Spirituality and Poetry
Reverend William Metzger
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
November 13, 2005
OPENING WORDS
We begin by celebrating the company of each other. At the same time we celebrate our own being and seek to discover, yet again, who we are, for even as we seek to meet others, we come to know our selves better.
Come, come, whoever you are!
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
This is not a caravan of despair.
It doesn't matter if you've broken your vow
A thousand times, still,
And yet again, come!
- Rumi
Those words by Rumi call us to celebrate the gathering. Rumi also celebrated the idea of self-discovery, and wrote this poem expressing the fact that each of us is made up of many parts:
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
READING
Jelaluddin Rumi, the great Sufi mystic, was born in a remote town in what is now Afghanistan . He lived most of his life in Turkey, at the Western edge of the Silk Road , a place where Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and even Buddhist travelers mingled.
Coleman Barks, a poet and scholar at the University of Georgia , tells this story. At the age of 37, Rumi was an accomplished doctor of theology and led his own divinity school. And then he met Shams, a wandering dervish monk, who mingled with laborers and camel drivers. Shams had no school, but people spontaneously gathered around him. He was not looking for followers or fame.
As the story goes, Shams one day met Rumi, who was riding a donkey. He seized Rumi's bridle and asked: “Who is greater, Muhammad or Bestami?”
Muhammad had founded the tradition, but Bestami was a legendary Sufi master given to ecstatic merging with God. Rumi gave the approved answer: “Muhammad.”
Shams responded: “But Bestami said, ‘I am the Glory!' Muhammad said, ‘I cannot praise you enough!'”
As Rumi was about to reply, he realized that this was no seminary debate about the mysteries. In a dusty marketplace in south central Anatolia , he had come face to face with the Mystery.
Barks writes: “A doorway to eternity flickered open… And in one pure outrageous act of faith, Rumi dove through. In an instant of mystical annihilation, fire met fire, ocean ocean, and Rumi fell into pure being.” Basically, he fainted. And when he revived, lying on the ground, he said to Shams, “Bestami took one swallow of knowledge and thought that that was all, but for Muhammad the majesty was continually unfolding.” Later, he would say, ‘What I once thought of as God I met today as a human being.'”
After that Rumi and Shams began a series of months-long retreats into solitude.
Rumi wrote thousands of lines of ecstatic poetry, much of it about the intense mystical experience of meeting Shams. But Shams left Konya , and after a time Rumi sent his son to find Shams and bring him back.
Rumi's son found Shams, who was playing cards in a tavern with a young man, a wastrel who would later become Francis of Assisi. Francis was cheating, but when Rumi's entourage treated Shams like an emperor of the spirit, Francis confessed and attempted to give Shams back his money. “No,” said Shams, “take it to our friends in the West.”
Obviously inspired by this meeting, Francis went on to great things. Rumi, inspired by his meeting with Shams, went on to write thousands of lines of ecstatic poetry.
Barks is perhaps the leading translator of Rumi, and has two wonderful books for anyone who wants to discover this great mystical poet. One is a collection of Rumi's poems, including Barks's commentaries, published by HarperSanFrancisco under the title, The Soul of Rumi. The other is called The Illuminated Rumi, with translations and commentary by Barks and beautiful illuminations (or illustrations) by the artist Michael Green, published by Broadway Books.
Rumi wrote:
Love comes with a knife, not some shy question
And not with fears for its reputation.
I say these things disinterestedly.
Accept them in kind.
Love is a madman, working his wild schemes,
Tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains,
drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing
annihilation.
There are love stories,
and there is obliteration into love.
You've been walking
the ocean's edge, holding
up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under,
and deeper
under, a thousand times deeper!
Love flows down.
The ground submits
to the sky,
and suffers what comes.
Tell me, is the earth worse
for giving in like that?
Don't put blankets over the drum!
Open completely.
Let your spirit ear listen
to the green dome's
passionate murmur.
POETRY & SPIRITUALITY
According to the poet Gary Snyder, the function of poetry is to help people “be where they are.” A mysterious thing, poetry. Stanley Kunitz said a poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. There is, Kunitz says, “too much order in the world,” and, like the trickster Coyote, “poets love to haul disorder in.” As Susan Wooldridge declares in her book poemcrazy , “We all have a troublemaker inside ourselves…. Coyote wants us to be free, to run and howl and play and hope and roll and eat our fill, at least sometimes.”
If that thought makes you anxious—for we all tend to worry about the troublemaker inside—know that we can live a quiet and seemingly sedate life if we express our wildness in our writing, Wooldridge says. I have conducted classes on poetry and spirituality, in which we just reacted to them. Nobody seemed to have any trouble getting into the poetry and talking about how they experienced the poems and what “lessons” they drew from them.
