The Riotous Upheaval of Conversion: Timothy Bartel’s A Crown for Abba Moses

A Crown for Abba Moses by Timothy Bartel
Solum Literary Press, 2023; 182 pp., $16.99

Reading a book of selected poems can sometimes feel like biting into a fried oreo uni nigiri fusion burger at a slow food restaurant with industrial light fixtures and house-made burlap coasters. Somehow, the eclectic combination works, but it’s difficult to say how. Timothy Bartel’s latest collection, A Crown for Abba Moses, presents similarly complex fusions and tonal shifts that challenge the reader to discern how the various sections speak to one another. One helpful way to approach this collection is with attentiveness to the theme of spiritual conversion as a journey through the soul’s remote wilderness.

In the title section, “A Crown for Abba Moses,” conversion paves the path to spiritual fatherhood for Moses of Ethiopia, a Desert Father with a criminal past. Street language introduces young Moses as a guy who will “teach the sons of bitches ’cross the Nile /The lesson that [he] learned while still inside: / The longest lasting memories you make /Are scars you carve into your enemy.” Moses is not afraid to “snuff a snitch” or burglarize a “hustler called Big Xerxes [with] three rams.” And he’s a player, about whom people ask, “‘Isn’t he / The one that laid the Pharaoh’s daughter?’” Moses’s gritty backstory reminds us that the path to God may be rough but lies open to us in our brokenness.

After his initial conversion experience, in a touching scene on the monastery roof with wise Abbot Isodore, Moses struggles toward his saintly future. Tradition says that Moses bemoaned the long road to holiness. In response, the abbot pointed out how slowly dawn defeated the night. Just so, the abbot explained, grace takes time to light a soul. In Bartel’s retelling, the abbot says:

“‘Look West’: and there [are] swarms of demons, clogged
In every desert cave. ‘Look East’: and there
[Are] twice as many angels, strapped for war.”

The image of demons swarming makes us recoil; we feel the urgency of finding the path to redemption. Advancing on his own purgative path, Moses becomes increasingly humble. When asked to judge a fellow monk who has sinned, Moses arrives carrying a bag of sand with holes in it and says:

“‘My brothers, see this bag of sand?
It holds my many sins. They pour behind
Me, but I cannot see them, for I come
To judge my brother and ignore myself.”
His conversion fully realized, Abba Moses can now mentor others in the way of mercy.

Whereas the Moses series considers the transformation from sinner to saint, “The Camillad” examines the unearned gift of grace and the alignment of human will with divine purpose. The poem expands the narrative of the female warrior Camilla from Virgil’s Aeneid. Bartel successfully imitates Virgil’s epic poetic voice and develops Camilla’s character. The poem opens in media res with Aeneas and two other suitors contending for princess Lavinia’s hand, their armies clashing. Camilla offers military support to Lavinia. In recounting her backstory to the princess, Camilla expresses gratitude to the goddess Diana for granting her a warrior’s life, “for the gifts [Diana] gives to girls— /And chief of these, virginity: the life / That, undistracted, can pursue the hunt.” Note the resonances of the consecrated life and sainthood. Such commitment first entails responding to a call to devote one’s life to God, unencumbered by distractions. To fulfill her life of service, Camilla, like Moses, must maintain purity of will and allow the divine to re-form her. This re-formation occurs when Camilla is at her loneliest and most discouraged. Covered in mud and exhausted from hunting, Camilla cries out in anguish at her hard life. Suddenly, she hears “a far, faint song, as of a girl, or stream.” She draws closer and sees

“...the sight that none have seen and lived:
The virgin goddess, bright and bathing in
A pool of perfect water. Perfect form
Inhered in every limb and living breath…”

In this moment, Camilla witnesses ideal, eternal beauty. Just as Dante finds himself unable to adequately express heaven’s glory in Paradiso, Camilla says that any description of Diana “would fall short.” Approaching the radiant goddess, Camilla collapses, sobbing. Diana washes her and grants an experience of holy ecstasy. Full of tenderness and awe, this scene metaphorically portrays the yearning and joy of a suppliant before God. With the abandon of St. John of the Cross in Dark Night of the Soul, Camilla says:

“I was the Earth while high Diana held
My self transformed within her hand, and I
Experienced a spring, I think, at last:”
“The Camillad” as a whole examines a life aligned with divine will.

Other sections in the collection convey the turbulence and unpredictability of the conversion process. For example, “Arroyos: Sijo and Other Poems” fuses the motif of the arroyo, a Southwestern geological feature, with the sijo, a traditional form of Korean vocal performance. Although this fusion feels jarring, it holds up under scrutiny; the yearning moan of the sijo formally and emotionally echoes the thematic fissure symbolized by the arroyo. Much like our souls working toward reconciliation, arroyos are “zones of concentrated geomorphic activity” that we don’t fully understand. In the poem “Arroyos,” monks look upon “the godless lands they’ve travelled” and “gasp / to see a maze of souls carved in with faith.” Bartel thus examines the spiritual landscape of conversion: tension, change, and upheaval.

In the section titled Exalt!, a series of short odes in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., celebrate what Hopkins called inscape, after Duns Soctus’ concept of haecceity, “this-ness,” the unique essence of each created thing. Inscape reveals a glimmer of the divine. Bartel’s odes celebrate the inscape of everything from raindrops, moonrise, mammoths, and headlights, to the donut shop, game night, Japan, and grizzlies. These odes invite us to discern the sacramental nature of the created world.

Rounding out the collection are translations and a series of Golden sonnets in a nonce form that Bartel created based on the Fibonacci sequence. Bartel's Golden sonnets address the search for wisdom, reverence for the created world, and religious conflict. New poems touch on themes of unrest, division, intellectual liberty, and the Incarnation, as in “Stars,” which concludes in anticipation of the nativity, “when the timeless first felt time’s weight.” These poems look toward the ultimate redemption, pure gift, impossible through our own efforts.

In the final poem, “Four Counties,” the speaker reflects on youthful waywardness in four Californian settings, where he and his friends studied theology, swilled beer late into the night, got tattoos of “the muraled Jesus [from their] Christian college walls,” and partied with their “teeth grinding at midnight / while the moonlight [made] a thousand children smile.” Recklessness and searching build until the speaker reveals “that these ends of earth / have seen men that shed their molting selves and prayed.” Deep in the mud of spiritual unrest, our change of heart germinates. We move imperceptibly toward honest introspection, knowing it will hurt.

With this tension, Bartel closes his collection, leaving us to contemplate our need for reflection and redemption. A book of layered fusions, technical proficiency, and historical acumen, A Crown for Abba Moses challenges readers to bare their souls to God and welcome the discomfort, mystery, and transformative power of conversion.