In her poem, “Six Recognitions of the Lord,” Mary Oliver writes,

I know a lot of fancy words.

I tear them from my heart and my tongue.

Then I pray…

May God deliver us from the scourge of fancy words. My friend, Father Jonathan Mitchican, recently wrote an article on why he’s eliminating fancy words from his online presence. It’s a quest for a theology that prays before it punches. In it, he lays out a vision for a simple apologetics that’s prayerful instead of combative. I have to admit, in the past I’ve had zero interest in apologetics precisely because I’ve found it to be immensely combative and I cannot think of anything more boring than arguing with people. So now, whenever I’m asked why I’m Catholic, I simply shrug my shoulders and, echoing Cardinal Newman, make a cryptic comment that one does not explain such profundities between soup and the main course. At the most, you’ll get me to make a sphynx-like statement with a faraway look in my eyes – Have you ever fallen in love? You either do or you don’t. By the way, here’s a super-gorgeous, tragic poem. Read it.

In my opinion, an irenic approach to apologetics, one that proceeds by way of contemplative prayer and love, bears the most fruit. I, like anyone else, listen far more closely to people I already trust, people for whom I have developed that undervalued form of love for that is called Friendship. A project like Father Mitchican’s is most welcome. It’s rooted in contemplation, and thus in friendship, love, and trust.

To understand why such an approach will be extremely successful, well now, that’s in my wheelhouse, because it’s a matter of aesthetics. It also happens to be the same explanation for why beauty and Catholic culture truly matter, and why these, too, are far more effective at apologetics than dialectical argumentation or the advancement of logical propositions. I’m told by smarter people than me that these propositions are important, and I believe them, truly I do, but at the same time, even the greatest of them all, St. Thomas Aquinas, placed his arguments before the Lord in prayer. Even he wrote poetry and gloried in the beauty of the Church. Even he famously discarded the lectures for a mystical vision of love, muttering that everything else is straw before the beauty it had been given him to behold. It’s all of a piece, interconnected and woven in mysterious ways. Beauty is truth. Poetry is theology. Contemplation is apologetics.

Those of us with a Catholic worldview seek to encounter a divine person, not an idea. I still remember being introduced to that concept for the first time in the work of Pope Benedict XVI. It changed everything. A person is meant to be loved. Further, in loving that person, we see him more truly because the eye of the lover sees most clearly. If we would explain a magnificent, life-changing truth to another, we must help others to love the one whom we love, to see why he is so lovable. It’s a perfect description of why I became Catholic. I fell in love with the Church and with Christ. After that, there wasn’t an argument or counter-apologetic in the universe that would stop me. It’s like running home to your mother.

Here’s the problem, though. It’s really, really difficult to get people to pay attention to beauty. Scoring points in arguments is way more fun. Creating outrage is more appealing in terms of getting page clicks. Blowing tribal dog-whistles rallies the troops much faster. It’s easier to formulate an idea and viciously defend it than it is to grapple with a real, flesh and blood person, the living Christ.

Fr. Mitchican writes about his previous online presence at the highly successful Conciliar Anglican:

I discovered that when I would write a blog post that simply reflected on the joy of following Jesus or the fruit of prayer, it did not gain much attention. But when I posted something brash, something that made claims to certainty while also rhetorically punching someone else in the face, the number of views increased exponentially. And so, slowly, this became the kind of post I would write all the time.

Isn’t that the way? It’s so satisfying to write an opinion that trends. It’s empowering to have people nodding their heads to something I write. I see this same effect in homiletics. There’s great temptation to preach on controversial topics week after week because those are the talks that generate reactions. They create the compliments after Mass. They make me feel brave. They get tons of page views and shares. Sometimes these homilies are good and necessary, but they don’t work as intended if not delivered to an audience that already knows and trusts me, if they don’t fit into a larger, ongoing relationship and conversation. In any case, the real work, the real soul-searching life-giving work of a homily is not accomplished with endless digressions into controversial topics and opinions about current events. A homily is a poem meant to mediate an ancient and mysterious beauty. Those are way harder to write. To me, sitting in my office blankly staring at an open Bible, it feel like blood from a stone. But, of course, even the rocks will sing…

It would be so satisfying to dive into the world of Catholic celebrity priests and share my opinion about every controversial and supposedly relevant topic. I could become an opinion machine – trust me, I have a lot of them – ready to bring perspective and hard-hitting, no-compromise commentary week after week. Or, I could take a step back and ask myself why, exactly, I like to write at all.

Here’s why I write. I’m a man in love.

I love the Church. I love the mysterious, vulnerable heartbeat at the center of that Church. I love beauty. I love how reading a poem is like running my hand across a hieroglyph. A man in love cannot cease speaking about the object of his love. This is why I write. This love is at the heart, I imagine, of why you all write. It’s at the heart of apologetics, and art, and culture, and this whole wild wilderness we call the universe. If your writing doesn’t start spring from deep and abiding love, tear those words from your heart and your tongue.

I lounge on the grass, that’s all. So

simple…

Isn’t it astoundingly, almost heart-breakingly evident that Mary Oliver is a woman in love?

Then I go back to town

to my own house, my own life, which has

now become brighter and simpler, some-where I have never been before…

Through the torpid haze of Saturday afternoon a voice came to shake me from my doze on the couch.

To make a bow, say, ‘BOW!’

The voice belonged to Blaze, I believe, of the Nick Jr. program Blaze and the Monster Machines, which my daughter happened to be watching this particular Saturday afternoon. In my mind’s eye I see the Philosophical Fathers of America shaking their hoary brow that I should doze as such pixelated inanity shone upon my family. So be it.

I did not open my eyes, but I listened somewhat more attentively as Blaze, from what I blearily gathered, called on the children of America to lend him their voices as he transformed himself into a crossbow on the strength of words alone (perhaps Blaze enjoys Yeats of a post-production evening).

At any rate, the most cursory, dozing survey of children’s television reveals the same pattern. When a problem arises, our protagonist need often do no more than say the right word and watch the problem vanish. We see it in Paw Patrol, wherein the canine first responders call out for the requisite tool, which emerges from the airplane or bull dozer or fire truck and patches the hull or whisks the baby dinosaur from disaster. We see it in Dora the Explorer, with whom we cry out “Map!” and watch as Map obligingly appears. Who of the author’s age does not recall Matthew Broderick calling “Go go Gadget oil slick!”?

In this linguistic power lies something of the feeling of deus ex machina, and this because the mode of action is that typically reserved, in the Bible at least, for God. The labor of Genesis is a labor of speech. Much of the power of Christ’s ministry resides in the power of his words to do things. When he tells the lame to walk, they walk. When he tells the blind to see, they see. Again and again the world orders itself according to his word, so that when at last he says, “This is my body,” we take him as more than metaphorical.

The heroes of children’s television have discovered that, like God, they can save the day by words. We see it in adult television, too, of course. Michael Scott, mired in money problems, believes he has found the solution when he cries “I… declare… BANKRUPTCY!!!” Oscar the accountant gently reminds him that there’s more to it than that. We have mentioned Inspector Gadget. Many of the endless James Bond parodies derive their comedy from the heroes’ miraculous victories, from their uncanny knack for having the perfect tool for the job at all times. Who but Clousseau can achieve such justice through bumbling? Who but Austin Powers can lend force to his attacks by shouting “Judo chop!”?

What we admire about the real Bond is that he employs consummate skill and takes endless punishment in the course of the mission. What we wonder at in Aslan the lion, who calls Narnia into being by song, is that he does not simply sing the Witch out of being or sing Edmund back into grace. He pays with his blood.

And so what is funny in the parodic pageant of spy game spoofs and office space sitcoms, this facile declaration of that state of affairs we most need, becomes, in the context of children’s entertainment, a melancholic comment on American ideologies of identity. The self in America today springs from verbal declaration and nothing more. If I am man or woman it is not by God or by nature but by my own command, and I may indeed be neither. I say I am whatever I feel, and like Blaze I call upon the children of America to say so with me. So far have we plunged into the bottomless end of nominalism that the substantial language of the classical tradition has been entirely removed from conversation. No longer may we say, “She is a woman,” or “He is a man.” We get the sense we are bound not to call that meowing thing a cat or that barking thing a dog. “The just man justices,” writes Hopkins. In America today we are told, in short, that we may only say, “The I I’s.” Nothing more.

Our personhood has become as empty as the plots of our children’s programs. But where in our increasingly brilliant enlightenment has joy hidden itself? Perhaps, in part, it has hidden itself in words. As more and more the power of words is touted in television and the politics of personhood, we sense more and more that words alone are not, in fact, certain good, that that description belongs rather to one Word, who took on flesh and healed the lame and hung crowned and bleeding for our sins one Friday afternoon. Praise him.

Daniel Fitzpatrick grew up in New Orleans and lives in Hot Springs, AR, with his wife and two children. He is completing an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. His novel, Only the Lover Sings, and his new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy have been published this year by En Route Books.

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” This is the first command God gives to early humanity, to till and keep the garden of the earth, to care, in short, for creation. This is a command which has never been rescinded. But how ought we to care for creation? What is our relationship supposed to be like with the rest of the world, with the universe? Not all of these questions can be fully answered, but we can gain intuitions and directions. I hope to shed some light on these questions in this essay by enlisting the help of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ as a reminder to the Christian that the world is our common home and demands our care. Following, then, on Pope Francis’ insistence that we leave no form of wisdom behind, I will look to the practical effects of folk belief in elves in places like Ireland and Iceland and the symbolic importance of the Green Man carvings in churches throughout England. I will conclude with a look at Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s masterful “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” looking at his vision of our relationship with creation, to conclude that we must attain a kind of poetic vision of reality.

In 2015 Pope Francis followed in the footsteps of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in writing a papal encyclical concerning the care for creation. In Laudato Si’ the pope addresses the concerns of the ecological crisis facing the world today. He emphasizes the world is included in the “least of these” for whom Catholics ought to have a preference. There are two concerns and means of addressing them that Pope Francis lays out which will help unfold this notion that myths and legends, that the imagination, helps us on the path to caring for our common home. The first is the emphasis Pope Francis places on the sacramental nature of reality. The second, and less developed in Laudato Si’, is the need to listen to other voices outside the sciences on how to care for and relate with creation.

The very title, Laudato Si’, shows the sacramental lens through which Pope Francis desires us to see creation. He pulls the title from the “Canticle of Brother Sun,” by St. Francis of Assisi. In that poem, St. Francis refers to all aspects of creation with familial language, brother sun and sister moon, and, of course, our sister, mother earth. We have not treated this sister well. “This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.” Pope Francis reminds us that we need this fraternal, this sacramental relationship with creation. Without it, we instead abuse, mistreat, rape. We treat creation, Francis writes, as, “a problem to be solved,” when we ought to view it as, “a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.” The problem, in many ways, is that we have turned creation into mere matter, as we turned the cosmos into mere space, a thing meant to be used, that exists solely for our benefit. Nowhere is this more evident, and possibly nowhere more detrimental in our treatment of animals. As Pope Francis writes:

It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence or convey their message to us. We have no such right.

While it may be true, and the pope recognizes this, that human caused extinction of certain plants and animals may mean the loss of creatures capable of helping us cure diseases and flourish as human beings, this is not the fundamental reason for caring for them. Rather, it is because they are good, they have their own ends in God which it is our job to cultivate. Thus, our failure to properly care for creation is a failure of our priestly role. For we are called to be priests, both representing all of creation to God and representing God back to all of creation. This is made most explicit in the fact of the incarnation. Christ, in joining his divinity to our humanity has also joined himself to all creation.

How is this the case? Humanity has in it all aspects of creation, from the smallest quark to the starkest mineral to the highest angel. All is joined in humanity as a microcosm. And thus, when Christ joins his native divinity to humanity, he joins it also to the rest of creation. I’ll return to this theme in a moment. For now, it is enough to ensure that we understand what Pope Francis is saying, it is our job to care for creation, in part (and this is going further than what the pope says in Laudato Si’) because creation may serve us in some way. But more because creation sings the Glory of God, and we serve as priests to and for that Eucharistic song.

It is thus this Eucharistic element to which we now must turn. For creation is sacramental. This song of thanksgiving is the reminder that creation is a book of signs that signify a deeper reality. Creation points to the fact of a Creator. And it is our job as people who live in this world, to learn to read these signs and experience them as, in a sense, sacramental.

To aid in the conservation efforts, Pope Francis recommends that we leave no stone unturned. It is essential, he says, to be attentive to other ways of knowing and understanding in order to better combat the problems facing us today. He writes:

Given the complexity of the ecological crisis and its multiple causes, we need to realize that the solutions will not emerge just from one way of interpreting and transforming reality. Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality. If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it.

Note two of the chief ways of doing this – art and spirituality. We live in an age where science and the scientific method are still seen as the primary, if not sole, ways of arriving at truth, or if not truth at least fact. What Pope Francis reminds us of is this – we need all branches of scientia of knowledge, and what’s more, we need wisdom that understanding which includes, but transcends mere knowledge. To quote T.S. Eliot:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of the Heavens in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the dust.

While Pope Francis will go on in some ways to focus on the essential nature of spirituality and the language of religion, he nevertheless opens the door for us to see, acknowledge, and move forward with the notion that art, and thus the imagination itself, is necessary in the fight against the destruction of creation.

The pope goes on to argue that ecological concern itself must also mean concern for the cultural. While not stating it explicitly, it is clear that Pope Francis has the older understanding of oikos in mind, that ecological concern is household concern and the household can, ought, and must include the cultural, the artistic, the poetic. And with this reality in mind, we turn now to the role myth, legend, and poetry can play in our ecological efforts.

In nearly every culture there is a notion of local geniuses, a kind of local deity or tutelary spirit that governs and guides the growth of a particular locale. They are imminently local. They belong to the place and the place belongs to them. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil is a more modern example of this, serving in his initial fictional creation as the tutelary spirit of the Oxford Valley. But these spirits have had a long history, and there are two instances of them I want now to engage. The first comes from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In the play, Shakespeare’s lovers, as well as the lovable Bottom, find themselves lost in what is best described as a Fairy Wood. They followed by the impish Puck, who, on King Oberon’s orders, endeavors to make them fall in love in the right pairings. At the end of the play, after the lovers tell their tale, Theseus says this:

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

In other places must I wait to discuss the notion of imagination’s role in bodying forth forms, but here I want to focus on the imagination’s role in giving “to airy nothing/a local habitation and a name.” The poet and theologian (and priest and rock’n’roller) Malcolm Guite, in his book, Faith, Hope and Poetry argues that the imagination’s job, through the poet, is precisely to do what Theseus here says with disdain: “The purpose of imagination, in its playfulness and poetry in particular, is to be the bridge between reason and intuitive apprehension, to find apprehension just in those shapes, those local habitations and names that make for comprehension.” Earlier in the same book, Guite argues that “Oberon and Titania are the ‘local habitation and a name’ given by Shakespeare to realities we could not otherwise picture, but which are nevertheless at play as forces within our own psyche and perhaps within the wider world.” These fairies, who seemingly can change in size, are the tutelary spirits of this English, Grecian wood. They embody something of the spirit of the wood. This notion of a guardian spirit is not foreign to the English imagination, one only need look to her churches to see that.

Walk around long enough in nearly any Medieval English church and you will likely find one of the Green Man figures. Not much is known about the history of the Green Man, nor do we know with certainty why the British stone wrights and sculptors deemed them important to include. What we do know is that they are fairly popular. While each one is unique they share certain traits. Most of them are just faces, sometimes with ears or open mouths, other times without. But they are faces surrounded by leaves and trailing vines. Sometimes these sprout from the ears or surround the head and are grasped by the Green Man’s hands. In Southwell Minster, particularly in the 13th century chapter house, one can find not only carvings of the Green Man, but stone foliage throughout. Nature is re-presented in artifice inside these churches. So it seems, whatever else the Green Man might be, he is now a follower of Christ. He is a reminder to us that God is the Lord of man, to be sure, but also of nature, of trees and fungi, of insects and birds, of fish and animals, of elves and the Green Man.

Creation’s relationship to the architecture of churches is a fascinating one. Churches fill themselves, or used to, with carvings of birds, animals, flowers, leaves, the Green Man, the Sheela Na Gig. It is a reminder, as Maximus the Confessor points out that the universe is a kind of macrocosm of the Church and the human person. Like an exploded picture of an atom, the cosmos can be seen as a symbol for the church itself, and the church, therefore, is a microcosm of the whole of the created order.

Pope Francis, as noted above, called on us to pay attention to local beliefs and spiritualities in our quest to fight against the degradation of creation. While perhaps not precisely what he meant, two interesting examples of precisely this have happened within the past five years. In both Ireland and Iceland local belief in elves has halted and altered road construction projects. In Ireland in 2017, Teachtaí Dála Danny Healy-Rae made the bold claim that the reason for the dip in Kerry Road was due to fairies. He went on to say that while he has a building machine in his backyard, if someone asked him to knockdown a fairy-fort (usually either a large stone or mound), he would rather starve first.
Similarly, in Iceland in 2016, road construction was brought to a halt. During the construction a known “elfin rock” had been covered with debris. After that, mishaps began to happen on the construction site. Finally, realizing what they had done, the construction crew worked to uncover the enchanted rock and continued to work with more care, lest they should anger the elves in some other way.

While it is not clear that either in Ireland or Iceland, the intent of either construction crew was conservationist. Yet this is precisely the effect caused by these local beliefs, some might call them superstitions, is better care and attention paid to the ground on which they live. These, it seems to me, are precisely the kind of local beliefs and wisdom we need to attend to. It is, of course, possible that these elf-stones and fairy-forts are either just rocks who through time have found their way into these places, or perhaps were placed there by our Neolithic ancestors. I have my misgivings, but it does not matter. These beliefs can be tested by their fruit, and in these instances their fruit is good. More care and attention is paid to the way these peoples do construction. As Chesterton averred about his own people, “If we ever get the English back onto English land they will become again a religious people, if all goes a superstitious people.”

Speaking of Englishman, the poet and literary critic (as well as philosopher and social activist) Samuel Taylor Coleridge has something important, quite possibly essential, to add to this discussion of ecological care and poetry. In his most well-known poem, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge sets out some key ideas that, by engaging with them poetically, ought to help us see the plight of our sister Mother Earth, more clearly. The end of the Mariner is perhaps the clearest expression of Coleridge’s ecological concern, but before we get to that, I want first to engage in the inciting incident in the Mariner’s life, the killing of the albatross.

The Mariner begins his tale––in the quasi-medieval setting of the poem––by stopping a wedding guest (one of three) on his way to a wedding. The Mariner tells him the tale of his ship’s journey down into the Antarctic Ocean. As they journey down, they are visited by an albatross. This bird is seen not as an omen of good fortune, but as a friend.

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

In the gloss, which Coleridge added years later, he tells us that the sailors, “received [it] with great joy and hospitality.” As the Mariner continues his story we see that the bird is fed by the sailors. There is nothing explicitly mentioned about why the sailors hailed the bird in God’s name. It is entirely possible that they saw the bird as a tiding of good news, that they would soon be clear of the land of mist and snow. Yet the poem does not mention it, not here at the bird’s first appearance. Rather, it seems that they love the bird for its being. They love the bird because it is, not because it is doing anything for them. That comes later, after the Mariner kills the albatross.

The poem does not tell us why the Mariner shoots the bird. It does not seem he shoots it for food, or to keep it from eating theirs. Nor does it seem that it was in his head killing the bird would bring some benefit to them. Rather, it seems the Mariner kills the bird in much the same way that young Augustine stole the pears, just for the sake of doing something evil. Of course, young Augustine knew the act to be wrong and did it because it was wrong, to feel the wrongness of it. It is not clear that the Mariner was thinking thusly. Perhaps he was more like a child throwing rocks at a bird or a squirrel, not because they desire to harm the animal, but to see if they can. Whatever the case, the sailors begin to interpret the consequences, though not the motivations, of the Mariners actions.

At first, the other sailors believe that in killing the bird, the Mariner killed the creature that had caused their northern wind to blow. Already we see a hint of the problem that implicates the other sailors. Their concern is not with the fact that albatross is dead, but that in killing it, the Mariner had also killed the breeze. But then, when the fog disperses and they see the sun again, the other sailors change their tune. Now they believe that in killing the bird, the Mariner has put an end to the fog and mist. It is here, as the gloss makes clear, that the sailors implicate themselves in the sin of the Mariner. But what exactly is the sin? The text is not explicit, but, as Malcolm Guite has argued, it is the utility involved here. The bird now only matters to the sailors insofar as it does either good or ill for them. They are only angry with the Mariner, not because he had killed a bird they had initially hailed as a human person, but because he made the wind stop. Then they praise him because he made the fog and mist disperse. They have no care for the life of the bird itself. They only care about what use it is to them. Once they determine that it was not only of no good use, but was an actively bad presence, they decide its death was justified.

But these sailors are a changeable folk. And after all, the fog and mist might be gone, but the breeze has not returned. And so, they sit in the midst of an unknown ocean, the sun beating down on them, and they run out of water. The gloss makes it clear this is the beginning of vengeance served for the death of the albatross. And once again, the sailors change their mind, and determine that killing the albatross has brought this misfortune––and in this they are correct, as the gloss shows––and they hang the albatross around the Mariner’s neck. What they do not yet realize is that they too are to blame and their attempts to make a scapegoat out of the Mariner will not deter them from their fate.
It is not until Part V that we finally come to a full understanding of the ship’s plight. Before then we learn, in the dreams of the sailors, that a spirit of the deep, a kind of genius or local habitation, is the one wreaking havoc on the ship. He too, presumably, calls the ship which carries Death and the Nightmare-Life-in-Death. But we do not know why, not until the almost very end of Part V. The Mariner is the only one alive on board the ship hears “two voices in the air.”

‘Is it he?’ quoth one, ‘Is this the man?
By him who died on cross,
With his cruel bow he laid full low
The harmless Albatross.

The spirit who bides by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.’

Here finally we learn two essential pieces of information. First, the bird in whatever level of agency it had, loved the Mariner. Who knows what good it may have worked the Mariner and the other sailor. Not that this was essential, this was not what gave the albatross meaning or value, its being, and its being loved are. In the end of the poem, we will see that the bird is loved by its Creator. But for now we learn the second essential piece of information. The reason the polar spirit is avenging the bird is because he loved it.

Yet what are these spirits? In the gloss, Coleridge says this, “A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted.” Then comes a truly fascinating line, “They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.” Coleridge was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, and that comes through nowhere more clearly than in the gloss to the Mariner. This gloss is one of the clearest. Here we see that what began as a gothic, semi-medieval, ballad now explicitly includes the supernatural by way of these middle spirits (another name he gives to them in a different gloss). These spirits are not demons, not in the Christian sense of this word, but nor are they angels or departed human souls. Rather, they are rational beings who belong to the air, which is really just to say that they belong to the middle space, not to heaven in the way the angels do, nor to earth, they that humans do. Yet they are not uninvolved with the earth. For again, the class makes it clear they are associated with climates (here we ought to read regions, not weather) and elements. This polar spirit, “nine fathoms deep” belongs to the South Pole, is its guardian and the lover of its inhabitants, hence its reaction to the death of the albatross. They are tutelary spirits, local habitations, those “airy nothings” Theseus claimed did not exist.

These spirits show us how we ought to relate the world around us. The polar spirit does not love the albatross because of anything it can do for him. It is not an issue of utility for him. Rather he loves the bird because it is his charge, because it belongs to realm which the spirit oversees.

This is the lesson the Mariner must learn throughout the rest of the poem. At one point, after his shipmates have died, he looks out into the sea and sees it filed with “a thousand, thousand slimy things.” But as the mediated light of the Moon shines on him, these disgusting creatures become beautiful. water-snakes” which move “in tracks of shining white,” surrounded by an “elfish light,” The Mariner goes on in this transfigured vision to declare:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.

The Mariner has begun to learn the lesson, the lesson he will pass on to everyone who needs to hear his tale:

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

God’s command that we till and keep the garden has not ended. This is the message Coleridge wishes us to hear in the conclusion of his poem. It is also the message Pope Francis wishes us to hear in Laudato Si’. It may very well be the case that there are no elves in Iceland or Ireland, that the Green Man only adorns the inside of our churches, but does not haunt the local wood. The tutelary spirits we cannot so easily get rid of, for they may simply be angels going about their business. The essential thing, however, is that we listen to the stories we have and are still telling ourselves about the world around us. Even if elves did not destroy Icelandic construction vehicles, the idea that a particular rock or forest has a deeper significance, that it might hint at a deeper truth as a kind of liminal or thin place, is almost certainly true. We simply need eyes to see and ears to hear.

David Mosley has a PhD in theology from the University of Nottingham and his writings can be found around the web, most particularly at U.S. Catholic Magazine.

In grade school physical education classes, my classmates and I found it thrilling to play with a huge multi-colored parachute. We’d ripple it so that dodgeballs bounced high in the air; we’d create a moving wave by taking turns raising our small part of the fabric. But the most whimsical moments were when our teacher instructed us to raise the parachute so we could all go under it. Before the silken material fell on us, we’d be surrounded in rainbow light, like we’d left the outskirts of the school baseball field and entered some otherworldly circus tent.

As beautiful and relatively coordinated (for a bunch of third graders) as that experience always was, my faith as a tent is one that I resist. The sky under the parachute may have been akin to stained-glass wonder, but there was a wider sky beyond it, one which holds the world under it.

Perhaps the sustainability of a faith is measured by who it includes. I’ve always loved that Catholicism means “universal.” What most assures me of this universality is the witness of those who never became Catholic, but were honestly drawn to it. One such individual was author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Scarred by the prejudices of his Puritanical ancestors, Hawthorne’s vocation as a writer of romance opened him to appreciating what the rather stringent Protestant American culture of his day struggled with: a faith that invited all the senses into worship—the body and the spirit. This sensual faith included artistry and architecture that was not prominent in Protestant worship spaces. In his English Notebooks, recorded while he was U.S. Consul to Liverpool, Hawthorne remarked on the stained-glass windows of a church he encountered in York:

It is a good symbol of religion; the irreligious man sees only the pitiful outside of the painted window and judges it entirely from that view; but he who stands within the holy precincts, the religious man, is sure of the glories which he beholds. And to push the simile a little farther, it requires light from Heaven to make them visible. If the church were merely illuminated from the inside–that is, by what light a man can get from his own understanding— the pictures would be invisible, or wear at best but a miserable aspect.

A faith illuminated from the outside. That Catholic worship can be flavored by the myriad cultures in which it exists bespeaks an enriching dynamism, a faith that sees beauty in the individual, as well as the universal. It is also illuminated by those who might consider themselves on the outside. Hawthorne’s observations during subsequent visits to France and Rome helped inspire his final novel, The Marble Faun, which takes place in Rome. In this book St. Peter’s Basilica is described as a “Cathedral, worthy to be the religious heart of the whole world” with “room for all nations” (276-277). Room to wonder, room to wander.

But lest it seem that the image of Catholicism as a tent is being replaced with Catholicism as a cathedral, let’s explore another facet of this word. I’ve been reading Bishop Robert Baron’s Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels—which has been referred to as a “cathedral in print”—and was recently drawn to his reflection on Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan: “In one of the great windows of Chartres Cathedral, near Paris, France, there is an intertwining of two stories: the account of the fall of mankind and the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This reflects a connection that was made by the Church Fathers. The Good Samaritan is a symbol of Jesus himself, in his role as Savior of the world” (“Becoming Other Christs” 367). Reflecting on the Good Samaritan as an other-Christ, I am reminded that our faith is so broad that the face of God can be revealed just as luminously by the non-Catholic as the Catholic.

This truth is made plain in Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, where the parable of the Good Samaritan is a touchstone passage by which he calls the world to a greater love of neighbor, one that bypasses our common modes of division: borders, cultures, political affiliations, and economic classes. The parable clarifies our universal vocation to love: “Here, all our distinctions, labels and masks fall away: it is the moment of truth. Will we bend down to touch and heal the wounds of others?” (no. 70). In a world fragmented by division, the question is not, is there room in the tent? Or even in the vastness of the beautiful cathedral? The question becomes, is there room in my heart for the other, especially those with whom I ardently disagree or to whom I’m wholly indifferent? And perhaps, more pressingly, is my heart, like Christ’s in the monstrance, able to be flipped inside-out to better orient itself toward others?

It is significant that cathedral contains the root hedra, which, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, means “seat” but also “face of a geometric solid.” In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis uses the shape of the polyhedron to describe a genuine “culture of encounter” between individuals to create a “variegated unity”: “The image of a polyhedron can represent a society where differences coexist, complementing, enriching and reciprocally illuminating one another, even amid disagreements and reservations. Each of us can learn something from others” (no. 215). Each of us is a necessary face, a face of Christ.

Hawthorne teaches me that Catholicism’s dynamism is such that one’s life may point the direction for others. The Church recognizes Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose, because she became Catholic and founded a religious order. However, Hawthorne’s life—blessed as it was with a position that brought his family abroad and a writing career that produced novels replete with Catholic symbolism—probably helped pave the way for his daughter’s conversion. Like the Good Samaritan, one can be a Christian without calling himself one. I’m ever-struck by a line from The Marble Faun, where the character Hilda remarks, “Why should not I be a Catholic, if I find there what I need, and what I cannot find elsewhere?” (285). Perhaps Hawthorne did not feel so readily disposed toward acceptance of Catholicism, but he did seem to find in it a way one can approach wholeness.

So, this Catholicism I try to live—it is not a tent, nor is it a cathedral. It is the body and soul of the world, as expansive as the atmosphere, as necessary as oxygen. And when lived with all its natural beauty, it is an invitation to taste, see, and touch not only our Lord, but his people, our neighbors and brothers and sisters. As a child, I never wanted to be the kid who wasn’t ready to disappear under the parachute with the rest of the class. Today, I realize that faith isn’t a dichotomy of inside / outside. It is a continual going out to others, a perpetual pursuit.

Lindsey Weishar is a contributor to Verily magazine. Her poems have appeared in Steam Ticket, The Indianapolis Review, and Kansas City Voices, and her chapbook, Matchbook Night, was published by Leaf Press in 2018.

I’m not much of a TV watcher. I’m vaguely aware of popular shows, but have no desire to actually watch one, especially if I have to commit to remembering characters and plot lines from one week to the next. I’m afraid the past year has exhausted me for character and plot line. I’m pretty much just pure image and rhythm at this point and have come to regard current events as so much really bad poetry. Also, I simply don’t have the time. Still, at the end of the day, for half an hour or so I’ll find something on one of the streaming services and watch it till I start nodding off. It’s my bedtime story.

I tend toward documentaries, especially science and nature shows, and will watch just about anything about outer space. In the morning as I’m praying, Venus will often still be low on the horizon, and I’ll think how pretty it looks. Then I’ll recall that it has sulfuric acid rain and a surface temperature of nearly 900 degrees. This is by no means to indicate I’m of a scientific mind. On the contrary, I don’t understand ninety percent of what the scientists on these shows are talking about. That’s why I watch them. I like getting lost in other people’s abstruse thoughts.

The other night, listening to an astrophysicist, I remembered the first time I tried to read Duns Scotus. They talk about primal forces in the cosmos that have to be there but only exist in theory, about distances so distant they can only be measured in time. They’re probing so deep into space with their telescopes and mirrors that they’re picking up light only a few moments (i.e., a few billion years) from the Big Bang, and the closer they get, the more their own laws and suppositions fold over on themselves into a kind of cosmological mysticism. The other night a scientist on the screen said if they could just get close enough to the moment of the Big Bang, get close enough to the beginning, they might finally be able to explain how all of this came to be, and that’s when things really folded over, when I went from knowing nothing to everything. That’s when I said to the scientist on the screen, “Oh, I can tell you that.”

But what I really like about space shows is that they make me feel small—really small. Even just a show about Earth tends to put me in my place. But then Earth is part of the solar system, which from the Sun to Pluto stretches 3.67 billion miles. The solar system is part of the Milky Way, which in turn is part of a larger set of galaxies called the Local Group, in which Andromeda is our nearest neighbor, two and a half million light years away. The Local Group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which itself may be part of a larger supercluster or may simply give way to an infinite phantasmagoria of stars, galaxies, and gases that finally render distance and number absurd. And I’m a carbon-based organic entity considering all this on a laptop in a failed biosphere called New York City.

Thousands of years before the Discovery Channel or NOVA, a psalmist peering into the night sky with no telescope but his soul wrote, “When I see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars which you arranged, what is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him?” Like the scientists, the psalmist is awestruck at the vastness and beauty of the cosmos, and when he considers the power that created that vastness, the hand that crafted that beauty, his awe is imbued with the deepest resonances of mystery and he experiences humanity’s holiest state: humility. The scientists, however, gazing at the same sky with better instruments and no humility at all, look back to an older tradition, older than the psalms, older than the prophets. They look back to Eve. Adam and Eve lived in perfect unity and innocence with God, in perfect relation: they knew they were small. Lucky; gifted; graced—but small. So the serpent’s idea for original sin was the idea of being bigger: “…you will be like gods.” But it was when they tried to be as big as God that they realized they were naked and twisted their God-given humility into shame.

Bigness, however, proved a long-lasting and successful temptation. The Tower of Babel was another notorious too-big-for-our-own-britches moment, resulting in the confusion of languages—and, by extension, the confusion of ideas [see: internet]. Israel decided, against God’s earnest advice, that it would stand bigger among the nations if it had a king. By the death of the third one, Solomon, the kingdom itself had split in two, and it takes several books of the Old Testament to record the epic fails of Solomon’s successors. And in a parody of bigness, the Roman Empire subsumed the ancient world: so overwhelming and arrogant, so unthinking and inhuman that it made the big mistake of crucifying an itinerant teacher, a former carpenter whose followers said was God Himself. Three, four hundred years later the Empire collapsed. The carpenter’s followers are still here. And now we’re in a Big Bang of deadly social, political, and cultural radiation and gases, poisonous, suffocating, and billions of little people across the country, around the world, are just trying to feel bigger, doing just about anything to feel bigger.

So I keep it small. (The carpenter said something about being meek…) I watch my little TV shows. I get a good night’s sleep. In the morning I go, as the carpenter told me, to my private room and pray. Facing east, I pray and wait for the dawn. It’s a New York City sky. There’s not a lot of stars. But some mornings there’s Venus. Some mornings there’s the moon. And some mornings, just a psalm and the heat coming up in the radiator are enough. Enough to make me feel small. Tiny. Enough, among the trillions and trillions of stars, to be in a tiny room in a tiny apartment where God gave me a candle, a cross, and a prayer book, and we can listen quietly to one other in the expanding silence of the universe.

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, America Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review and The Road Less Traveled. He is a Benedictine oblate of Mt. Saviour Monastery.

In 2009, I am embarrassed by a woman who is Welsh. I barely know what “Welsh” means other than “sounds English,” but apparently “Welsh” means “Not-English.” The woman is one of my tutors at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford. Having finished implying that I should know Wales is a complicated country and not some tribal hangover like York, she turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” She gives a classic, bracing British smile. “Amazing how he stuffs it all neatly into this one poem, isn’t it?” she says. But I do not understand the poem even a little. I am studying Heraclitus, or rather Heraclitean cosmogony as preserved and expanded by the Stoics, and if you’re wondering—No, I don’t really get any of that either. When I say I don’t understand Hopkins’s verse, I mean at the most superficial level of “what is happening” or “what is the poet describing.” I can tell my tutor the individual words, barely, but not a bit of their content. I am “Jack, joke, poor potsherd,” as Hopkins puts it. I am floundering.

#

A private conference room and no one is looking me in the eye. That’s my first clue. Other students hand me an edited packet of my own writing like the famous four feathers from that old novel (also a Heath Ledger film!) about shaming a coward in public. This is my last MFA workshop and it is a failure. I have attempted something I think is avant-garde; I have been reading too much Joyce; I am in an MFA program and determined to innovate first and communicate later. I am torn to shreds. Sitting in the room, a small room not unlike my Oxford tutorials although it’s nearly a decade after Oxford, I listen to my peers and instructor check off my excerpt’s failures one by one. The setting doesn’t feel historical. The pace is too fast, too summative. The supporting characters are flat.

But every failure they list pinpoints an area in which I thought I was brushing originality. No one in the 50s thought, “Gee whiz! ‘Diners,’ ‘greasers,’ and ‘hotshops’ are the only things I should say!” People likewise don’t turn their lives over and over in their minds the way writers rotate word after word for effect and sentences should reflect this: they should move. As for supporting characters, they are seen as flat in life when the principle POV is racist or blinkered or self-absorbed, which is everyone. Check. Check. Check.
I’m wrong, of course, which is why I am so livid. I have not learned how to write. I have not learned in a straight line—no better in my last year of art school than my first, and maybe worse.

#

How I want to learn is like a machine. I want to input, retain, recall like an iPhone. My iPhone reduces this capacity in practice—I don’t remember phone numbers, I log them—but my iPhone also tempts me to imitation. Silly, of course. We do not store information so much as we experience it. We are not flesh machines who upgrade or upload. Even the pleasure of storing data (baseball statistics, facts about WWII) is just that, a pleasure, sometimes an effect of vanity or a collector’s dopamine fix, but never an object of pure capacity. When there’s no practical need, the spirit either responds, or else there’s no learning. If I were an iPhone, I think the modern lie goes, I’d be free of the need to love.

#

At our new church I don’t know when to cross myself or when to kneel, even though they explicitly tell us when to kneel, and I don’t know if I’m allowed communion. We have moved across the country so I can attempt more schooling, and moved across denominations as well. What no one in Denver can understand about “moving to New York” is that we are actually relocating, in terms of their imagination, to Pennsylvania. Cost of living will be cheaper, we’ll be in a smaller town, the region is basically out in the country. Syracuse, New York. We are slow, too slow, in coming to love it. Before we love it, we are trying a new way to worship and learning these words: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” Learning the city and learning this new church. Learning as acclimating. The church is both too high for our background and too low in terms of actual fundamentalists, but we go back again and again. We take my mother-in-law when she visits, an ex-Catholic and non-church-goer, and it’s the week the priest is gone and we basically pray out loud for thirty minutes and then someone speaks in tongues. (Forgive me, ex-Catholic mother-in-law!) My interest is not prophesy, but repetition. I want to return and repeat and return and witness accretion. Me, the man who cannot learn in a straight line.

#

Writing programs believe learning is practicing, we are there to “learn the craft,” whereas I wish I could be contemptuous of craft. Or rather, I am contemptuous of craft except when it helps me, just as I chafe at all formal education until the knowledge is blended seamlessly into the language of my temperament. The writer Joy Williams, goes the legend, was once asked to give a craft talk and brought a blue box of Kraft Mac&Cheese to the stage and made wry remarks about…Kraft. I hope it’s true. My simplicity is that I try to learn my craft through email, long texts, through every bad story I produce, and I mostly produce bad stories. My second year of my program, I start praying in earnest because I am writing bad stories at a Very Good MFA and public failure and core-identity crisis all seem at hand. I critique stories well and give pointed comments, but I want to write better. Such a gift, it seems, is beyond me. I can do nothing systemically. I cannot proceed in a straight line. I cannot begin at “Begin” and end at “End” or understand the purpose of a narrative or my choices or even the point of writing—aren’t there people starving and taxes to be paid and wars? I start praying-before-writing during the second year of my MFA and you have already heard about the third year. A failure.

#

We are back in Denver and we have two kids. For some reason I’m recounting how I don’t know enough about Russian history, China’s Cultural Revolution, Ida B. Wells, J.I. Packer, or the inception of English football. We are discussing the loss of brain cells from having two children, or I am, when my wife stops my blather of self-denigration to suggest that I “experience the learning process as failure.”
“Gah,” I tell her. “You’re right. What a moron I am for not knowing this sooner!”

We laugh. But also, it’s true. I can do nothing systemically. Every worthless degree I’ve hung around my neck has confirmed this failing. I cannot read by syllabus, I cannot mimic scholarly depth, I cannot read Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies back to back to back (for example) or go poem by poem through Hopkins’s oeuvre for even one month. Naturally, then, I want to write novels, those classically whimsical and carefree projects thrown-together last minute. “Whoops! Here’s 75,000 words that are good! It just keeps happening to me!” What I experience is almost imposter syndrome, except I’m correct about the flaw. I have published peer-reviewed work on Hopkins, and I still haven’t finished a single biography on the man. Sometimes I forget the year he died, and he died young enough it deserves to be remembered.

#

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” The words have by this time been repeated once a week for two to three years and they are less rote, or rather less empty, now than at first. We attend a church in Golden, Colorado, or we try to. We are newly doubled in the number of our children. One plus one, as the sages foretold, is not two. One child plus another child is at least three times the first child. But when we do attend and when we navigate the squirming and the coloring and the smiles of neighbors assuring us we aren’t ruining their practice of sacrifice and worship with over-loud whining (the children, usually) and curt, whispered threats (me, always), the words land like individual footprints on the mind. “Most merciful”—that than which nothing can be greater, who has yet, and for no reason I deserve, promised to be unfair on my behalf. “We have sinned”—we, those of us speaking together, the words personal because I am speaking them, but a promise of support, of solidarity in the act of sharing them aloud. We, together. All the flounderers eating the same body.

#

When my children are born, I memorize a Hopkins poem a piece to say over them. I re-learn Hopkins only after internalizing Hopkins, which feels backwards to my generation and obvious to my mother’s. He becomes a part of me before I understand him. He wants his writing to imitate his theology, the True Presence of the Host a model for all inscape, for that essence, or rather essence-ing, which each thing has of itself and yet which also calls forth the Essence. Learning! And I could have learned this when I was in college, or when I was in grad school, or when like a practical joke I was in grad school again. I learned some of Hopkins’s secrets along the way, un-systematically and experientially, just as I learn everything. He designs the words to shed their word-ness, their initial communication shorn for the sake of their sound. I learned and re-learn him sound-first. “Heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng, they glitter in marches”: clouds!

I hold my children and I practice: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” I practice and I repeat and I do not feel like a failure except for when I forget the words. Two years of repeating a poem and sometimes—poof!—I cannot conjure it for a midnight episode. I go daddy-dumb, an intensification of how I am always a little imprecise.

#

We move back to Colorado and I discover hesychasm. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

#

If you know about hesychasm, then you realize I’ve already said too much. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

#

I sit at my computer in the garage trying to write and hear my family inside. Writing a novel is not like learning and learning is not like prayer and prayer is not the handmaiden of anything but God. I keep failing. I do not simply experience the learning process as failure, I experience the way I experience failure as failure. I review my failures and see their similarities, the inconsistency of rigor and habit of mind. The Stoics, if not their cosmogony, have gotten to me at last! Still, I don’t want to be rigid or predictable. What is rote can only become meaningful by way of personal response or personal necessity; in my case, through resonance at the words somebody else designed. “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” The feedback loop is necessary and unsystematic even though it is regular. Different words press with greater and lesser weights at different times. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I am one of the blockheads, I cannot learn what I cannot love. I cannot memorize to memorize or hit a word count like a happy slap on the word doc’s ass—smack! “Good luck!” I knew Hopkins young and learned him late. “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: deals out that being indoors each one dwells. Selves goes itself, myself it speaks and spells”—and so on. A telling out of who we are by how we are.

That’s from memory, of course. If I could do the work justice, if I could strap it down, approach it systematically, there’d be proper line breaks as well. But the words are mine.

#

“Hesychasm!” I remember, whenever I want to get to the heart of learning, and maybe worship, too.

“Me, a sinner.”

Everything rote dies before it lives again.

Joel Cuthbertson is a writer from Denver. His work has previously appeared in Electric Literature, LitHub, and The Millions. He received his MFA from Syracuse University, and can be found at joelcuthbertson.com or @joelcuth on Twitter.