I know many people experience some anxiety in approaching poetry, especially if the poetry seems obscure and confusing. I decided that the poetry I chose had to be, let us say, accessible. Not that poetry must always be “accessible.” There are poems I love, but nevertheless do not really understand, like Wallace Stevens's “The Idea of Order at Key West,” that begins with this gorgeous if puzzling line: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea./ The water never formed to mind or voice,/ like a body wholly body, fluttering/ Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion/ Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,/ That was not ours although we understood,/ Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.”
Nor did I wish the poems to be accessible in the manner of Joyce Kilmer's dreadful “Trees.” Rather, a poem like this one by Thomas Lux. We began our class with this.
POEM IN THANKS
Lord Whoever, thank you for this air
I'm about to in- and exhale, this hutch
in the woods, the wood for fire,
the light—both lamp and the natural stuff
of leaf-back, fern, and wing.
For the piano, the shovel
for ashes, the moth-gnawed
blankets, the stone-cold water
stone-cold: thank you.
Thank you, Lord, coming for
to carry me here—where I'll gnash
it out, Lord, where I'll calm
and work, Lord, thank you
for the goddamn birds singing!
- Thomas Lux
This poem of gratitude for life, just as it is, is very accessible. It is in fact a poem that Garrison Keillor read on the radio, on his five-minute daily show. It is collected in a book of poems Keillor had chosen for his “Writer's Almanac” program, published under the simple, evocative title, Good Poems.”
“The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio,” Keillor says. ”The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand. It's more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they're frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers offhandedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet.”
That seems wise indeed to me, and although I have quoted some from Rumi, my choices today are more in the spirit of Garrison Keillor, who had said when he began the project that he expected to choose quite a bit of Walt Whitman but discovered that Whitman made him seasick.
If Gary Snyder is correct, and I think he is, poetry doesn't so much seek to “educate” as to help us be where we are. We are, after all, alive in the world and poetry can help us to be more alive to the experience of the world. I think that if a poem has meaning for us, that meaning comes out of the fact that it speaks to who and where we are and helps us to be more deeply aware of what grounds us.
This seems also to be Garrison Keillor's theory; he has published a second book of Good Poems for HardTimes.
There are, of course, critics whose regard for Keillor is low. When Poetry magazine published two reviews of Keillor's first collection—one an amiable review, the other exceedingly acerbic—there was a storm of response from readers. A review of the second Keillor collection in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review concludes that “The best we can do—the best we have ever been able to—when faced with the words ‘Good Poems' in a book's title, is to turn the page hoping to say yes they are, or yes they were, or yes (believe it or not) they will be.”
Here is a poem by Rabindranath Tagore:
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
But to be fearless in meeting them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
But for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life's battlefield,
But to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
But hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward,
Feeling your mercy in my success alone.
But let me find the grasp
Of your hand in my failure.
The recent poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, founded a Favorite Poem Project during his tenure. He and Maggie Dietz, the director of the project, have put together a book called An Invitation to Poetry which includes a DVD featuring project participants reading their favorite poems from Shakespeare to Szymborska. It is a really interesting collection. Each person—and these are, many of them, ordinary folks, not “scholarly types”—reads a favorite poem and talks about why it is.
The Favorite Poem Project demonstrates how poems live in us, as people choose their favorite poem and read it aloud and tell how it speaks to them. For example, a 16-year-old student from California reads a poem by Langston Hughes:
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?
The student says “I walk around with a smile on my face at school and with friends, but I still have different thoughts running through my head. It's never stable, it's always going.” He explains that his parents are originally from Cambodia , but that he was born in Thailand because his parents had fled there to escape Pol Pot's genocide. Then they were able to come to America , where some family members had come before. “I feel guilty that, hey, I'm here free and I'm better off than a lot of people in Cambodia —a feeling I'm not free to let out. And that's what Langston Hughes was saying.”
Poetry of course need not always be weighty, not even about, say, such theologically weighty topics as how many angels can dance on the head of the pin. For my money, Billy Collins, another former poet laureate, answered that question definitively in his poem, “Questions About Angels” in which he declares the question is designed to make you “think in millions, billions,” but nevertheless concludes:
. . . perhaps the answer is simply one:
One female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Poetry demonstrates, I think, that there are all kinds of ways to plumb the depths of life experiences. This poem, by Wendy Cope, “The Orange,” is a wonderful demonstration of the everyday discovery of life's wonders, of relationship, of love:
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange. It made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It's new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time left over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.
CLOSING WORDS
We end as we began, with a poem from Rumi, which is a message about meeting, about the deep connection that can flow between people in relationship. It is called “The Most Alive Moment.”
The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each
other's eyes and in what flows
between them then. To see your face
in a crowd of others, or alone on a
frightening street, I weep for that.
Our tears improve the earth. The
time you scolded me, your gratitude,
your laughing, always your qualities
increase the soul. Seeing you is a
wine that does not muddle or numb.
We sit inside the cypress shadow
where amazement and clear thought
twine their slow growth into us.
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