new poem

To tell of teaching the body to pray

Straight ways are walked to launder
me clean. I saint-watch Mary Anne
while pretending dreams sleep in
my chair. When she freshes covers
Her arms rise and fall. As enfleshed
concentration: her breasts risen
and falling as daily bread. Maybe
the still warm parts of her remain.

I dream she is getting ready for
work washing clean bodies for
funeral. And she prays that I can only
trust the dead. The digging of her
gardens reminds me of the sprawl
and tangle. Last night she told our
new priest of observing me smile.
A long time last since Advent.

New poem

Confessions of Fortune Neglected

When teaching, body minds me to breathe in: breath out.
Eyes do not see shimmers and bold shades wander wicked
and kind within and around the slick and vascular dense
spacelessness of low brain; a locus for haunting by former loves
as if Broca priviledged their campground and ancestral grounding

with a name. When walked and wandered and worked of needs
done is done, body is mostly alone and suprated in front of ugly
cookbooks and bogus textbooks and skanky dictionaries of butchered
saints. Body deigns why are there so few succulent spirits to recall
The taint is only and again so many mistakes and count them as cost

mistakes to pray for and burn. Body will say today that I (body is)
am made of mistakes. mistakes that many lovers of my teachers have
paid as gravedirt price. forgive us all hasty and arrogant performances
of cannot do this: cannot do this and cannot do this again: and finish
with the valued and jettisoned version of the consecrated strain.

So it goes. As if these doe breasted and rutted morphes of menstudents need
help emptying their bodies of meaning. They are feeding me kenosis as
apophatic masters inhabit each of them. Pools of since feeling is first battle
dance within slippery and graceless irregular verbs that rattle the locks of
their spore into particular sleek and styleless notions of defeat.

As if the god's persective never could change. The soul
of body is a movement along the chainbrakes and crack of
desire. Nowhere and elsewhere are holy sparks present
and counted as faith unto righteousness. Maybe the quickening
lust of flesh made heir is more to the point of their working rest.

New poem

Work of Fathers

What does chainwork say about these our Gods?

Does worship retain a plural? Are ropes of believe in me covering

less ground and trailways? What would it be as thread,
can parabola, or splinter of narrative coupling and penetrating

with a character arc make a difference in the winding
smoke and updraft of stories nee prayer long neglected?

What is the aboutness of chain implied by the cracks

in brick and stone, block and rock, our walls and fences?

Does it tell a prayer of load bearing desire? of forged Stocks
holding Persephone's long wait. How will a wall of block
wait for the chain? The raw stances holding our parts in desire aware?

Emerson's iron strand is a chain. Not moving up the via

not moving down the interdicts, but straining left and right.
Moving to host and stem, pared and loosened rindedness of want(ing).

Simple sweeps of stress moving steppes of not enough up nor down
linked top to ground as a question is presented by the nude

and fully human sensation of desire bidden hither and come.

good advice for writers

Linh Dinh

What I Usually Say to my Students

Written at the request of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who's compiling an anthology of "micro essays about approaches to teaching poetry":

Hoard your time, since you'll need it to be alone to think and to write.

Be frugal, since it'll allow you to work less and have more time to think and to write.

Try, as best you can, to have an overview of what's possible in writing, the various strategies attempted throughout history, throughout the world.

Identify the writers or works you admire the most, and read them very slowly, as many times as necessary.

Have faith that you will get better at thinking and writing, and that people will notice it, even if stingily and reluctantly, since you're not entitled to any attention.

Be prepared to be disappointed over and over.

For the sake of experimentation, it's OK to write badly, even foolishly, but don't try to pass off crap you yourself are disinterested in.

Even if you'll end up a mediocre writer, there's an outside chance you will become an excellent reader, so this pursuit will still be worthwhile, sort of, even as you lie there, unheated, loveless and clutching your last packet of Ramen Pride.

Don't be afraid to be as weird, meaning as PECULIARLY YOU as possible. Try to say it all. Be shameless. Don't hesitate to revisit a piece over and over to follow and capture everything that it really wants to say. Use each draft as a lead and a springboard into revealing something truly astounding, even if the actual changes (a revised noun here, an added adjective there) may be minimal.

Be as crazy and as perverse as possible, be inspired to the point of madness, but don't be glib.

Poetry should astound and frighten, not make you giggle for two seconds.

Quote from Dwelling in Possibilities

It's not a luxury, this Socratic education whose goal is self-knowledge. Constantly I see my students leaving the university, determined to do not what they want and need to do, but what their parents and their friends believe that they ought to do. And in this they can in some measure succeed. Society has a great span of resources to assist someone in doing what he's not cut out for yet still must be done. Alcohol, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don't need will all help you jam your round peg of a self into this or that square-holed profession.

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm

Christmas, Christ Mass, and Incarnation

amen hesid

 

 

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Christmas, Christ Mass, and Incarnation

via flying.farther by d. w. horstkoetter on 12/18/08

This post was brought to you by the insanity that spews from radio stations. I hate Christmas songs. I detest Christmas specials (save for Colbert's Christmas Special). And quite frankly, this "war on Christmas" and "saving Christmas from all those atheists" is a bunch of crap. You're saving Christmas — the capitalist holiday — from any meaningful critique.

Now enter the Christian calendar and the season of Advent. Often in this time, we talk of the incarnation. On one hand, it is a perfectly legitimate time to do so. On the other hand, we misunderstand the incarnation as simply divine conception. With this problem, we disconnect the incarnation from the entire life of Jesus and therefore, misunderstand much to be seen in the incarnation.

We need to remember that the action of the incarnation made God's story – his mind and heart – known as never before. It showed God's acceptance and rejection; it was the embodiment of the divine yes and no within history, to a greater extent than ever before. While God at the beginning called creation good, God in the incarnation brought creation into herself. At the same time, Johann Metz argues, "God's divinity consists in the fact that he does not remove the difference between himself and what is other, but rather accepts the other precisely as different from himself." In other words, God accepted creation. In point of fact, "[i]n Jesus Christ, man and his world were accepted by the eternal Word, finally and irrevocably…. what is true of this nature that Christ accepted is also fundamentally true of the acceptance of man and his world by God." He did not ontologically destroy or divinize creation; he did not conflate the divine and human narratives, he accepted creation.

God's acceptance of the world and humanity was proclaimed from the beginning: when Gabriel told Mary of what was growing in her and she accepted it with praise, when Joseph accepted the Messiah growing within Mary and Mary's own obedience, when Jesus was born, when the Angels told the shepherds, and when the wise men brought their offerings. God's coming, God's acceptance, was heralded to all. In the proclamations, God did not only affirm creation, but upheld much more about the world. The incarnation was no vague or one-sided acceptance of humanity; the announcements were one of affirmation and salvation. Coming as an infant, from a miraculous birth, the creator of the world grew up; he was formed by the divine promises of the past and looked into the future. Thus "the process of history is 'accepted' in the Christian logos and remains so." However, as scandalous as the idea that the creator grew up, it is inextricably linked to an equally scandalous idea, one of salvation history – one of promise and interruptive action by the creator within history – that makes good on the proclamations from birth. Metz maintains that the otherness, or creation status, of the world is necessary for the world to be, and that "[t]he reality of the world as creation is always mediated through the historical saving reality of the world."

However, Colin Gunton reminds theology and the world, from another approach, that the whole of creation has a telos that speaks of salvation, while affirming the creator/created distinction:

If, then, to be created is to be in indissoluble relation to God through the Son and Spirit, it follows that that shape of being, the dynamic form that it takes in its various space-time configurations, derives from creation's relation to its creator. Incarnation, the involvement of God the Son, on the initiative of the Father and through the enabling of the Spirit, then, is a violation of the being neither of God nor of the world. On the contrary, there is a sense in which it realizes the true being of them both, for it perfects at once the Father's work of creation and creature's determination at the traditional doctrine of the incarnation and its teaching of the coming of the one through whom all things were made into direct and personal relation with the creation.

With the creation act bringing creator and creation into a distinct relationship, the incarnation takes center stage, where "Jesus Christ is the one through whom all things take their shape and to whom the Spirit directs them. The shape is unmistakably full of purpose and eschatological significance: "[w]hen the Spirit shapes him a body from the flesh of Mary, what we see is not just the working out of election—through we do see that—but the renewing of the whole of creation, the redirecting of the world to its end." The incarnation, quite simply, restores "creation's teleology."

It is from this incarnational realigning of creation with its telos that salvation history can be understood, and vice versa: the acceptance of creation-history also meant the salvation of creation-history. While the acceptance of God was extensive – in both time and space, it was not only acceptance. In short, the salvation of creation and history are interlinked. The creator incarnate, more than metaphorically elbow deep in creation and history, would not stand for a broken state – that is, creation-history deviated from its telos. The world, humanity, and history must be reconciled. But what method for reconciliation would God incarnate use? Grace and interruption was and is the method.

Thus, Christ's Mass should never be understood within the context of a jolly, vapid song, or the fight for a Christmas tree in a shopping mall or airport, but within hesed, promise-making, promise-fulfilling, solidarity, divine love, justice, peace, and reconciliation. This is why I detest so much the false Christmas and those who seek to wage, in their estimates, a holy war to save Christmas. We must remember that it is for their bourgeois Christmas, not Christ's Mass of acceptance and reconciliation.

Posted in Colin Gunton, incarnation, Johann Metz, reconcile      

 

 

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Advent...the Conspiracy

This is the truth with a capital T and is Beauty in that we as Christians should do everything in our power to destry cute. Especially christmas cute and the light and sweet pornography associated with the holi-daze instead of holy day(ze(.

 

 

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Advent...the Conspiracy

via Out of Ur by UrL Scaramanga on 12/18/08

Our friends at Advent Conspiracy have produced a truly thought provoking video for this season. Is your church participating in this campaign? I'd love to hear about your experiences. If not, how would people react in your church if you showed this video?

 

 

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Lost Souls

this soul and belief in the soul still is in tension for me.

 

 

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Lost Souls

via From the Catacombs by Caryl on 12/11/08

[Note: This is a re-post from November, 2006]

Vox clamato in deserto . . .

The writings of the Christian ascetics of the Orthodox tradition comprise the collection of texts known as the Philokalia, and span the 4th to the 15th centuries. The first compilation of these writings was completed in the 18th century. In our time a four-volume set was compiled, translated and edited by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, and published in 1979 in Great Britain under the auspices of the Eling Trust.

It is a shock to encounter the Desert Fathers. Almost everything that comes to mind when we hear of them is wrong, and there are vast layers of assumption and prejudice that have to be peeled away before we can understand what they mean about the different energy levels in human nature - intellect, image, emotion, wishing, perception, thinking, voluntary and involuntary. Compared to their acuity of discernment, Western philosophy seems a dry husk, and the massive accumulations of psychology and social science following the post-philosophical age - that is, the harvest of modernity - seem like mere dust.

The shock of Christian ascesis consists in realizing how much the activity of thought depends upon or presupposes the existence of the soul. But it is precisely the existence of the soul that is at issue. As Jacob Needleman writes in Lost Christianity, referencing a modern practitioner of Christian ascesis, "... the soul is not a fixed entity. According to Father Sylvan, it is a movement that begins whenever man experiences the psychological pain of contradiction." [1]

It was a disaster for Christianity, according to Father Sylvan, when it accepted the existence of the soul already "in finished form" in human nature.

This "given-ness" of the soul in the Christian view of human nature passed out of active use several centuries ago - what modern discipline concerns itself with the soul in any meaningful way? -- and has been succeeded by the "given-ness" of reason or intellect -- the a priori assumption of reason. John McMurtry writes that the first rule of the "Group-Mind" is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection:

"When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, the group-mind disconnects by stopping thought before it arises."

Christian ascesis is the practice of giving attention to thoughts as they first appear, thus it is a practice wholly at odds with a priorism and with all forms of mechanical, psychic or associative activity which masquerades as "thought." According to Father Sylvan, a hundred, a thousand times a day, thoughts that challenge or contradict assumptions and beliefs, thoughts that might provoke self-questioning or discomfort about some fact or emotion or received wisdom, thoughts that might force one to confront one's own laziness, anger, lack of love, lack of integrity -- such thoughts are continually circling the perimeter of the mind and sometimes even penetrate its arena. And yet they come to nothing, they are quickly repelled, conveniently forgotten, dispersed, and covered over by compulsive action, rationalization, explanation, or emotional reaction. Father Sylvan calls this incessant activity of covering over the Question the "First Dispersal of the Soul." It means that the force of attention is wasted, degraded by absorption into one part or another of the psycho-physical organism, and rendered useless for the growth of the soul. Man becomes trapped in an "automatism of non-redemptive experience," which he likens to St. Paul's "body of death."

The struggle of Christian ascesis is to contain the energy of the Question within oneself so that the Soul can come into being. Thus, the existence of the Soul is not a given, not an a priori assumption. It is an energy formed through the confrontation with question and contradiction, an energy that has to be sought, recognized, collected and accumulated - "pondered in the heart." This is why "God can only speak to the soul," according to Father Sylvan, "and only when the soul exists." How accurately this comment foreshadows the condition of modern man, exemplified in John Derbyshire's complaint concerning his loss of religious faith. When asked by an interviewer whether he had ever had a religious experience, Derbyshire replied, "No, and I'm miffed by this."

It is a relief to move from this world of the whining modern, who expects to be provided with spiritual experience in the full armory of modern comforts, to the writings of the Desert Fathers. St. Mark the Ascetic (5th century; sometimes known as Mark the Hermit) says "Never belittle the significance of your thoughts; for not one escapes God's notice."

Of course - for it is these very thoughts, no matter how seemingly insignificant, that must be attended to and carefully 'interrogated.' The process of interrogating the thoughts is likened in the New Testament to 'dividing the sheep from the goats.' It is an activity of continuous discernment and sifting of thoughts that can lead to the 'gathering' of what is vital in them, 'saving' them and 'saving in them' that which is possible for future development.

Then there is this astonishing passage from "No Righteousness by Works:"

"Involuntary thoughts arise from previous sin; voluntary ones from our free
will. Thus the latter are the cause of the former." [Italics mine.]

I emphasized this last sentence as underscoring the fact of 'Presence,' which is the aim of Christian ascesis - dwelling in the presence and present attention of the soul, which acts retroactively upon the 'past.' It is not the past that determines in the present, as in deterministic modern psychology; it is the present disposition of the soul that influences the kind of past that we even perceive. And again, emphasizing our responsibility for our thoughts, as for our experience, St. Mark the Hermit says: "Do not say, 'I don't want it, but it happens.' For even though you may not want the thing itself, yet you welcome what causes it."

And again, responsibility is presence: "It is the uneven quality of our thoughts that produces changes in our condition. For God assigns to our voluntary thoughts consequences which are appropriate but not necessarily of our choice."

The quality of attention: "When you find that some thought is disturbing you deeply in yourself and is breaking the stillness of your intellect with passion, you may sure it was your intellect which, taking the initiative, first activated the thought and placed it in your heart."

And finally: "He who does not choose to suffer for the sake of truth will be chastened more painfully by suffering he has not chosen."

There are many other sayings of this quality in St. Mark the Hermit's "On the Spiritual Law." And his comprise a small portion of this wonderful collection of texts. In reading these texts one can understand why the West underwent a tremendous historical development, and how the energy these Fathers discerned and elucidated in the soul later exploded into so many fields - fields seemingly quite diverse from their lucid gaze. And reading them today brings one into a renewed sense for the failures of modern Western intelligence, which now at the pinnacle of its power seems like a blind and destructive giant. The recovery of lucid intelligence in the West would be greatly assisted by a revival and study of these texts. Thinking and empathy can only arise in the soul, but if there is no basis in the soul for them to become active and conscious, these manifestations attest to the presence of energies, and these energies do not just cease to be or disappear. They must go somewhere. Instead of empathy and thinking, the energies fuel cancerous hatreds and controlling, rigidifying obsessions.

The Philokalia is our crying need -- in the twilight of our souls, it can be a lamp to hold up against our darkening minds.

[1] Simone Weil on contradiction: "God has entrusted all phenomena, without any exception, to the mechanism of this world... The contradictions which the mind is brought up against form the only realities, the only means of judging what is real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test on the part of necessity."

Compare also Richard Weaver, speaking of the liberalism in Western societies: "Its fundamental incapacity to think, arising from an inability to see contradictions, deprives it of the power to propagate." From his Ideas Have Consequences (1948).

 

 

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amen

As the great Chinese poet Yang Wan-li said, a thousand years ago, "A poem is made of words, yes, but take away the words and the poem remains."