Oilithreachta

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my first sestina. My apologies if it's a bit abstruse... the form took over, and I could only try to keep up with it.

The Summer breathes in rain and limestone crumbs
And nestles in the nettles for a rest
Beneath wool blankets of her heavy peace.
I sought her once, but found my eyes were blind
And feet too young to tread her ancient stones,
The incarnations of the stuff of Time.

But Summer’s chief possession is her time,
The time it takes for sprouts to grow from crumbs
Or walls to churn the weight of their own stones.
So in the pilgrimage that she calls “rest”
I rubbed my muddy eyes that lingered blind
And let her redefine the Irish “peace.”

And on the way I met a man, a piece
Of tender paper passing like the time
Between his brittle fingers with his blind
Routine of ritual tobacco crumbs.
He grinned a “Tóg go bóg é”—take a rest—
And perched to smoke his sculpture on the stones.

And as a child I might have cast some stones
Or at the least recited off a piece
Of dime-store jargon hoarded with the rest
Of my resourcefulness I lost in time.
Yet now I sat a spell to cull his crumbs,
Just old enough at least to know I’m blind.

For if there’s grace enough to heal the blind,
It tumbles down like execution stones
Beneath the slab where dogs can gather crumbs.
And on the coast of Inis Oírr there’s Peace
That soaks the rain of Irish summer-time
And trembles in the wind just like the rest

Of us. And we who take the yoke of rest
And find that mud and spittle leave us blind
May learn to see trees walking over time
(If trees could grow in Cheathrú Rua stones),
Or pass the sacramental sign of Peace
As if the dust were Eucharistic crumbs.

For here time passes like the pilgrim’s rest
And falls like sandwich crumbs that tumble blind
On stones that catch as many grains of peace.

They shall not enter into my rest, II

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Psalm 127:2

Thursday evening I celebrated the end of an exhausting week (in which I learned that keeping up with five courses that utilize three dead languages, one of which I haven’t learned yet, might have been a bit ambitious for my first semester) by having a dear friend over for dinner. Toward the end of her visit we found ourselves in a conversation about contemplative prayer, a spiritual discipline my soul has been quite slow to learn.

Ever since I was first introduced to the Divine Office, I have become increasingly aware both of the value of contemplative prayer and of my great deficiency in it. Prayer was always something I did, whether that was journaling (by far the most natural form for me) or talking casually on the way to class or venting in a fit of angst or fasting from food or sleep or any other bodily need I could think of (asceticism was also quite natural for me). I have never learned prayer that was not an intellectual exercise or a willful discipline, prayer that was found outside myself rather than inside, prayer that involved uniting myself to something and someone else rather than exploring my own mind.

But that night in a strange intersection of my academic weariness (I had turned in two papers and took a Latin quiz that day) and my soul’s deficiency in finding communion with her maker, I realized something as if it were a novel concept:

I was tired.

I was always tired. I had lived on sleep deprivation since I discovered books as a young girl, and exhaustion became a matter of principle by college. Dualism, the heresy that separates spiritual matters from physical matter as if they are distinguishable, had been so pervasive in my thinking that rest still feels overly indulgent. But if dualism really is a heresy after all, then it may be that a neglect of my body is not only damaging to my body; it may be damaging to my soul.

At any rate, on a sudden impulse soon after my friend left, I went to bed hours before it was absolutely necessary, and I let myself sleep an hour past my alarm.

When I awoke my soul was refreshed, as if it had just spent eight hours communing with God. I began to wonder if my tired body was connected to my restless soul. I began to wonder what it would be like to wake from eight hours of sleep more often.

...for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Abide with me

Continuing on the theme of comfort in the midst of transitions, departures, and death, this hymn struck me today:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word;
But as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord,
Familiar, condescending, patient, free.
Come not to sojourn, but abide with me.

Come not in terrors, as the King of kings,
But kind and good, with healing in Thy wings,
Tears for all woes, a heart for every plea—
Come, Friend of sinners, and thus bide with me.

Thou on my head in early youth didst smile;
And, though rebellious and perverse meanwhile,
Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee,
On to the close, O Lord, abide with me.

I need Thy presence every passing hour.
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

-Hen­ry F. Lyte, 1847

And there was a great calm...

There're Graces strewn like wildflowers that turn
Their gatherer into a child, and all
The grubby roadside violets, she will learn,
Have clutched the very hands that let them fall.
And Grace has wrapped around like ocean foam
That's deeper, fuller, older than Despair, and in
That vastness even sorrow finds a home
In depths extending deeper than the sin.
Be still, my soul, for Home is larger than
Your restlessness. Be still, for Peace is deeper
Than your tears. The runner and the sleeper
Never leave the place where they began;
For we the restless wander to the stars,
Surprised to find our roots extend that far.

The Irish work ethic

“Is this a good time?” I asked when I arrived at the priory. It was indeed the time we had arranged for me to come help preparing the apartment upstairs for the arrival of guests the next day, but I’m always a bit self-conscious about being on time in Ireland.

“Yes, it’s a perfect time,” Fr Padraic said as he welcomed me inside. “I was just about to smoke a cigarette; would you like to join me in the back?” Since he had been a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that needed to happen that day (thus my offer to help), I assumed it would be a quick break.

I had yet to learn about the Irish work ethic.

Fr Padraic smoked a cigarette as he checked on the plumbing work being done out back. Then he invited me back inside for tea.

Ready for the mountain of tasks for the day, he went to the office to put some finishing touches on his dissertation he was about to get bound. Then he smoked another cigarette.

Dissertation in hand, we walked to the binders, only to discover upon arrival that the title page had a smudge. We returned to the priory to print out another title page. Then he smoked another cigarette.

We returned to the binders with the new page in hand, and stopped at a department store on the way back to pick up a dresser. Tired from carrying the load, he checked on the plumbers again, smoking another cigarette amid his amicable Irish banter with the laborers. Then we went to a cafe for tea and biscuits.

Then he smoked another cigarette, musing over the great amount of work we had already accomplished, and how much help I had been.

Finally, sometime after noon we got to the main task of the day and walked to Tesco to buy dishes and cutlery for the apartment. Now that I finally had a task that felt useful, I began washing the newly purchased dishes and cleaning out the mysterious collection of entirely random objects that had accumulated in the unused kitchen. Before I had got very far, Fr Padraic interrupted me for lunch. It was a light lunch, but included gin-and-tonic and more cigarettes.

Fortunately after lunch I managed to work quickly enough to finish the kitchen and help Fr Padraic select some curtains online for one of the bedrooms. Then it was time for another cigarette.

As the day waned, we walked to the store to buy the curtains. Upon our return, Fr Padraic bumped into some people he knew and invited them in for tea. By the time that was over, thoroughly exhausted from the day’s tasks, Fr Padraic thanked me for my invaluable help and escorted me to the door. “What a lot of work we’ve got done today!” he exclaimed with all sincerity as I left the priory.

Of course, jokes about the work day with Fr Padraic aside, I know that Ireland has had more than its fair share of brutalizing labor inflicted upon it over the years, so I do not actually intend to imply that the Irish are lazy. From what I can tell, the Irish seem to work as hard as they need to (though there are many places where the Irish and Americans would quibble over the definition of “need”), but no more than that. If they don’t need to work as hard, they don’t; and when they can relax (and enjoy a cigarette), they absolutely do.

It may look lazy to an American entrepreneur, but there is something profoundly healing to me about a work ethic that strives for nothing more than the day’s tasks, that does not try to get 25 hours out of a day nor would work the full 24. Pitfalls of the Irish economy aside for now, there is much for me to learn from it.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray, and ask nothing more. “Give us this day our daily tasks,” the Irish might also pray, and expect nothing more. Fr. Padraic accomplished what his Tuesday demanded, and nothing more. I’m sure he went to bed feeling content... after he smoked another cigarette.

Pentecost, 2010

Find rest my soul; the work is done,
And you may simply keep the feast.
There's time to rest just as to run
And to receive and pass the peace.
The calling is revealed a grace: the choice
To follow where you're fashioned to rejoice.

The Spirit hovers on the deep
That 'til today had groaned in pain,
And those who sewed in tears will reap
The New Creation green from rain.
You entered fractured, but you found the whole;
So rest, O weary Pilgrim — rest my soul.

God rested

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
-From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Today we have been sitting with the death of Christ, the great, deep silence that will not be broken until tonight (not to get ahead of the story).

If I had posted on Thursday, I would have mentioned something about the New Testament reading in Hebrews 5 that says “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (a peculiar use of the word “heard,” I would say). I mentioned before that this seems to be Christ’s credentials as the Great High Priest. Rejoice, he tells us; we have as a mediator a man who similarly prayed seemingly unanswered prayers. What kind of a high priest is a man who begs God to let the cup pass from him but willingly drinks it anyway?

But he did drink it yesterday, and it is finished. Now, on the seventh day, God rests. At morning prayers we read from the previous chapter of Hebrews that “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” Christ has offered his prayers to let the cup pass, he has drunk from it anyway, he declared his work finished, and today he rests. This is our high priest. This is the mediator of the new covenant. This is our model of suffering.

I read yesterday in a sermon of Melito of Sardis:

It is he who endured every kind of suffering in all those who foreshadowed him. In Abel he was slain, in Isaac bound, in Jacob exiled, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed to die. He was sacrificed in the Passover Lamb, persecuted in David, dishonored in the prophets.

Now, it turns out, he is also prefigured (or postfigured) in everyone who has or will ever offer seemingly unanswered prayers, anyone who has ever tasted suffering he longed to avoid, anyone who has ever faced the silence of God.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.

Pixie Dust

There is a mendacious rumor abroad that Southerners should be fixed. How can we help the backward agrarians get on the great progressive bandwagon, well-meaning philanthropic carpetbaggers might have asked. I remember reading a history textbook in my undergrad years that puzzled over the reasons why industrialization took so long to set in and improve the quality of life for the rural poor in the South. The answer to me is quite obvious: the rural poor didn’t want improvement.

Today I sat at my corner of my favorite coffee shop, and something magical happened: large chunks of white powder fell from the sky outside the window, initially mistaken for debris from the perpetual construction that plagues every university I have ever attended (that is only two, of course, but doesn’t the superlative make it sound dramatic?), but soon realized to be the 4-letter-word that has been on everyone’s lips like a whirlwind that cleared the grocery store shelves of milk, eggs, and bread ever since the meteorologists had hinted the possibility days earlier: SNOW.

The barista screamed and ran outside to perform her snow-dance. Every eye in the coffee shop was glued to the window. Adults on the street lifted their faces to the sky with open mouths like five-year-olds. Children, many of whom had been let out of school for the mere possibility of snow, gave the adults a run for their money on glee. Even the construction workers paused and extended their gloved hands. There was nary a smileless face anywhere in the city as the chunks of white powder functioned as pixie dust in an otherwise gloomy day.

And then it was gone.

Later I read a (northern) friend’s blog and heard his (delightfully true) take on the experience of trying to find milk and eggs at the grocery store. Despite the utter appropriateness of his caricature of Southern snow-panic, I felt like something magic had happened, and he had missed it. Yes, as my nephew had once reminded me, God did indeed make magic in the world. I saw some this morning.

And now, as the possibility of bonus winter medleys is on the forecast for tonight and my graduation tomorrow afternoon hangs in the precarious balance of Mother Nature’s finicky Southern temperament, I remember that even now in our high-paced, 21st-century culture, there still remains a Sabbath rest for God’s people. It comes rarely and unpredictability, an unplanned holiday that forces begrudging businessmen and ecstatic schoolchildren alike to rest at home despite the ever-driving forces of the stockmarket and academia, but it comes.

At least it comes to backward Southerners when there is a hint of any form of frozen precipitation. That is, it comes to them after they get back from their panicked trips to the grocery store for milk, eggs, and bread.

They shall not enter my rest

Moses said to the LORD, "Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,' to the land that you swore to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me and say, 'Give us meat, that we may eat.' I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness."

“The story of Moses always breaks my heart,” I remember explaining to a friend across the table at a coffee shop. “He clearly had never wanted to lead the people in the first place, but had led them anyway when God called him. He had a miserable time with it. The people were constantly wanting to stone him, and their stubbornness added another 40 years to the journey. During that time God decides he’s going to wipe out the people, and it is Moses who wrestles with him and convinces him not to wipe them out. And after all that, at some point, God tells Moses to speak to a rock and he hits it instead, and then God won’t let him into the Promised Land. Seems like God’s pretty mean.”

“No,” my friend struggled, seemingly unsure of how he knew this, “God’s not mean. Something else is going on there.”

“Seems pretty mean to me,” I persisted. “And I’m no Moses... if this is what a man like Moses can expect after 80 years of serving God, what do we have to look forward to?”

My friend looked at me sadly, unsure of how to speak words of Grace into the world as I saw it.

“I mean,” I continued when he had nothing to add, “he keeps leading the ‘stiff-necked’ people after God tells him he won’t get to enter the Promised Land, and then sits on a mountain at the edge of Canaan begging God to change his mind. But God had some point he needed to make about Moses not showing his name as holy before the people or some ambiguous thing like that. For whatever reason, that was worth more to God than letting Moses enter the Promised Land.”

I concluded strongly, as if I dared him to suggest redemption in a story like that.

“Em,” my friend finally interjected, “Moses did enter the Promised Land.”

I looked stupidly at him, wondering which Bible he had read.

“He did,” he insisted. “At the Transfiguration. Jesus was there with Moses and Elijah. Moses was there.”

I sat there dumbfounded. Truth be told, I was halfway scandalized. My friend was right. My most bleak, grim, hated Bible story had suddenly been tainted with Grace, and my standard extreme-situation trump card had been trumped. While Moses had been cheated out of the Promised Land because of some ambiguous punishment, the Punishment had been cheated out of Moses when Christ came.

And I don’t know why that conversation is coming back to me this week, except that I am being reminded that as much as pain is deeper than the airy, ephemeral sentiments that Christians often confuse with hope, Grace is deeper than the pain.

Slemish

The hill of Slemish wraps herself beneath
Green blankets, wool of living sheep, and time.
A million Irish evenings sink their teeth
Into her weary, mute, volcanic grime;
But she will stoutly take a million more,
Not as a conqueror, but one who’s done
The most she could and takes a nap before
Her pint of Beamish with the morning sun.
For Ireland wears suffering like a well-
Worn t-shirt, and the scars are covered in
Green blankets, matty wool, and time, and tell
Of beauty running deeply as the sin.
“Come rest,” she says, “for beds are for the clever.
The fight goes on, but beer won’t last forever.”

Bold rest

As soon as my classwork, undergraduate grading, and brother’s graduation were out of the way, I took off on a much-needed vacation, my first break from schoolwork since I started my program two years ago (a near-break at least... I had to bring one small piece of work). I drove across the state of Virginia last week, visiting friends and family scattered in various towns from the mountains to the coast.

• I enjoyed dear friends and their growing collection of fiancés, spouses, and children.
• I watched about eight different movies.
• I had a picnic where the James River meets the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• I drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
• I went to mass in downtown Lynchburg and had dinner with a priest afterwards.
• I salsa danced on the outdoor patio of a Peruvian restaurant with an old friend.
• I listened to a friend read a children’s book aloud against the music of the evening rain while I smoked my pipe.
• I let myself buy two new CDs.
  
• I painted three different watercolor paintings.
• I walked a mile barefoot along railroad tracks.
• I took a nap beside the James River.
• I got a tour of a soon-to-be-renovated 100-year-old theater.
• I took my grandmother out for dinner and breakfast.
• I let my cousins take me out for some nocturnal festivities at their favorite bar, succeeding at being on the winning team of the arcade game and at managing the drinks they bought me without a hangover the next day.
• I played a round of Frisbee golf.
  
• I ate seafood at a restaurant on the beach.
• I stuck my toes in the ocean.
• I marveled at the stars over the darkness of the no-man’s-land on the way home.

My first name means “industrious,” and some have suggested that I am aptly named; at my high school graduation one of my teachers lauded me as a “doer.” Very rarely do I let myself enjoy moments without the need to be productive. Even when I try to reserve Sunday as a day without schoolwork, I manage to keep myself otherwise occupied with different kinds of tasks, normally with the justification that they have a spiritual or relational telos. But like the research for a graduate school paper, the work of life is infinite, and as long as there is life left there are tasks to fill it up.

My middle name happens to mean “grace.” Last week was a bold (for me) seizure of grace for the doer, grace to love the world and the people that God gives us like wrapped presents which require our attention to unwrap. The God who set up Sabbaths of days and weeks and years, who gave Sabbaths to his people and their slaves and their animals and even their land, is by no means stingy to us. This is true cause for Jubilee; it is the Gospel, and it is good news to a doer like me.

Indeed, I don’t mean to take Scripture too far out of context, but it is interesting to me that the author of Hebrews connects the new covenant God makes in Christ to rest. The climax of history has come, “the promise of entering his rest still stands” (Heb. 4:1), and “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11), the author exhorts us. For me, it is a bold exhortation.

Lines on a Red-Eye

You shut my eyes like airplane wine along
The red-eye flight from San Francisco, though
I wouldn’t mind foregoing the Merlot
To get a softer bed. And you’re the song
That plays in airline headphones; rarely do
I see you as a gift because you cost
Me far too much. Like February frost
That’s only rain in California, you
Can touch the ground and call it good when I
Would call it muddy. Never mind. May-
Be I am getting old enough to say
I like the plastic cup, and though I try
To call you every insult (growing thinner),
Never could I call you late for dinner.

...and there was a great calm

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know His voice
Who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
And all is darkened in the vale of tears,
Then shalt thou better know His love, His heart,
Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears.
Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord.
When disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love's purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

Reckless Safety

I plan on writing about something else at some point, but a number of people told me they enjoyed the last time I told a story and then posted the sonnet I wrote around the incident. Here is the sonnet I scribbled down during class (don't tell my prof!) the morning of the last post. I suppose, in an abstract way, that makes it a September 11 sonnet seven years later.

Lay down your weary head upon the air,
My child; it will not hold you, but it will
Completely wrap around your limbs that still
May find a blanket they can weakly bear.
You will not find it safe - nor free of terror -
Nor light, for air itself has had its fill
Of tragedy with beauty mounting 'til
It's dense enough to carry sparrows there.
But we who reap the whirlwind have sown
In tears and songs of joy, and seed will fall
On just and unjust ground alike. Lay down,
My child, for safety's deeper than your fall.
So penetrate the reckless safety here
Inside this dangerous place you need not fear.

The Deeper Safety

My brother’s girlfriend ended up in the hospital yesterday, and I realized the first benefit of all my loved ones scheduling their lives falling apart at the same time: at least it makes hospital visits more convenient. I was already planning a trip to the same hospital to visit my friend with leukemia.

As I walked to campus this morning, praying by name for those whose lives are closely linked with mine, holding out faith that God was hearing me for their good and not their ill, I wondered if part of the reason we pray for one another is to remind ourselves that God cares for them. After a summer of praying for my loved ones, I felt pretty sure of God’s presence in their lives, even after three weeks of watching a catalogue of tragedies. If I get another heavy phone-call about another loved one, I feel pretty sure God will continue to be present. We are not safe, and yet we are.

And then I walked by the bell-tower and saw the flags at half-mast, and realized what day it was.

In the liturgy of being American, this is the day set aside to remind ourselves that we are not safe. But I’m wondering if that’s only true on one level, on the level one could say that God did not hear my summer prayers for my loved ones. Our lives are not insulated from tragedy, and my prayers do not seem to compel God to be the Great Insulator.

But he is the Great Redeemer, and I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin is destroyed yet in my flesh I shall see God (what the heck does that mean?!). Maybe we pray to remind ourselves of that. Maybe even if we don’t remember that, we pray because that is who we are praying to.

And I am rambling this morning, but what I am trying to say is that I feel safe, that as I visit my friends in the hospital this afternoon and as I finger the addresses for the jail letters I have still not written I know that my redeemer lives. It’s a deeper kind of safety, one that looks a whole lot like being unsafe. But I think I really do believe it.

Maybe that is why we pray.

Home from the soaring

Most poetry does not translate well. But from the exposure I’ve had, I think Rainer Maria Rilke is a translatable poet. As I crossed the Atlantic on Tuesday and nodded off into a delightful 6 solid hours of airplane sleep, I read this from his Book of Hours:

I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the
refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words.

To the others I was like a wind:
I made them shake.
I’d gone very far, as far as the angels,
and high, where light things into nothing.

But deep in the darkness is God…

Somehow, though Ireland is a new country for me and though I am here alone, Rilke’s words resonate in my spirit this summer. Being alone in a new country is an interesting kind of solitude, and if it is a green country inhabited by people who sing their English (after all, isn’t that what an Irish accent is? It’s not a pronunciation; it is notes and rhythm), it is a beautiful solace.

Comfort and Joy

Christmas is almost over, so I thought I’d put up at least one more post about it here on the tenth day... before celebrating my brother’s 20th birthday, working a late night as a barista/bar-tender, running out of town to visit two sets of old friends, rushing back to pull my last barsta/bar-tender shift of the break, drinking a celebratory beer with a dear friend, having lunch with three policemen… all before classes start on Wednesday.

That was a confession; I’m writing to talk about rest. Just like my dad once said of driving the day I totaled my second car, it seems that of my many talents resting is not one of them.

Last year, while I was observing Advent in a communal home that was part of the New Monasticism, one of my housemates pointed out to me a comma I had never noticed in a song. Like any good English major, I have occasionally had my holiday seasons transformed by small grammatical points, and this comma was one of those. It has become one of my favorite commas in literature.

My housemate pointed out to me the comma in the song “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” I had always assumed the song was a greeting addressed to “merry gentlemen,” and thus I had never noticed the exhortation and blessing in the first line. “Rest ye merry,” the song exhorts us; Christmas brings tidings of both comfort (rest) and joy (merry).

Rarely do I grow into that exhortation and blessing. I greet the news of Christ’s coming like a task-list, either to fix the world or myself. I greet his perfection with despair at my shortcomings. I forget the angel’s oft-repeated exhortation to “Fear not.”

God rest ye merry, my friends. Maybe next year I will too…

Yet must I think less wildly

Yesterday I was re-reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and there were a couple stanzas that well-described the state of the melancholy poet-prophet who Byron believed himself to be. (Okay, okay... so I really meant “who I always believed myself to be,” but I can’t always be self-revealing on this listening-blog. Every poet thinks himself a prophet, and most of them are melancholy ones.)

Yet must I think less wildly: I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poisoned. ’Tis too late!
Yet am I changed; though still enough the same
In strength to bear what time cannot abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing fate…

But soon he knew himself the most unfit
Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quelled,
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompelled,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebelled;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

(III: vii., xii.)

Without expounding on why those passages struck me—the poet whose thoughts can become poisonous torture, the visionary whose stubbornness isolates him—which would by necessity be either hypocritical or self-incriminating, I thought I’d contrast them against what I read this morning from the daily lectionary.

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD
from this time forth and forevermore.

Psalm 131

The contrast for me this morning after spending yesterday submerged in Byron was striking.