’m fine with National Poetry Month.

The beloved has gone away.
Always, this is the case.
Each moment turns on its hinge
And loss is there, loss
Announcing itself as absence.

But that’s because we’re looking
Backward, looking in the wrong
Direction: so desperately clinging
To a last glimpse of the beloved,
As if loss itself is what we loved.

And all the time the beloved
Is coming toward us, is arriving
Out of the future, eager to greet us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, Poetry as Survival
Martin: Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

Jesus said to them… “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13:24–25)

These were among the words that greeted the Christian New Year a couple of Sundays ago, the beginning of the Advent season. Well, dang, commented some of us who meet after the 9 a.m. service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church to discuss the readings. We might as well fold up our tents and go home if this is what the season’s bringing.

By the end of the discussion, we surprised ourselves by agreeing that there’s something oddly reassuring about the passage in which these verses are embedded, despite the Episcopalian squeamishness often evoked by the apocalyptic Jesus. All this talk about judgment and suffering is fine coming from John the Baptist—what can you expect from someone who eats locusts? When Jesus talks about judgment and end times, however, I get linear, literal, and cross. The world didn’t end. Jesus was wrong. Untrustworthy. Oh, forget it. I’ll just sit here alone in the dark.

But eventually I have to note the quotation marks around the darkness-coming passage, which means that Jesus is not just throwing wild predictions around. He’s quoting scripture, from the times when other prophets saw God’s people careening off toward the wilderness without so much as a water bottle. The world did not come to an end after Isaiah used this imagery eight centuries before Jesus used it, something Jesus probably noticed. Nor did it come to an end after Ezekiel or Joel used it in the interim centuries. It was (and is) poetic language used to jolt people out of their open-eyed, daylight sleepwalking. Wake up! There is darkness around and within us, but it’s not what we think it is. There is light as well, and it too is often not what we think it is.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent border city, angels have taken to landing at crime scenes, at busy intersections, even on the International Bridge. They stand about ten feet tall, with wide feathered wings, and carry signs that say things like “Murderers, Believe and Repent.” The fact that these angels are actually teenaged members of Salmo 100 (Psalm 100), a tiny evangelical church, doesn’t make them any less impressive: in fact, I think it makes them even more so. Frustrated with the lethal violence that flays their city and with the flabby ineffectiveness of public policy, these young people persuaded the city to donate old office curtains that they turned into robes, raised money for make-up and feathers, and began their work of shocking people awake—particularly those who continue to perpetrate and permit the demonic activities that so plague the city. Their performances are beautiful and dangerous: they stand without speaking, without means of defense, in places where they are very likely to encounter the demonic forces unraveling their world.

They have seen the sun and the moon cease to give light, seen the stars fall from the sky. They have seen the signs that their world is charged with darkness, but they have chosen an energy source beyond the darkness.

Most of us have seen the skies go dark on at one time or another; most of us have had times when it seemed that the world is going to end. What our little discussion group decided that Jesus was saying was that that there are times when the skies go dark and the world seems torn from its course. These times are unavoidable. But don’t think that darkness defines the whole nature of reality, or you’ll pull from a limited energy source, see from a restricted field of vision. Sometimes it takes darkness to remind you that there is light, and that you want to see it.

It’s easy to think about the darkness simplistically. I do it myself, noting the physical and spiritual relief that the pre-solstice days bring from the scorching Texas sun. I’ve noted that most things, including us, need darkness in which to grow. But I also hearken to Wendell Berry’s pithy distillation of the full power of the dark:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and wings.

Most of us—used to light, to a particular, merely visual way of seeing—have definitions of darkness that are inadequate to its full reality. Although there is blooming in the darkness, there are also things fully worthy of terror. Because we can’t see in the darkness the way we’re used to seeing in the light, we often have trouble discerning what blooms from what bites. And sometimes it’s the same thing.

In his book The Blessing: A Memoir, the poet Gregory Orr recounts the stunning journey of his life into the darkness, beginning when, at the age of twelve, he killed his brother in a hunting accident. His brilliant, erratic, meth-addicted physician father and his depressed mother, who died in surgery a couple of years later, were not able to help lead him through the dark, in which he lived persistently until an incident after he returned to the upstate New York village he called home after a shocking experience with Mississippi state police in a civil rights protest in 1965. When he got back, he found that many of the people he’d known all his life wouldn’t speak to him because of his civil rights work. The darkness he’d lived in deepened; he wore the mark of Cain.

At the end of the summer, before he left to go back to college, one of his high school English teachers invited him on a drive. She took him to the property of a sculptor who had died earlier that year. Ignoring the “No Trespassing” sign on a barbed wire fence, they climbed into a field filled with metal figures, suggestive of but not restricted by human form. He and his teacher wandered for an hour through the field. Thought Orr:

… these were soldiers of art. They brought no mayhem—only a longing to rise up and stand inside meaning as a man might stand in armor. There would be no violent struggles here. This was a field of blessing. A field where the mortal and fallen rose up, transformed…. Here in this field, arrayed in long lines, was an army of art. This army was engaged in a war against the nothingness and indifference of the universe. It wasn’t the kind of war history fought, where timing was everything and the clocks ran on blood. This was a war outside of time. It was a war where you didn’t fight, or march, or do violence to anyone…. Somewhere in this field was a rendering of each agony and exultation [the sculptor] had ever felt. And I could feel them, too. I knew that somewhere in this field Cain stood; somewhere else, his slain brother.

Our discussion group came to an equivalent conclusion about the disturbing, apocalyptic words of Jesus. (At least, I think we did.) He was offering his soon-to-be-tested disciples consolation: do not think that the coming darkness is all there is. His advice to them: stay awake. Stay awake to the angels that land in front of you, insisting that there is a way toward meaning. Stay awake to the power behind love, beauty, forgiveness, and mercy that moves in the dark and beyond it. Do not let the darkness consign you to indifference or despair. Stay awake.

What we’re reading
Heather: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff