We had a walked about fifteen miles that day – one of the shorter days of our Camino. We arrived in Astorga, tired and hot, just in time for the noon Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. We had been walking since 5:30 am that day. My friend had a particularly challenging day as her feet were covered in blisters. We were sore. Everything hurt. We shuffled into the Church and as Mass began, we found our bodies trying to adjust to the rhythmic motions of standing, sitting, and kneeling. After a thanksgiving, we went to leave the Church. As we genuflected in our exit from the pew, we both grimaced and then started laughing from the pain as we slowly descended and ascended from the floor.

We waddled out of the Church to find food and lodging. My friend decided to call her family and take a much-needed rest as her feet were covered with blisters. I, on the other hand, needed to quench my adventurous spirit. I wanted to explore the city, visit the Church where Saint Francis of Assisi stayed when he was on the Camino, the Way of Saint James, see the ancient Roman ruins, and visit the Cathedral of Astorga.

After some sightseeing, I stopped before the entrance of the Cathedral of Astorga within the hour of its closing. Like most famous cathedrals in Europe, one must pay to enter. This presented a dilemma as I recalled a promise I made to my friend earlier: I would stop paying for entrance into cathedrals for some time. We were on a budget, and the majority of the allotted money for sightseeing was being spent towards paying for cathedrals of the towns we had visited or walked through, such as Madrid, Avila, and Leon. Since I needed a minute to internally debate whether I should keep my promise, I migrated to the façade of the Cathedral to carefully weigh my options. Perched on a seat overlooking the façade, my internal conflict ceased as the beauty of the façade of the Cathedral captivated my interest and left me pondering the mysteries which the exterior design presents.

Normally when we think of cathedrals we gaze at their grandeur. We are left awestruck at its height, design, and beauty. We spend most of our time wandering around the interior of the cathedral. We contemplate its vaulted ceilings, arches, and domes and experience first-hand how the design of the cathedral shifts and guides one’s focus to the heart of the church: the altar, where the sacrifice of the Mass takes place.

The builders of the cathedrals of old knew the important role which architecture plays in worship. Sacred architecture disposes the mind and heart to be transformed and transcended as it reflects Heaven. Besides its practical purpose, the design of cathedrals also serves a spiritual purpose. For example, high cathedral ceilings reference that the liturgy transcends time and space, and so invite man to worship in a manner which points to the timelessness which occurs at every Mass.

Yet, though cathedrals interior relay rich theological aspects of the Faith and aid man in his transcendence in participating in the eternal, the exterior of the cathedrals were also built to enable spectators to contemplate spiritual mysteries. Thus, in my internal conflict of visiting the interior of the cathedral, my mind soon become enveloped in contemplating the theological meaning which the façade of the Astorga Cathedral offered.

On the façade of the building, visitors are greeted with two images above the cathedral’s doors. To the right, there is an image of Christ bending down, writing in the sand as the woman caught in adultery is brought before Him. Above this image the word “innocence” is chiseled. To the left, the panel depicts Christ angrily dismissing the moneylenders from the temple. The word “piety” is chiseled above this image.

Both of these panels speak to the faithful of the disposition one needs to enter the house of God. They remind all who enter the doors that the temple, the church, is sacred. Nothing unholy should be brought into it to profane or defile it. If man has sullied his soul, then like the woman caught in adultery, forgiveness should be sought. These images further inspire worshipers to leave behind worldly concerns so as to focus on Christ. It reminds them that the house of God is a house of prayer; thus, the virtues of piety and innocence, being properly disposed and free from grave sin, is integral to proper worship.

To help maintain the virtues, the cathedral depicts the archangel Michael slaying the dragon. His image centered above the doors to the cathedral reminds the faithful of Saint Michael’s role as protector of the Church. He guards the Church against evil. His very presence inspires those who pass through the doors to ask for his intercession to shed any inclinations to sin before entering into the presence of God.

Above the main wooden doors, the archway depicts a three panel relief series. The central panel portrays Christ being taken down from the cross, thus calling the faithful to prepare their minds and hearts to enter into the mystery of Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection. By doing so, the dispositions of these souls are more receptive to living the Paschal Mystery in the liturgy and are more aware of the sacredness which occurs at Mass.

To the right, a panel portrays Jesus healing a boy suffering from dropsy, a condition more commonly known today as edema. In the relief, the sculptor depicts Christ in the act of curing the boy, for Jesus touches the boy’s hand. Meanwhile, the left panel shows Jesus healing the sight of the blind man. However, both the boy cured from dropsy and the blind man do not wear the traditional garb of Jesus’ day. Both are dressed as pilgrims.

These two reliefs speak to the passing pilgrim for the men cured physically resemble pilgrims. The young boy suffering from dropsy clutches a staff in his hand, which is a familiar sight for those on the Camino. Likewise, the boy’s condition is one which the seasoned pilgrim soon becomes well acquainted with, for it is not uncommon for legs and ankles to swell on the Camino journey. Similar to that of a pilgrim, the boy with dropsy experiences physical obstacles and challenges which test his endurance on the journey to Christ.

Yet, all is forgotten in the moment of encounter. The boy extends his hand, and Jesus returns this acceptance of friendship in a moment of compassion and healing. By placing His hand on that of the extended boy’s, Christ’s demeanor reflects His understanding of the difficulties of the boy’s journey. His presence reassures guidance and protection for the boy who has searched for Him in love. The boy’s gaze is one of adoration, love, and trust. He does not exhibit fear, nor focuses on the pains of the journey. The young pilgrim’s encounter with Christ is enough, for the boy recognizes Christ to be the fulfillment of all his desires and the goal of the journey. The encounter reaffirms Christ’s continual companionship with the pilgrim on earth, and so, with a renewed strength and conviction, the boy continues his earthly pilgrimage, mindful of Christ’s presence.

The imagery of the blind man conveys similar sentiments as the panel of the boy cured of dropsy. The body language of the blind man conveys that he intuitively knows the Lord’s presence although He cannot yet be physically seen. The blind man too has experienced suffering as a result of his search for the Lord. Yet, the suffering allows him to encounter God in this most intimate way. Once recognizing the Lord’s physical presence, the man kneels and tilts his face so that, once cured, he may immediately see the face of Christ. Christ, in return, reaches His hands to heal.

As the cathedral served as a place of worship for countless pilgrims throughout the centuries who walk the Camino, it is fitting that in both panels, the men healed are depicted as pilgrims. By doing so, the cathedral’s exterior speaks to the very depths of man’s nature: all are pilgrims on this earth in need of healing. The pilgrim on the Camino experiences this both on his physical and interior journey, for the Camino itself presents various sufferings to the pilgrim who walks.

All experience suffering due to original sin, whether it be physical, mental, or spiritual. All seek healing and grace from the Divine Physician. All desire an encounter with Christ and to be touched by Him whether realized or not. Yet, through life’s struggles and sorrow man experiences intimacy with God if he allows the Lord to penetrate his heart and heal the wounds inflicted by the effects of fallen human nature. This interior journey, as learnt by the boy with dropsy and the blind man, is never accomplished alone, for the Lord always accompanies man and meet him on the way. The pilgrim learns that he is aided on His journey by Christ Who walks with him, caring for him through the Church.

The Astorga Cathedral teaches that each person who walks through its doors has a unique journey which has been shaped by his experiences, upbringing, conversations, friends, temperament, and the stirrings of his heart. Everyone’s journey through life differs, as each encounters joys and struggles which are unique to his personal story. Because of this, no one can fully understand another as God does, for only He knows the innermost joys and sorrows, as well as one’s past and future. As only He sees the workings and desires of the heart, only He can touch the areas of one’s life in need of healing. The Psalms echo this, saying that God searches and knows us, He discerns our thoughts from afar. For God knows our innermost beings and before the foundation of the world, He knit us in our mother’s wombs.

For the pilgrim, it is necessary not only to recognize his journeying state, but also that all too are wayfarers. Man is called to be a companion to those whom he meets on the journey to Heaven, and it is integral for him to realize that this pilgrimage is never completed alone. This reality perhaps inspired Saint Ignatius of Loyola to call his order the “Company of Jesus”, otherwise known as the Jesuits, for man discovers that Christ walks with him on life’s journey. Though all are sojourners on earth, searching for what will give peace, Christ personally meets each soul and extends His healing, grace, and friendship to all those who accept. Thus, Saint Therese speaks to the uniqueness of man’s journey and of the need for Christ’s personal encounter as she said: “I realized that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, but no two souls are exactly the same.”

To accompany man on this path, the façade of the Cathedral reminds its spectators, is the Blessed Mother and the Apostle Santiago (James). Mary is seen assuming into Heaven, reminding the pilgrim of her intercession and of man’s heavenly destination. Meanwhile, the Apostle Santiago watches over the pilgrims entering the cathedral, reassuring them of his protection on the journey, not only on the Camino, but also one life’s pilgrimage. As the eye shifts higher past the Apostle’s statue, the image of the slain, victorious Lamb emerges to remind man of the Resurrection of Christ and of the promise of Heaven.

The façade of the Astorga Cathedral gave me much to think about in regards to pilgrimage. It also spoke to the beauty of sacred architecture as integral to the survival of the Church for it causes man to wonder and lift his mind and heart to God and internalize the theological images which it portrays. Quite similar to the interior of the European cathedrals, the design of the façade of the Astorga Cathedral enables man to contemplate. It confronts man with the mysteries of life, challenging him to come face-to-face with spiritual realities.

 

Maria Cintorino currently teaches at a Catholic school in Northern Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys to travel and write. She has been published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Crisis Magazine, Our Sunday Visitor’s “Catholic Answers,” and The Imaginative Conservative.

When Laurus dies, his body lies beside his little hermitage. It gives off the scent of pine cone like an incense. Finally, after reposing in the woods for some time, writes Eugene Vodolazkin, “On August 8, in the year 7028 since the Creation of the world and the year 1520 since Christ’s birth…they raise Laurus’s body from the earth and carefully carry it through the forest.”

In the hauntingly vivid novel Laurus – translated with great sensitivity by Lisa C. Hayden – Vodolazkin always has the end of the universe in view. Arseny, the protagonist, transforms into a Holy Fool named Ustin, and finally full circle into Laurus, a hermit who lives in silence among the wild herbs of the Russian forest. Always, though, he is Arseny. After his death, a rope is tied to his feet. Screams are heard from the crowd of 183,000. The bishops, beards floating in the wind, take the rope and drag his body through a field of wheat, his dead arms fall open into a blessing and begin to finger the grass, just as you or I would finger a rosary bead.

It’s a haunting image, a riddle presented to an uncomprehending, modern mind. Why did it make my eyes water as I pictured the image? Why did that funeral rite baffle me so, almost make me angry how they treated the body? Laurus is a particularly beautiful but incomprehensible novel, a blend of modern language with archaism, a series of juxtaposed vignettes that somehow stitch together into a unified life. Vodolazkin writes like a medieval. This is an intentional choice, he explains in a contribution to First Things, “Texts were not so much composed as compiled in the Middle Ages. New texts contained, almost consisted of, fragments of preceding ones.” Time is cyclical. What has come before will come again.

The nature of time means that it doesn’t endlessly progress, but returns to itself in new and mysterious ways. Laurus is written in the form of a new medievalism. It seems fragmentary until, suddenly, it isn’t. The fragments are gathered up and circumscribe a redemptive moment.

In another contribution to First Things, in an article titled, “The Age of Concentration,” Vodolazkin clarifies his search for the new medievalism. In Russia, he writes, materialism is passing away both in its communist and capitalist iterations. The two are closer than they like to admit, with their chaotic permissiveness and individualistic selfishness, their all-encompassing worship of the economy as a measuring post of success. Even as Russia has seemed to be growing economically closer to the West, she has grown more wary, passing out of the range of Western cultural influence and back to the East. This doesn’t seem possible – why would a people only dabble in Western capitalism, and why would they turn away from its unsurpassed ability to produce wealth? It only makes sense once we understand that, “Metaphysics is one of the movers of history”

In the split of Russia from the West is proof that the Age of Concentration is upon us – the new medievalism – an age when the inner life of man will be concentrated, filtered, and by some mysterious herbal alchemy, transformed entirely.

The Age of Concentration is marked by: 1) Inner Strengthening, and 2) Social Reconsolidation. Both of these markers are present throughout Laurus.

Inner strengthening

Vodolazkin writes, “Our dispersed and untrained souls need to be shaped and formed, attaining focus or concentration. This will have to be realized first of all on the personal level, requiring the development of the ability of self-direction independent of the condition of society and the propaganda surrounding us. Personal concentration works against the dispersing influences that might otherwise gain control of our souls.”

With each passing day, we are learning (or have already learned) to distrust legacy news and other sources of information as a form of propaganda. The old establishment has lost credibility. Institutions such as Congress, academia, and even law enforcement are coming under severe criticism. The American Dream is in tatters as hope is lost in the once taken-for-granted proposition that a person who works hard and does right will prosper. Personally, my social media feeds have tilted over the past few months into political commentary at an alarming rate. Any sense of these people as individuals who I have befriended is subsumed under the weight of current events. I’ve been snoozing people on my facebook feed at an alarming rate as they’ve become unwitting mouthpieces of propaganda (of all kinds), and find myself constantly fighting the urge to spout propaganda too. The urge is powerful. It is a singing Siren. There’s a manipulation at work that strikes the foundation of who we are as individuals and as an authentic human community, a hollowing out of our personal agency. The deployment of language to gain and leverage power is alarming. The goal is to gain control of our souls and subject them to a materialist end. This is all the more frightening because it’s unwitting, an unstated movement of materialism towards its proper end. Even the villains are being manipulated.

In Laurus, Arseny is assaulted by a gang of young boys. “They knock him down, onto the boards of the roadway. Several pairs of hands press him into the boards, though he does not resist. The boy whose hands remain free nails the edges of Arseny’s shirt to the boards. Arseny watches the boys laugh and then he laughs, too.” Why are the boys abusing a holy man who never did them any harm? No reason. No reason at all. It’s just what you do. See a Holy Fool. Abuse the Holy Fool.

What happens next is even more interesting, “It gets quiet when (the boys) run away. Only one boy remains, and he approaches Arseny and embraces him. And weeps. Arseny’s heart sinks because he knows this boy pities him but is embarrassed to show it in front of the others…He kisses the boy on the forehead and runs away because his heart is ready to burst. Arseny chokes on his sobs. He runs and the sobbing shakes him and tears fly from his cheeks in all directions, sprouting all sorts of humble plants on the roadside.” Set free from the mob, the humanity of the boy returns to him. It is only when he is free of the dehumanizing social construct in which he was trapped that the boy is able to concentrate his personality into that of a sympathetic, caring, feeling, human being. The change comes naturally and it comes easily.

It’s time to turn off the system that we might see and love the individual souls of which it is comprised. Doing so takes enormous inner strength.

Social reconsolidation

A society made of only horizontal, materialistic connections cannot prosper. In Laurus, the people laugh at but, ironically, are in desperate need of the Holy Fools who wander their city. These strange men remind them daily not only of their charitable obligations to each other but also that demons linger at the door to their houses waiting to pounce. Arseny very helpfully throws rocks at the houses to chase the demons away. The Fools are embarrassing and unacceptable socially, but they provide a necessary vertical connection. God exists and he is a strange God. This vertical connection serves as the basis for personal autonomy and individuality. It’s the staggering and disruptive departure from the usual material concerns of life that sets us free to live in solidarity with our fellow man. Arseny feels connected with his fellow man throughout his life, caring for and nursing them with heroic compassion, even as he lives in isolated circumstances for most of his days.

Metaphysics is a great mover of the Russian mind in Laurus – concern for the end of the world, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the truth of the Holy Fools, the inexorable, redemptive drive that steers Arseny towards his destiny. We might be able to convince ourselves that the path to freedom is through protest and revolution. It is not. Vodolazkin writes, “Today, the paradigmatic modern way of achieving independence from mass consciousness is one of social protest. But this is horizontal—the position ‘against.’ The vertical connection provides a much stronger position. It puts one in position ‘above’ and transcends the horizontal web of social relations.” The source of renewal for the individual, the living power of Laurus, of all art, of human thriving writ large, is religious – transcendent beauty mediated through cultus.

The new medievalism is focused on the reconsolidation of society towards its metaphysical end, always keeping in mind that the end of the world is drawing nigh. Everything proceeds in light of this apocalypse. Everything physical is in the shadow of the metaphysical. The effects this has on societal construction is concentrating. There is but one goal, one way this life we are building together will end. So focus.

Laurus reveals again and again the dark heart of human communities have lost sight of the metaphysical, particularly how they become wrapped up in utopian delusions of constant progress. Communities that forget the year the world will end also let go of their humanity. They form irrational, purposeless mobs to scapegoat and do violence to justice. They’re prone to plague and natural disaster but don’t know how to put their pain into perspective, have no ability to situate suffering within a redemptive framework, and so they dissimulate, building up to a mimetic, propulsive force that randomly explodes into singular, murderous acts. Arseny himself, a holy man, is regularly confronted by mobs who would bully him and rulers who would control him. The relationship is asymmetrical, because for him, these are but episodes on a pilgrimage.

The mob is unable to accurately name an enemy and address it in a constructive way. It lashes out. An age set adrift on a sea of materialism is unable to bring language to bear in an accurate way, unable to communicate, and thus unable to grapple with reality. When the mask slips from the fantasy, the utopia descends into a hellish panorama and the myth of constant progress becomes violent. Sound familiar?

Vodolazkin is clear on this point, “It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.”

These past few months have rattled us, but we have before us the opportunity to reconsider our values. Not what we say we believe, but how we actually situate ourselves in a particular place, with each discrete action never taken for granted. “The past is returning,” argues Vodolazkin, “Any return assumes a preceding departure. Perhaps, though, the past never left, and its absence will turn out to have been an illusion.” Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps a new medieval age is upon us, not as a departure from the present moment but as an antidote ready-born within it.

We are a new text about to be incorporated into an old text. We are being written into an ancient story. Our history matters. Who we were and where we have come from is not worth sacrificing on the altar of progress. Vodolazkin writes, “In the Middle Ages, which did not know the idea of progress, either in public life or in aesthetics, the old and the new were not opposed: New texts incorporated old texts. We see the same sort of symbiosis in postmodern literature, which makes precursor texts a part of itself rather than rejecting them.”

The Age of Concentration is here. I have no clue what it means to lay out this claim. I am as baffled as anyone else as I watch Laurus dragged through a field of wheat, his blood spilling into the furrows. Is this a fruitful seed?

“What kind of people are you? Says the merchant Zygrfyd.” The merchant is a symbol of materialism, a world devoid of inchoate, deep mysteries. It isn’t so much that he is wrong so much as he, like all of us, must turn our faces to the mystery. “And do you yourselves understand it? Asks Zygfryd. Do we? The blacksmith mulls that over and looks at Zygfryd. Of course we, too, do not understand.”

 

The Rev. Michael Rennier is on the editorial board of Dappled Things. He is pastor of Epiphany of Our Lord parish in St. Louis, MO and regularly posts his homilies here.

“Let us be silent in order to hear the whispers of God” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am odd. I might as well tell you this at the outset. Sooner or later – probably sooner – you would discover it on your own. I do odd things. I’m that person with her whole head in the rose bushes at the Botanical Gardens whom you might have found yourself skirting a large circle around as you passed. I’m that woman in her nightgown, standing barefoot and precariously tip-toe on a garden bench at the crack of dawn, half-hidden in glorious, dew-drenched cherry blossoms with camera clicking, a sight that might shock you awake in mid-coffee-sip as you pass by your kitchen window waiting to see what will happen next. Will she CLIMB, though? You might wonder aloud. I cannot for the life of me power walk around a park, although I’ve tried. I get waylaid every twenty-five feet by something curiously botanical. I wander under pine trees and touch their new-born cones. I put my face dangerously close to pollen-gathering bees and stare at them for a long while. I am sure they find me shockingly voyeuristic. I kneel and peer at dew on grass. My iphone camera is ALWAYS on zoom. I do not care for vistas. I live for inches away. You see? Odd. But as it turns out, my oddity has a name. I am an, “Inscaper.” And I am not alone. I am in the happy company of the illustrious Gerard Manley Hopkins, my poetic hero for many years now.

Gerard spent many long hours tramping the fields and streams around Oxford and later in the hills and dales around his Jesuit Seminary. He would get lost in clouds, in blades of grass, in the movement of water, the curious growth of trees. He made all the good-natured Jesuits chuckle and shake their heads as they passed him down on all fours gazing at dew drops. Harmlessly eccentric, they might have surmised. If they only knew that Gerard was deep in contemplative prayer at those moments. He coined a word for this experience – Inscape. Gerard defined it as referring, “to particular features of a certain landscape which make it different from any other.” His belief was that God never repeats himself. So, each blade of grass, each flower individually, each glint of sun on water was utterly unique, holding within itself a completely new message from the Beautiful One beyond – a Divine missive of love that must be answered with love.

Hopkins considered it his vocation to seek and find this Divine voice in the, “deep down,” of things. And once discovered, he urgently needed to express it, for love seeks a voice. His voice was poetry. He called this, “instressing,” an up-close-and-actual, unique experience of an inscape. How it is received into the sight, memory and imagination. He sought to capture that particular inscape in very specific words – words sometimes creatively invented by him for just that moment. He wished no inscape to be lost. This is why he once wept when he saw some workmen cutting down a large tree. Some of us might say, what sentimental, pitiful stuff. But for Hopkins, it was a Divine Revelation irretrievably lost, and his heart ache was genuine.

Inscapers are everywhere. When you start being attentive to that fact, you find that you are not alone. It’s like that knowing wink of an eye or a secret handshake. You can spot them just there. They don’t all use poetry like Gerard did. Some use paints, some use a camera, some transform an ordinary room into a place of magic by noticing the light and capturing its gold in fabric and furnishings, some cook souffles because they see the fascinating, deep down science in food, some bake aromatic breads to remind us that this was Jesus’s chosen portal to our hearts. There is embroidery, fashion, theater. William Morris covered walls with the gleanings of his personal inscapes and allowed us into his gorgeous world while simply staring at his wallpaper over breakfast.

I think of all these things as rising prayers to which we give a voice. All of us as, “inscapers,” seeing the deep down things – in nature, in the world of the human heart, in the very center of our homes. We can’t each see EVERYTHING the Lord is revealing to us through the world He created. We are each given our particular portion of what we are intended to see, to hear, to touch, to feel. What a shame if we miss it, for then no one else will know that God was there waiting to speak. We must learn to be silent, attentive, patiently waiting.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a master inscaper. He revealed to me what exactly I was doing with my nose in a rose bush. He told me I was praying. He inspired me to look closer and closer, and he showed me that I must not forget what I see and hear and feel, that I must pass on these particular messages, these whispers of the One who has so much to tell us.

 

Denise Trull lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband Tony. She is the artistic director of a small but mighty theater company and loves the written word in all its forms.

This is the second part of a series of essays. Read the first part here – Poetry beyond the Closed Room.

Nobel-Laureate poet Octavio Paz wrote, “Poetry is the antidote to technology and the market. What poetry’s function might be, in our time and in the time to come, is reduced to this. Nothing more than this? Nothing less.”1 I believe this to be true—profoundly, urgently true. Technology and the market drive the closed-room world: it exists by means of and for the glory of that twin-headed idol our society worships with every breath. The poets are the ones who can, and who must, lead us out of this mess. Heidegger and Marcel have written brilliant essays about Rilke’s role in a return to the creative spiritual center of ourselves and our earth, and those essays and Rilke’s poetry (especially the Sonnets to Orpheus) are worth long and deep consideration. But there are other poets who deserve mention, poets of the New World whose ancestors lived in and encountered the wild, rugged geographies of the North and South American continents and whose poetry pulses with the life-force of Creation. I want to mention briefly two of these poets (there are others, of course) who are often overlooked and misunderstood, and whom every Catholic should know about.

The first is a Native American poet, medicine man and mystic who converted to Catholicism and whose cause for canonization was recently opened. His name is Nicholas Black Elk, and together with Nebraskan poet John Neihardt, the great Lakota visionary set forth one of the most extraordinary epic poems of all time in a book called Black Elk Speaks. The book is problematic because Neihardt, against Black Elk’s wishes, left out Black Elk’s conversion to Catholicism and subsequent life as a catechist to his people, giving the book a character Black Elk did not intend or approve. But one does not have to look very far to see the Catholic-infused poetic and religious sensibility visible in every word that Black Elk spoke and Neihardt transcribed. In an appendix to the book, Neihardt describes feeling:

that he had been sitting at the feet of a poet fit to dine with the finest spirits that have sung in his discordant world and are now among the tallest of the dead. Black Elk is a truly great poet; and if ever our world shall be privileged to see and understand his masterpiece, the horse dance…there will be few to question the indubitable truth of this statement.2

I encountered Black Elk in graduate school as a convert desperate for a way to begin reconciling what I had found in Rilke with what I had found in Catholicism, desperate for a voice from this side of the Atlantic and this side of the equator who could speak to things I was feeling in a true way. When I picked up Black Elk Speaks, it was like the book burned white hot in my hands. I’m going to quote at length from the opening section, because it is a deeply moving and poetic invitation into the space of his vision, which he has made available in writing “to help in bringing peace upon the earth, not only among men, but within men and between the whole of creation”:

My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, [only] to be grass upon the hills.

It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-legged sharing in it with the four-legged and the wings of the air and all green things, for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit.

This, then, is not the tale of a great hunter or of a great warrior, or of a great traveler, although I have made much meat in my time and fought for my people both as boy and man, and have gone far and seen strange lands and men. So also have many others done, and better than I. These things I shall remember by the way, and often they may seem to be the very tale itself, as when I was living them in happiness and sorrow. But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.

But if the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.3

The vision that follows is one of such spiritual intensity, so charged with symbolism and mystical depth, that it would be futile to attempt to excerpt a piece of it to quote here. But it is a vision of a world in which all will be well, in which all of the destructiveness of money and machines will be gone, and in which creation no longer suffers at the hands of men. That this vision is a gift to all people was made explicit in a final prayer Black Elk uttered near the end of his life, when he wished that through his vision and the book which made it available, and through the peace pipe which is a foundational symbol and ritual of the Lakota people, his children and those of Neidhardt—which is to say, all those people who come to Black Elk’s vision through the poetic power of the book—would “see many happy days.

I remain convinced that the future of the Church in America will find hope and direction in Black Elk’s great vision, which wants to help lead us into a deeper communion with God’s creation and into a deeper understanding of one another. But like Marcel, Black Elk recognized that as Christians born of a predominantly European culture, we must humble ourselves to realize that we have not embraced a peaceful relation with creation, and that we have much to learn, and much to do, in order to rediscover the secret of God’s creative love. In a beautiful and challenging forward to his book The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk said:

We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that he is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that he is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends.4

It is important to note in this passage how much emphasis Black Elk places on the knowing and understanding of the heart. He prays earlier in the same forward that “peace may come to those peoples who can understand, an understanding which must be of the heart and not of the head alone.” He who has ears, let him hear.

That there are two kinds of knowing, one of the head and one of the heart, is also emphasized in the epic work of seventeenth-century Mexican poet-nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Again here a well-meaning but confused intellectual (this time the searching poet and critic Octavio Paz, quoted earlier in this essay) is responsible for having written the Catholicism out of deeply Catholic work, leading to a critical assessment which takes Sor Juana’s great poem “First Dream” to a conclusion that is directly opposed to its content—a remarkable and unfortunate feat of critical acrobatics. But like Rilke in Europe and Black Elk in North America, Sor Juana found that our deepest knowledge of and relation to creation comes not through science, technology or machines—the fruits of the closed room—but through poetry.

“First Dream” begins with a long and dark descent into night, into the dream of comprehensive scientific knowledge, a theory of everything, as it were; the symbolism is full of vapors and shadows, strangenesses and fears. It is telling that the search after this kind of knowledge leads to greater and greater darkness as night deepens in the poem’s telling of Sor Juana’s desire to understand all things by “investigating nature.” But then something happens: at the near middle of night, there is a turn in her way of thinking. She writes of her struggle with her desire for a theory of everything, at times desiring it,

but at others I forswore

that wish, judging it excessive boldness

in one who failed to comprehend the smallest,

the most simple part of natural effects

nearest at hand, to attempt

to apprehend everything;

one who could not grasp the secret, obscure way

the pleasant fountain led its crystalline course,

…

one who did not know why an ivory cast

circles the frail beauty of a brief flower:

why a mingling of colors, scarlet blending

with the whiteness of dawn, is

its fragrant finery, or

why it exhales the scent of amber, unfolds

to the wind its raiment, beauteous because

delicate, which multiplies

into countless new daughters, forming a frilled

display fringed with gold tracings5

It is the investigator, Sor Juana-the-scientist, who fails to comprehend the truth of the fountain and of the flower. As the poem progresses, Sor Juana continues to wrestle with her desire to investigate nature and achieve comprehensive scientific knowledge; her part of the world turns towards the day, night lessens and her body begins to stir, her mind lets go of the dark dream, and at last:

…the fair golden mane of the Sun lit our

hemisphere, with just light and distributive

order, gave all things visible their colors,

restoring to the external senses their

function, the world illuminated with more

certain light, and I, awake.6

These are the final lines, when in the more certain light of day, it becomes clear that the fruit of her struggle is not scientific knowledge, but the poem—that knowledge of the heart which leads to a true understanding of creation. The brilliant thing about this poem is that it turns standard symbolism on its head and in so doing reveals a deeper truth: in western poetry and philosophy, day and the sun are typically associated with reason, and night or the dream are typically associated with poetry, that surreal, untrustworthy world that has been held in suspicion by scientific, rationalist minds since at least the time of Plato. Sor Juana sees the darkness of the investigative approach, wakes up, writes a magnificent poem, empties her room of all of its scientific texts and instruments, dons sackcloth and ashes, tends to plague-stricken nuns, and dies a beautiful death shortly thereafter. Far from defeat (as Paz would have it), her final act is one of true peace and reconciliation with God and with his creation.

There is of course much more to say about these magnificent poets, and about the ways in which poetry is the antidote to the ills plaguing our society, but it is perhaps enough, for now, to gesture in the direction of possibility. That it could take a global pandemic and a global climate catastrophe for us to wake up to the destructiveness and limitations of our closed-room ways is maybe a little sad, but also maybe a little hopeful. Neruda, in his turn, had an unbounded hope for poetry, and in particular for the poetry of the new world. It was a hope for a poetry of the open window, of walking through the window. So he continues the observation at the beginning of this essay with advice for the poets of the future:

I would say to young poets of my country and of Latin America—perhaps this is our tradition—to discover things, to be in the sea, to be in the mountains, and approach every living thing. And how can you not love such an approach to life, that has such extravagant surprises?7

This call is not just to the poets of his time and place, but a universal call, an invitation for all of us to exit the cave, leave the prison of our four walls and recycled air, take a deep breath and find a new way forward.

Anna Key is a poet, essayist, and thinking mother of four. Her first full-length work of poetry, Notebook of Forgetting, is available through In the Wind Projects.

 

Blue. The color of water. The color of the sky. Bright and lively but also melancholic and mysterious. The color of peacock and robin eggs. The color of Flannery O’Connor’s eyes. The color of the endpaper of Amy Alznauer’s and Ping Zhu’s wondrous book, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor: A Life.

When I opened this picture book with my six-month-old daughter, the first thing I felt was that I was swimming in color, in an ocean of potential possibilities. Materially the book is large, even for a picture book, my daughter wanted to grab it, take it into her little hands, but it was too much. This is good and as it should be. For Flannery O’Connor, her life, imagination, and stories are large, or as she wrote, sometimes “you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

And while perhaps Alznauer and Zhu’s book isn’t startling in the way O’Connor thought her work was, it certainly reorients you. Like little Flannery, the reader is enveloped by the spaces within these pages. Swathes of green, reds, yellow and blue. We are both in them, and also outside of them, in that often as a reader, we seem to be dwelling in the very mind of Flannery O’Connor herself. Certainly the beautiful paintings in this book, but also the beautiful words vibrate with energy. The pages reveal the vibrancy of this strange woman from Georgia.

We often imagine O’Connor only as the woman surrounded by peacocks, immersed in writing, and walking with her aluminum crutches. But Alznauer and Zhu begin in a different place and give us a window into her childhood before they lead us into her adulthood. It is a childhood that was filled with wonder, with oddities, with joys, with sadness, with humor, with sassiness. The young Flannery draws with her crayons fiercely, constantly, trying to capture the world around her — particularly chickens. She is tenacious, collecting birds, desiring the oddest fowl she can find. We see her mourn the loss of her beloved father, who always carried the drawing she made for him of “a fat turkey squatting on the ground and a stick-figure child sailing overhead.” We also see her begin to deal with the illness that will one day take her life, as she sits melancholically in her bedroom, lying on her bed with her “pigeon toes,” staring.

Alznauer traces Flannery’s attention to the odd to her childhood, but in particular, an experience of fame: “In that brief moment of fame, Flannery had a revelation. People didn’t want to see any old chicken; they wanted a weird one. There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look.” This is one of my favorite passages and also favorite illustration spreads in the whole book. In this passage, the line between Alznauer and O’Connor fades, and for a moment it’s as if Flannery the woman is telling us about Flannery the girl.

There are many things that have stayed with me after my first few readings of this book. Perhaps the two that have left me pondering, the two which I hope I can pass on to my daughter are – the importance of staring and the beauty enmeshed in suffering.

From the first page, Flannery is staring. Staring at everything. At chickens, at her parents, at the stars, at her toes, at an altar, at the darkness and sadness, at Sr. Consolata and her mother, at the old and the young, at the beautiful and the strange. Flannery stares – not to be nosy, not to gossip, or intrude – she stares in order to wonder at the world, to understand the workings of man, to disentangle the strangeness and glory of reality, to know and to love, to revel and to rest.

Too often we find we cannot do this. We do not give ourselves time to stare, to know and be known, to love, as Pushkin writes, “the sticky green leaves,” as expressing the mystery of it all. We are restless, with restless hearts. Perhaps Flannery shows us that while this restlessness and desire might sometimes ail us, the balm for this is to pause and stare and take in all that is around us. To look for grace peeking through, even in the odd, even in sorrow, even in pain. If we take time to stare, and let our restless heart sit, revelations abound.

Throughout her life Flannery O’Connor encountered and experienced pain and sorrow. But as is clear in her own writing and storytelling, and as Alznauer voices, she had an innate sense for the complexity of these moments: “She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness.” And here lies the mystery of Flannery O’Connor, and also one of the great mysteries of being. How do we as humans learn to move in a world that is burdened, that is violent, that is unjust, and that is cruel. How are we to live as beings that, as St. Augustine writes, “carry our mortality about with us?” Alznauer and Zhu show us Flannery in the midst of great loss. She turns to her faith, but she also turns “with a new ferocity” to writing. And she “took to staring.” Alznauer writes, “If she studied something hard enough, Flannery found, she could always discover some hidden strangeness, making it beautiful and funny and sad all at the same time.”

Flannery O’Connor’s method of living was to stare down reality, and to keep on staring and writing her whole life. But also to stare quietly, receptively. So I hope that you too will pick up this book, and that you might stare, at birds and people, at leaves and fireflies. And I also hope that even in the midst of sadness and pain you might await that “large and beautiful rushing in” even amidst it all.

 

The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor is available for purchase at Enchanted Lion Books at the first link in this article, or at other independent booksellers such as Women and Children First, or Bookshop.org

Jess Sweeney is Managing Director of the Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative for the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture as well as the founder of Commonplace Living. She completed her M.A. in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas and met her husband at a week-long seminar exploring Genealogies of Modernity. They now have a little 6 month old daughter who, amongst many things, enjoys gazing at the books and salon walls in their West Philly apartment. She enjoys finding time to paint with gouache, explore new children’s books, and write about art history. Find her on Instagram: @commonplaceliving

In an interview with Robert Bly, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda makes a remarkable distinction between two kinds of poetry—one written in closed rooms and another, by implication, written in the open air:

Well, I make a distinction between kinds of poetry. I am not a theoretician, but I do see as one kind of poetry the poetry which is written in closed rooms. I’ll give as an example Mallarmé, a very great French poet. I have sometimes seen photographs of his room; they were full of little beautiful objects—‘abanicos’—fans. He used to write beautiful poems on fans. But his rooms were stuffy, all full of curtains, no air. He is a great poet of closed rooms and it seems that many of the New World poets follow this tradition: they don’t open the window and you not only have to open the window but come through the windows and live with rivers and animals and beasts.1

The degree to which we have embraced the closed room in North America would have been incomprehensible to him. Many of our buildings—office towers, hospitals, schools, museums, and even our churches and our houses—have windows that don’t open at all. They’re stuffy, all full of curtains, there’s no air. What’s worse, those same buildings have many rooms with no windows at all. And how can you open the windows and walk through them if the windows don’t open, or—worse yet—if there aren’t any windows at all?

As COVID-19, which thrives in closed rooms, rips through our closed-room world, we’ve been forced by necessity to open some windows. I recently heard that a parish I once attended is holding masses outside, and for a moment I felt relief and hope that a global pandemic could motivate us to push aside the curtains for a moment. As a mother of four children, several of them still young and restless, I have spent the better part of the past decade attending mass from outside the building, where my children always want to be. They run around happily and sing their joyful songs to the Lord, while I walk around or sit quietly contemplating the sky and meditating on God’s grace and creative goodness. The truth is I’m grateful that my children never manage to sit through an indoor mass, because I’m not comfortable there, either. I don’t like to be around crowds of people in interior spaces where I can’t breathe fresh air or see the world God created. Mass is just as valid out of doors as it is in a closed room with closed-room music and small, perfunctory windows. It might even be hopeful.

As the earth continues to heat up and the evidence of industrial destruction piles up all around, so many people, especially but not exclusively young people, are beginning to feel desperate for a return to a more natural way of life, a simpler, humbler, and more ecologically-minded living that forgoes the empty, indifferent things money can buy and machines can make in favor of greater care for the earth and for each other. I meet so many people who are turning for inspiration to indigenous peoples and pre-Christian ways of living and seeking God, searching for a more meaningful existence than the present-day configuration of bureaucratic institutional society will allow. They want to be closer to the earth and closer to their family and friends. They want to spend time together living and working in ways that do not cause harm to the earth that sustains them. Many of these people are suspicious of or downright hostile towards Christianity, which they perhaps wrongly, but understandably, consider to be part of the problem.

Thank God we have St. Francis (everybody loves St. Francis!). In keeping with St. Francis’ legacy of nearness to and love for God’s creation, Pope Francis (in his wonderful and challenging encyclical Laudato Si) and subsequent movements in the Church (such as the Global Catholic Climate Movement) have begun making some headway in overcoming the stigma of Christianity’s perceived ‘man-dominates-nature’ spirituality. But it seems to me we must humbly admit that we have a very long way to go searching out and learning to embrace ways of living, working and worshiping that evidence greater degrees of ecological sensitivity.

The need for Christians to find their way to a deeper relation to creation was articulated nearly a century ago by French-Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Writing about the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose profound sensitivity to the spiritual nature of creation and the destructiveness of industrial ways of life is unsurpassed, Marcel makes the following observation:

The interconnected consciousness of death and resurrection which pervades [the Sonnets to Orpheus] like a breath of air from another world is the principle of a pious reverence for souls and things of which the secret has to be rediscovered today. Shall I say what I really think? I believe this to be true of most Christians, even those who have been genuinely touched by grace.2

Marcel had the feeling a century ago that we were losing a sense for the deeper reality felt in every aspect of creation, from the humble rock to the great mountain, from the tiniest critter to the tallest tree, from the drop of water to the sea—if only we will look and listen attentively.

That we, as a people, and even sometimes as Christians, have forgotten almost entirely how to look and listen to creation is evident in our closed-room houses and work-places, in our screens filled with virtual “windows” that take us even farther away from the real world outside our real but unopened and unopenable windows. It is evident in our cars and planes and trains that rush through the created world at inhuman speeds, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. It is evident in our industrial farms and food production factories that make us and the earth sicker every day; and evident in the screens we now carry with us that consume more and more of the precious hours we spend walking around in the outdoors, not looking at the things God has made or listening to what he has to say to us in the birdsong and the wavesong, in the quieter but still audible song of the tree and the blade of grass, of stone and sky, of all things that bear the mark of the maker. It’s almost impossible to miss the striking resemblance this screen-world bears to the images flickering on the walls of Plato’s cave where prisoners chained facing one direction cannot (or will not) turn around to see the light of the real world behind them.

Anna Key is a poet, essayist, and thinking mother of four. Her first full-length work of poetry, Notebook of Forgetting, is available through In the Wind Projects.

This is the first part of a two-part essay. Look for part two soon, with examples from two amazing poets of the New World, Nicholas Black Elk and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz