'Dragonet'|| Watermarks

Dragonet

I listen to money singing.  It's like looking down
   From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
   In the evening sun.  It is intensely sad.  ~Philip Larkin, High Windows (1974). 

“What to read in war time is a great question, I mean in the way of fiction...” ~on the binding of periodicals

The Wreck of the Deutschland

The inscription on the gravestone reads:

"Pray for the Souls of Barbara Hultenschmidt ,Henrica Fassbender (not found), Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura and Brigitta Damhorst.

Franciscan Nuns from Germany who were Drowned near Harwich in the wreck of the Deutschland Dec 7th 1875. Four of whom were interred here Decr. 13th. RIP"

The sinking of SS Deutschland (1866) in December 1875 was one of the great Victorian maritime disasters

The German liner became stranded on the Kentish Knock while en route from Bremen for Southampton and New York with passengers, emigrants, and general cargo. It happened in severe fog and snowstorms, which also prevented her signals of distress from being seen. Amongst those who died were five Franciscan nuns. The nuns had been expelled from Germany under Bismarck`s Kulturkampf laws. En route to fulfil their vocation, they perished in the tragedy.

Of the five, only four of the bodies were discovered. The fifth remained undiscovered. The four were buried in St Patrick's Cemetery, Leytonstone...

This incident inspired the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'

The poem is dedicated to

"the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875"

On that night when the nuns were on board the ship, Hopkins recalls that he was in Wales in one of the Jesuit houses.

The reference to Gertrude is to St Gertrude the Great, the subject of yesterday`s talk by Pope Benedict XVI.

It would appear that Hopkins thought (wrongly) that St Gertrude of Halfta and Luther were born in the same town. Hopkins contrasts the two traditions in Germany: Lutheranism and Catholicism

It would appear that in the turbulent scenes, the leader of the nuns was seen standing and heard calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’

In the poem Hopkins teases out what the nun may have meant and the influence of St Gertrude of Halfta is evident.

"20

She was first of a five and came

Of a coifèd sisterhood.

(O Deutschland, double a desperate name! 155

O world wide of its good!

But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,

Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:

From life’s dawn it is drawn down,

Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.) 160

21

Loathed for a love men knew in them,

Banned by the land of their birth,

Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;

Surf, snow, river and earth

Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; 165

Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,

Thou martyr-master: in thy sight

Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.

Five! the finding and sake

And cipher of suffering Christ. 170

Mark, the mark is of man’s make

And the word of it Sacrificed.

But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,

Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—

Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token 175

For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

23

Joy fall to thee, father Francis,

Drawn to the Life that died;

With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his

Lovescape crucified 180

And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters

And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,

Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,

To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

24

Away in the loveable west, 185

On a pastoral forehead of Wales,

I was under a roof here, I was at rest,

And they the prey of the gales;

She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly

Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails 190

Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:

The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

~from postings, Perry Lorenzo

In wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas

                                     

      This is a series which begins with "Breathe, arch and orginal Breath," which is an invocation of the Muse of the Holy Spirit--rather like the opening of Milton's Paradise Lost which develops the imagery from the opening of Genesis whre the Spirit of God hovered over the waters------a series which begins with the Holy Spirit and ends with an image of the waters as a Dragon, which of course reminds us of the drama of the Apocalypse as well as the Babylonian creation-myth of Marduk slaying Tiamut or Jehovah slaying Leviathan, underlying the original Genesis account as well. These stanzas, obviously, run the full sweep of God's affair with the world, from Creation to Apocalypse, particularly climaxing in:

"Other, I gather, in measure her mind's

Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragoned seas."
Addendum:

....When at last he saw fit to introduce Hopkins’s singular poetry to the world, some 30 years after his friend’s death, Bridges opened the volume with “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.” Entrance would be gained, however...

Newman's vision is of a soul who desires purgation in order to be made worthy & capable of the vision of God: it is a beautiful vision. It roots our relationship with God, even our relationship through death on such a celebration as All Souls Day, in Love, in Eros even, indeed in our longing and desire for God, a longing God has put in us. Thus Purgatory, for Newman, as for Dante, is Love.
Of course, Edward Elgar famously set this all to exquisite music:
Soul
I go before my Judge. Ah! ….
Angel
…. Praise to His Name!
The eager spirit has darted from my hold,
And, with the intemperate energy of love,
Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel;
But, ere it reach them, the keen sanctity,
Which with its effluence, like a glory, clothes
And circles round the Crucified, has seized,
And scorch'd, and shrivell'd it; and now it lies
Passive and still before the awful Throne.
O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe,
Consumed, yet quicken'd, by the glance of God.
Soul
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn,—
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain,
Until the morn.
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love:—
Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.
--from John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Dream of Gerontius

 

SHIRT OF FLAME: WE PAVED PARADISE

SHIRT OF FLAME: WE PAVED PARADISE
Excerpt:
July 13
I know now too what a tinkling brook is.

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: For Blessed John Henry Newman's Feast Day

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: For Blessed John Henry Newman's Feast Day

Notes for paper on Hopkins

Notes for paper on Hopkins
Excerpt:

The Dialogue

      1.  …basically I look at some of the possible choices made by a selection of nineteenth-century writers to the challenge of faith in what was a radically changing and challenging society. I include writers who continue to maintain their faith throughout their lives such as John Henry Newman and Christina Rossetti, writers who make some kind of accommodation between faith and doubt, such as the deism of Thomas Carlyle or the religious humanism of George Eliot; and writers who completely lose their faith, as in the case of Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy.

       2.  …students will be surprised how the personal journeys of faith made by those Victorian man and women writers can connect with roads travelled by 21^st century Christians. Their texts may influence the students’ faith negatively or positively but as Holmes argues, ‘the educated Christian must be at home in the world of ideas and people.’¹

       3.  Our aim is to create educated Christians with self-knowledge and with reasons for belief. We have a responsibility to influence our students to become critical thinkers, and that sometimes means taking risks.

      4.  Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet in question, will be the main focus of my paper. I have always included his poetry because in it he explores a unique and compelling journey from faith through deep despair and doubt back to faith again.² Hopkins was a man of his time. As a Victorian, he expressed the spirit of his age, which involved an unusually strong sense of self-consciousness. Note Matthew Arnold in his preface to his poems of 1853 where he ‘informed his readers that “the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced” ’.³

       5.  For many Victorians, like John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hardy and Charles Darwin, along with that internal dialogue had come ‘“doubts” [and] “discouragement” ’and the loss of their Christian faith.⁴ But Hopkins chose to remain a Christian despite an acute awareness of the reasons for disbelief so haunting his contemporaries. His final faith position does however seem to have been a more tentative, somewhat modified version of his earlier youthful faith, which was so full of exuberance and celebration. I feel that very honesty about the possibility of change and development in faith makes him a helpful model for students to study.

      6.  Hopkins had a highly attuned sense of self:

And this is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut-leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.²⁷

d.  Poetry is the sacrament of flesh, word, and spirit charged by their interpenetration with each other. When his resistance broke, Hopkins’ highest gift was released.³⁸

     1.  So the poem ends with a ‘moving request for some kind of fertility of spirit…Christ, the maker of the universe, is asked to bring [him] renewal’.³⁹

     2.  Hopkins and the Psalms: …and as Merton reflected in Bread in the Wilderness…

This expression of a man approaching the edge of the abyss and finally returning with hope to the reality of himself and his relationship with God has valuable parallels with other literature including the biblical. There is a fruitful correspondence between Hopkins’s experiences and those expressed in the Psalms.40 Walter Brueggemann, in his book Spirituality of the Psalms, talks of them in terms of psalms of orientation, disorientation and new orientation… Finally there are the psalms of new orientation which ‘bear witness to the surprising gift of new life when none had been expected…

     3.  Hopkins’s final sonnets also cannot recapture the purity and simplicity of the faith he once embraced. But at a point when he had lost hope, he was able to believe that new life was emerging and that his Lord would ‘send [his] roots rain’. This spiritual movement, more accurately a spiral than a circle, from orientation through disorientation to new orientation, is very appropriate for Hopkins’s own journey. The key for him, as for the psalmist, is that ‘everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life’.⁴⁸ In that renewed conversation with God, he has managed to accept ‘God’s grace [that] gives man the power to transcend himself, to rise to a higher pitch of self’. Hopkins describes this perfectly in the paradox he uses in his poem ‘On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People’: ‘The selfless self of self, most strange, most still’.⁴⁹

      4.  To see how Hopkins emerges from his doubt into a new faith is equally significant since it offers reassurance to those who feel they may have to deny their early faith because it no longer answers all their questions. Faith changes, develops, and in line with Fowler’s Stages of Faith, may be able to hold more questions in tension in its later stages than in its earlier ‘first naïveté’.51 Hopkins’s penultimate poem – with the marvellously grand title, ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ – closes with words which reveal the new orientation he has attained.

     5.  They reveal a man who can still speak words of glorious and powerful faith:

Enough! The Resurrection,

A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash;

In a flash, in a trumpet crash, …

~ from Penny Mahon, THE SEARCH FOR INTEGRATION: A STUDY OF THE FAITH JOURNEY IN THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS -Newbold College, England

 

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Henry Purcell, RIP

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Henry Purcell, RIP
Excerpt:
Gerard Manley Hopkins praised Purcell in verse:
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally. 
HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,...

Earth, Sweet Earth

  Excerpt:

Earth, Sweet Earth   [July 2,12 post]

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Ribblesdale:

Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leavés throng
And louchéd low grass, heaven that dost appeal
To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;
That canst but only be, but dost that long—

Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong  
Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,
Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel
Thy river, and o’er gives all to rack or wrong.

And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man?—Ah, the heir  
To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare
And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

Hopkins, letter to Richard Watson Dixon (June 25, 1883): "In the sonnet enclosed 'louched' is a coinage of mine and is to mean much the same as slouched, slouching. And I mean 'throng' for an adjective as we use it here in Lancashire."
..................

O the Craftsman|| each tucked string tells ...

The Fire of Christ

“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!”[15]”

O the Craftsman

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

===========================

    *“The truth is ultimately an act of love.”*  ~Bd. John Paul II,  Fides et Ratio

Introduction to the ‘Living Flame of Love’…

   Most probably John introduced these variations into the text while at La Peñuela in the last months of his life, August-September 1591. A witness who lived with him at La Peñuela told of how in the early morning John used to withdraw into the garden for prayer and remain there until, coaxed by the heat of the sun, he returned to his monastery cell where he spent his time writing on certain stanzas of poetry. By this date all his other works, including the Canticle, had reached their final stage. Moreover John brought a copy of the work with him to Ubeda. He gave it as a gift in gratitude to Ambrosio de Villareal, the doctor who had cared for him there. What must have been the doctor's thoughts as he read of "how much God exalts the soul that pleases him"?

========================

‘As Kingfishers…’

    Abstraction is the enemy of poetry and Hopkins did not need reminding of this: despite the essentially intellectual nature of his theme, there is not a single abstract noun in 'As Kingfishers...'. Hopkins, in full energy, makes the experience present rather than talking about it; and it is good to be there. Desmond Egan analyses this great Hopkins poem line by line, word by word.
Norman MacKenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales. (These included 'God's Grandeur' 'The Starlight Night', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' and 'Hurrahing in Harvest' - all of which he dated; and 'For Spring' , 'The Caged Skylark' 'As Kingfishers..' and 'The Lantern out of Doors', which he did not). Surely a'wonder-year' - in MacKenzie's words and one which poet Paul Mariani, in his Commentary has described convincingly as one of growing metrical complexity: Hopkins at the height of his powers - or close to it.

Hopkins was was 33 years old. We are dealing here with a completed work of art. The imagery of the poem has a corresponding coherence - and is often, perhaps, not fully understood.

First of all, here is the text of the poem.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speak and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Chríst - for Christ play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of succeeding metaphors: the lightning flight of the kingfisher seems to turn him into a firebolt; the sudden dart of a dragonfly draws (or attracts) a brilliance comparable to that of a fierce blue flame (MacKenzie refers to the blast of a blowpipe)…
MacKenzie suggests another meaning: that the sound tells of the creator - but it seems to me unnecessary to anticipate Hopkins's thesis - particularly when he is dealing with the natural and the inanimate insofar as each is uniquely itself, before he moves onto another level of significance. He is not quite ready to do that yet, until the bell comparison is made. This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'…

The movement in 'As Kingfishers..' so far, has been from nature, animate and inanimate, to what is man-made: from kingfisher, dragonfly and stone to string and bell… Each human, every created, and therefore 'mortal' thing also has one distinctive, defining function: a single raison d'etre, of which the earlier imagery provides reminders. It is interesting to see that Hopkins reaches for another metaphor to put words on this: 'being indoors each one dwells'.The metaphor, 'dwelling indoors', living inside oneself, can only apply to the human and not to kingfisher or stone or the like…

The image of Christ's 'playing', in line 11 of 'As Kingfishers...' may owe something - as MacKenzie suggests - to St. Paul's expression: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2 19-20) Zo de ouketi ego, Ze(i) de en emoi Xhristos.

… In one of his short Commentaries on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius ('Contemplatio ad Obtinendum Amorem') written circa 1881, we read, All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them (,) give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. (House ed. p.342).
… he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet. In this regard, some lines from a recent Collection, The World Returning, by contemporary English poet Lawrence Sail are worth quoting:

As when you gingerly open prayerful hands to see what you have caught, that has been tickling your palms with wings or feelers, and you find only the thought of something bright and precise, that must have somehow zig-zagged back to the sky, its image too soon blurred to an idea. (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, UK, 2002)

How easily a fresh moment or feeling can be lost in words that slide back from life towards the 'idea'.
… the word, meaning 'it is likely (that)'. If we understand the word in this way in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, the meaning is 'it is likely that /in the same way, each tucked string tells ...'

------------

~ Desmond Egan ,'As Kingfishers Catch Fire'. . . analysis of Imagery

Hope Had Mourning On

The Work of Mourning: “A Vale of Tears”

      'hope had mourning on'  ~Hopkins

Vale of Tears,  עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא‎‎, Emek HaBakha)

*The phrase vale of tears (Latin valle lacrimarum) is a Christian phrase referring to life and its earthly sorrows, which are left behind only when one leaves the world and enters heaven. In English, "valley of tears" is also used. The origin of the phrase is uncertain, but the most accepted view is that it comes from the Catholic hymn "Salve Regina", which at the end of the first stanza mentions "gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle", or "mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.*

   Putting psychoanalytic conceptions of self-transformation through speech in dialogue with early modern devotional techniques of spiritualizing the physical, this essay asks how Robert Southwell's poem "A Vale of Tears" constitutes a work of mourning.

…Contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of subject formation attribute immense importance to processes of mourning…is not simply a reflection on how one negotiates loss throughout one's life but more primarily how the subject is itself constituted by mourning: formed, that is, by and through loss. From this perspective, mourning is not simply something the subject engages in when confronted with abandonment; but, rather, the subject is itself an effect of loss-the product of a series of renunciations and compromise formations…

…Aesthetic and spiritual practices are, at bottom, modes of renegotiating identity, strategies of mourning aimed at confronting divided-ness while living out imaginatively the sense of self-unity that the subject is constitutionally deprived of.

…the process of psychotherapy operates by enabling the patient to "reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come" (Language 18). In short, it is symbolic acts of interpretation that enable a subject to transform objectifying and traumatizing events into subjectively meaningful experiences. Devotional and religious writings often present explicit examples of this desire to mitigate feelings of meaningless and loss, centering as they often tend to do around the desire for identity with God as the absolute Subject, the source and the delta of all meaning…

This therapeutic dimension of devotional writing is evident in the work of the early modern Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, particularly his poem "A Vale of Tears," published in the year of his execution, 1595. Southwell's poem presents an unusually dramatic illustration of how the therapeutic efficacy of early modern religious poetry often derives from its careful organization, its movement from a rhetoric of division, emptiness, and loss to a language of union, identity, and wholeness. This movement occurs through the speaker's shifting disposition toward the Alpine landscape that he confronts in the poem. When the speaker begins, he perceives the landscape as a horror vacui, a wholly godless, objectifying, and alienating unreality. Through a process of poetic meditation, however, it emerges as an appropriate setting for a spiritually meaningful transformation of self that is enabled by an increased sense of God's presence. In this respect, Southwell presents a variation on the technique of spiritualizing the physical, a well-established convention that consists, as Saint Augustine says, in the knowledge that "every good of ours either is God or comes from God" (27). In "A Vale of Tears," the devotional practice of spiritualizing the physical consists in the act of relating elements of creation that appear void of meaning because they seem unrelated to God's goodness, back to their divine source. Through the poem's emphasis on paradox, visual and aural oppositions, and its insistent representation of an objectless but omnipresent mourning, it expresses the speaker's feelings of loss and self-division and his ultimate hope for union with God. The formal dimensions of the poem perform this movement from loss and division to the emergence of a meaningful sense of spiritual purpose.

…As Southwell puts it, it is a place "where nothing seemed wrong, yet nothing right" (line 32). To this extent, the landscape presents an encounter with meaninglessness, a scene, that is, w here God's presence remains indiscernible…thematic focus clearly resembles the meditative sentiments found in the meditations one sees in Saint Ignatius Loyola, where the practitioner "is to consider who God is against whom I have sinned, reflecting on the divine attributes and comparing them with their contraries in me; God's wisdom with my ignorance, God's omnipotence with my weakness, God's justice with my iniquity" (27).

This meditative process of focusing on one's lack in the face of God's perfection is…to admit: "I am divided and lapsing with respect to my ideal, Christ…”

Southwell's "A Vale of Tears : A Psychoanalysis ofForm.(Critical Essay)

Spring and Fall - Hopkins

Spring and Fall - Hopkins
Excerpt:
               Spring and Fall:
                to a Young Child
   Margaret, are you grieving
   Over Goldengrove unleaving?
   Leaves, like the things of man, you
   With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
   Ah! as the heart grows older
   It will come to such sights colder
   By and by, nor spare a sigh
   Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
   And yet you will weep and know why.
   Now no matter, child, the name:
   Sorrow's springs are the same.
   Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
   What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
   It is the blight man was born for,
   It is Margaret you mourn for.

Hopkins On Krakatoa « Hooting Yard

Hopkins On Krakatoa « Hooting Yard
Excerpt:
...Gerard Manley Hopkins’ reportage on the remarkable “Krakatoa sunsets” of 1883.

For Keats' Sake!: Exiles and the real Hopkins

For Keats' Sake!: Exiles and the real Hopkins
Excerpt:
...scattered lines...Chrysoprase...

Goin' Home

Fountain of Elias: Roy Campbell and St. John of the Cross

Fountain of Elias: Roy Campbell and St. John of the Cross
Excerpt:   Deo Gratias!
How the South African poet saved the letters of Our Holy Father St. John from being destroyed in the Spanish Civil War.
It was March 1936. A series of anti-clerical riots swept through Toledo. Churches were burned and priests and monks were attacked in the streets. During these disturbances several Carmelite monks, disguised in lay clothes, sought shelter in the home of the South African poet, Roy Campbell, who had moved to the city with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters in the previous year. Four months later, on July 21, republican forces advanced on the city. Under cover of darkness, the Carmelite monks once again called on the Campbells. This time, however, they were not seeking refuge for themselves but for their priceless archives, which included the personal papers of St John of the Cross. Campbell agreed to take possession of these precious archives and that night a heavy trunk of ancient documents was delivered secretly from the Carmelite library to the hallway of the Campbells’ house......

As for the story of the man who saved the original letters of St John of the Cross, it could be said that Spain and the Catholic Church are indebted to him for his role in preserving a priceless part of their inheritance. As for Campbell, he was equally indebted to Spain, describing it as “a country to which I owe everything, as having saved my soul”....

St. Rita of Cascia||Pope John Paul II: A Life of Heroic Humility and Obedience - 20 May 2000

Pope John Paul II: A Life of Heroic Humility and Obedience - 20 May 2000
Excerpt: from his papal address:
Live as witnesses to a hope that never disappoints

4. The saint of Cascia belongs to the great host of Christian women who "have had a signifiant impact on the life of the Church as well as of society" (Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem, n. 27). Rita well interpreted the "feminine genius" by living it intensely in both physical and spiritual motherhood.

On the sixth centenary of her birth I recalled that her lesson "is concentrated on these typical elements of spirituality: the offer of forgiveness and the acceptance of suffering, not through a form of passive resignation ... but through the strength of that love for Christ who, precisely in the episode of his being crowned, suffered, along with other humiliations, an atrocious parody of his kingship" (Insegnamenti V/I [1982], 874).

Dear brothers and sisters, the worldwide devotion to St Rita is symbolized by the rose. It is to be hoped that the life of everyone devoted to her will be like the rose picked in the garden of Roccaporena the winter before the saint's death. That is, let it be a life sustained by passionate love for the Lord Jesus; a life capable of responding to suffering and to thorns with forgiveness and the total gift of self, in order to spread everywhere the good odour of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 2:15) through a consistently lived proclamation of the Gospel. Dear devoted pilgrims, Rita offers her rose to each of you: in receiving it spiritually strive to live as witnesses to a hope that never disappoints and as missionaries of a life that conquers death.

 

Quick – hurry to the Carmelite Monastery « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Quick – hurry to the Carmelite Monastery « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics
Excerpt:
f you do, you can catch the vows being made by Sister Maria Guadalupe of the Infant Jesus of Prague!  11 am!  I wish I could go!
Monday, May 21st at 11:00 A.M.Mass at the Carmelite Monastery 600 Flowers, Dallas 75211
Sister Maria Guadalupe of the Infant Jesus of Prague will be “Rendering her Vows” to the Superior of this Carmel, Reverend Mother Juanita Marie. Sister Maria Guadalupe has transferred to the Dallas Carmel. There will be a reception after Mass.

Dymphna's Road: Pray for our priests

Dymphna's Road: Pray for our priests
Excerpt:

Pray for our priests

Blessed Jerzy

Father Vera

'to the testimony'||'to the love'|| 'to the pain||

The Levite and the Holocaust

Each one of us is lovingly, uniquely crafted by God to hold the radiant gift of love and serve it up;  William Blake said: We are put in the world for but a little while to learn to bear the beams of love.

In 1938, with the outbreak of violence that would come to be known as Kristallnacht, American Orthodox rabbi Menachem HaKohen Risikoff wrote about the central role he saw for Priests and Levites in terms of Jewish and world responses, in worship, liturgy, and teshuva, repentance. In הכהנים והלוים HaKohanim vHaLeviim(1940), The Priests and the Levites, he stressed that members of these groups exist in the realm between history (below) and redemption (above), and must act in a unique way to help move others to prayer and action, and help bring an end to suffering. He wrote, "Today, we also are living through a time of flood, Not of water, but of a bright fire, which burns and turns Jewish life into ruin. We are now drowning in a flood of blood...Through the Kohanim and Levi'im help will come to all Israel."^[10]     [Wikipedia: Holocaust Theology]

A picture in my mind comes suddenly from the movie Escape from Sobibor, the Nazi death camp.  Once the shooting began the prisoners ran towards the front gate.  As some of them began to fall dead, running men would suddenly stop and rocking back in forth would begin chanting the Kadesh for their dead.  They too would suddenly drop.  I have never forgotten that image of priesthood.

"Where is God? Where is He?"

Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with passion,
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.

Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk, expelled, make nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds across the sea-line sailing,
Lies he, stricken by his master's rod.
"Where is man?" the cloister murmurs wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders — "Where is God?"     ~Swineburne

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows..." That night the soup tasted of corpses.~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

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Wiesel's witness as survivor is twofold. There is a witness he must bear, certainly, to the non-Jew, the "executioner." But, as well, he must witness to the Jew, the "victim." In each case the testimony pricks the conscience.

Mainly, my position in the Jewish community is really the position of a witness from within and a defender from without. This goes, of course, along with my ideas about the duties and the privileges of a storyteller — of a writer. From the inside, from within the community, I am critical. If Jews are criticized or attacked from the outside, then I try to defend them. What I try to do (it's very hard) is to reconcile the two attitudes: not to be too strong, too sharp, too critical when I am inside and not to be a liar on the outside.

… When evils of such magnitude are occurring, no one is completely innocent — and Wiesel has taken it upon himself to witness in such a way that our guilt can never sink into unconscious forgetfulness.

But Wiesel is more than a bearer of testimony. He is an artist — a storyteller, a writer. True to his Hasidic roots, he believes in the power of the tale… are "not novels but pages of testimony"… the "spiritual archivist of the”….family…for very profound reasons.

…Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

God made man because he loves stories.

(150) "What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on places and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death."   

In the Kabbalah, there is the story of shvirat hakelim, "the breaking of the vessels.”

The writer must write as witness.

We are witnesses in the cruelest and strongest sense of the word. And we cannot stop. We must speak. This is what I am trying to do in my writing. I don't believe the aim of literature is to entertain, to distract, to amuse. It used to be. I don't believe in it anymore.

When asked what it means to be a writer today, Wiesel has consistently said that it means to correct injustices, to alleviate suffering, to create hope. Precisely for this reason, the witness/storyteller/writer's work is disheartening. It so rarely accomplishes what it must accomplish.

Wiesel's role as witness so thoroughly governs his role as writer that he must continue to write whether his testimony meets with any response or not.

One must write out of one's own experience, out of one's own identity. One must cater to no one; one must remain truthful. If one is read, it's good; if one is not read, it's too bad. But that should not influence the writer. [23]

And, most important, the witness' work as writer demands that he write as a moral man. The literary artist can no longer be excused if he writes one way and lives another. Life and story must blend in ethical harmony. The writer is bound in a moral commitment by the very tale he tells. The making and reading of literature is no frivolous business.

True writers want to tell the story simply because they believe they can do something with it — their lives are not fruitless and are not spent in vain. True listeners want to listen to stories to enrich their own lives and to understand them.

Actually, I believe that today literature has changed its purpose and its dimension. Once upon a time it was possible to write l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake. People were looking only for beauty. Now we know that beauty without an ethical dimension cannot exist. We have seen what they did with culture in Germany during the war; what they called culture did not have any ethical purpose or motivation. I believe in the ethical thrust, in the ethical function, in the human adventure in science or in culture or in writing. [24]

The witness begins with his testimony.   ~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

Poetry: A Privileged Means

In Dickinson, poetry becomes a privileged means for telling the truth about trauma and, therefore, for integrating traumatic experience into the self. Or to put it in the words of Wallace Stevens, poetry is "a violence from within that protects us from violence from without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."^xi

“It happens that over time, even the most beautiful bowl, even the most finely tuned satellite dish get mucky. We get coated, as it were, with our own personal history, fears and beliefs, especially negative ones.  Our personal stories, our opinions about things, our staunch positions, also serve to coat over the message we are here to transmit.  All of this is totally normal, but, ultimately our personal overlay can occlude our purpose, and then, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we become messengers who have forgotten  their message. ”

  It is the extensive sympathy of the human heart…

To Prove Him With Hard Questions…

And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart. --I Kings 10.1-3

"To prove him with hard questions" : answerability in Hopkins' writings.(Gerard Manley Hopkins)(Critical Essay)   ~Lesley Higgins, Victorian Poetry

     Some interrogatives are forensic, designed to elicit afresh a pre-confirmed truth; others function as "a forestall of the thing" someone else will ask.4 Some effect a dialectical process that leads to further insight; others betray a "fretty" doubt, abjectly seeking an "answering voice"[5] that never replies… A critic such as Robert Lowell could consider the interrogative habit as a substantial part of Hopkins' "dramatic" writing; Rachel Salmon could cite its contribution to the "eccentricity, even the rambunctiousness, of Hopkins's language."[7] I would suggest that question s reconfirm in his writings the materiality of language, drawing "attention to its physical features"[8] and reminding us that meaning is made through the graphic dimensions of the text (a visual / cognitive experience) and its physical I sensuous dimensions, both oral and aural. Questions are acts of summoning and, in Hopkins' terms, bidding: "I mean the art or virtue of saying everything right to or at the hearer, interesting him, holding him in the attitude of correspondent or addressed or at least concerned, making it everywhere an act of intercourse-and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell."[9] The letter to Robert Bridges just quoted refers to bidding as "such a fugitive thing" (Letters I, p. 160).

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence…W.H. Auden, Under Sirius

Sacred Grounding

When we decide to read a poem (it is an act of the will), it is like entering sacred ground where the Holy can happen. When we read poetry, we create our own oratory of the heart and mind where both the poet and the reader engage in holy dialogue.'  ~ Robert Waldron's essay on Jessica Powers

In the final analysis, spirituality contains two essential ingredients, relationship and revelation. Spirituality is about God's decision to establish a relationship with humankind through creation, covenant and, for us as Christians, through the paschal mystery - the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are all called to holiness and to intimacy with God and union among ourselves. To understand the nature of friendship, its intimacy, duties and commitment is to understand the essence of spirituality.
This article first appeared as "The Spirituality of Jessica Powers, " by Rev. Robert Morneau, D.D., Spiritual Life, Vol 36, No 3, Fall 1990, pp. 150-161.

Melchizedek

The name Melchizedek means King of Righteousness. Genesis 14:18; ‘Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem) brought out bread and wine…

  A year ago a small picture of a French country table caught my eye at the thrift store.  It is a picture that I have received as a gift from God; and, as such, I have continued to study its meanings.  To finally understand ‘the wine seal’ on the wall is a relief.  The ‘gifts’ of ‘bread and wine’ were ‘given’ from the ‘beginning’ of God choosing to be in ‘covenant’.  It brings to mind a song I once heard: “God and man at table have sat down…” is all I remember.  The discovery of the picture and now learning more about the gifts from Melchizedek have solidified my understanding about the gift of ‘haecceitas’ of don Scotus and Hopkins.  They were both ‘priests after the order of Melchizedek.’

Returning to the Ripple

     ...My tryst with Hopkins is much different even from its beginnings.  I had only written several poems two of which were ‘brutal’ to me at the time.  The first remains unfinished inside me.  Of the second I remember only its final line.  After my own ‘burning’ of my writings and paintings in the trash bin my writing became merely copying parts of what I was reading into a personal diary-journal.

                      "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
                        Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
                        May who ne'er hung there.”

                       ~ Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ; No Worst, There is None

     The original impetus was not the poem itself but its appearance after a tragedy, much as the sinking of the Deutschland was for Hopkins.  A divine spark of an eagle and the comforting mantle of a friend planted me squarely upon the ‘North Face’.  From those cold polar heights through the broiling mists I too have witnessed the…”“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.”

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The Interrupted Concert

                            By Federico García Lorca   Translated By W. S. Merwin

                                           The frozen sleepy pause

                                           of the half moon

                                           has broken the harmony

                                           of the deep night.

*Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.*  Henry Van Dyke
I can have dreams? Really?  Me?  I am trying desperately to listen, to keep my mind focused...Instead, I feel a ripple in the underwater; a crocodile entering a swamp or some mysterious creature waiting to destroy.  The image....morning sunlight touching the dew drops glistening on petals of marigolds and roses...withou a dream we have nothing.  ~Ruth

…to say, “but this is how the world is”.   ~ Jennie Erdal, ‘What’s the big idea?’

Skopeji

…As Fike suggests, perhaps the term inscape is a cognate of the Greek verb skopein (to look attentively) or the noun skopos (that upon which one fixes his or her look). ⁷⁰  In any case, the essential point is that Hopkins’ use of inscape implies many of the elements of Ruskinian aesthetics…

…Or seven tied by the rope on the Alps; four go headlong, then the fifth, as strong as Samson, checks them and the two behind do not even feel the strain’).⁶  Did ‘the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?’  Hopkins fancies that the cry of the tall nun may have alerted the other passengers to the reality of their situation (stanza 31), for their time of suffering is, in fact, the moment of their inevitable confrontation with God….he builds on that fancy…~Inspirations Unbidden, Chapter 4, ‘The Cavernous Dark’

   Does that fact negate the importance or the beauty of the writings of such poets as Lorca?   Personally, I do not think so.  We are called to a higher taskmaster than that as artists.  The beauty of a diamond is that it does contain many unfolding facets as it 'reflects' light. Reason and truth however cannot be petulantly discarded for they remain the necessary discipline and banner of all true 'creativity'---that which can continue to give 'hope' and 'life'.

Returning to the ‘Ripple’

   We live in the ‘age of the enchantress’ which has been unfolding for centuries.  More recently I have discovered that many ‘artists’ continue a fatalistic dance with this enchantress.  Many of the English poets such as the Brontë sisters openly admit to a type of ‘channeling.’  Many of the 19^th C. ‘artists’ were in attendance at spiritualist, theosophical salons. 

   It is pronounced in the surrealists.  Lorca confronted it in his study of ‘duende’.  Many of the Spanish artists have continued along this path.  While it continues to morph through its Medusa-like tentacles its source is the enchantress.  While Lorca and his companions followed it as ‘avant-garde’ surrealism, Roberto Bolaño restyles it as ‘magical realism’.  Its ‘amorphous’ shapes and its siren songs bring about many human ecstasies that often elude discernment as Odysseus knew.  The key focus is the 'source'.

  These false ecstatic experiences are antithetical to the work of the Holy Spirit as he continues His work of and in creation.  Duende, however,  is not ‘haecceitas’.  

==============

My topic is Hopkins and contemplation. It is a word we are hearing more and more as we enter the new millennium, but few of us are able to define it. Hopkins himself did so admirably, as we will see.

Contemplation contains a Metaphor of Seeing

First, instead of a definition, I would like to offer a paradigm experience of contemplation, that of Isaiah of Jerusalem, sometimes called First Isaiah: "In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; his train filled the sanctuary" (Is. 6:1). Not only does Isaiah see the Lord, but he is literally dumb-founded, that is, mute before the vision, managing only to hear the Seraphim stammer out the phrase, "Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are filled with His glory."

Because contemplation contains a metaphor of seeing, Isaiah's vision is paradigmatic. He sees first into the sacred space of the temple, and then into the whole world filled with God's "glory". If the first moment of this experience, the Temple vision, is the more mystical one, the second moment, the glory of God filling the world, is the more incarnational. Isaiah experiences God both as utterly holy, "set apart", and at the same time hears the angels proclaim that God's kabod or shining presence fills the whole world, streaming out of and beyond the Temple. If contemplation is seeing that the sacred space of the temple is everywhere, the true contemplative, like Isaiah, moves this experience out of the temple, so that the temple becomes the template of the holy in our midst, the sacred that is right in front of us. At the moment of God's greatest transcendence, Isaiah hears of immanence.

Contemplation is the Legacy of Everyone

Being truly contemplative is being able to say like Jacob, "Truly Yahweh is in this place and I did not know! . . This is nothing less than the abode of God, and the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28: 16-17). If the spirituality of our time has learned anything, it is that this vision is not reserved for a Temple elite, that contemplation is the legacy of everyone. The paradox is that the holiness or "set apartness" of God fills up the world, and is to be encountered in the everyday; God's transcendence is immanent.

Contemplaton and Purification

But Isaiah is so overcome by his unworthiness before this vision that one of the seraphim must purify his unclean lips with a live coal. So the second element of the contemplative experience is purification, letting the "unclean" speech of ordinary thought and language be burned away so that one can be a true prophet, a "spokesperson for God." Finally, as the third element or moment of contemplative experience, Isaiah is commissioned; he is sent to the people to ask them to "listen and listen, but never understand" and to "look and look, but never perceive"  (Is. 6: 9).

Contemplation: Seeing the Sacred in the Ordinary

I find something of all three of these elements of Isaiah's contemplative experience in the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins: seeing the sacred in the ordinary, being struck dumb and purified (even to the point of a seven-year silence), and being given the frustrated mission to get others to "look and listen", even if they cannot understand. Hopkins's experience was the contemplative experience of seeing the world's holiness, even in its ordinariness, peculiarity, and irregularity--its "piedness". "The world is charged with the grandeur of God"; "Glory be to God for dappled things." Hopkins was a contemplative, that is, seeking and seeing God, the Holy, in the world and in humans, in all of his life, no matter how opaque or complex or how troubled it became. Even when he came to Ireland, I do not believe he ever stopped being the contemplative he was when finding God's glory filling the whole world in his Welsh years. Only, as the darkness increased, the challenge to that contemplation was greater. Finally, Hopkins took up the prophetic mission in the same way Isaiah did: he shared the vision, often, sadly, like Isaiah, to those who, like his few readers, would listen and listen and not understand, look and look and not perceive….   ~ Maria Lichtman Beroea College, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Contemplative Hero’

A Mother's Love

"The Virgin Compared to the Air"

I say we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air; the same
Is Mary. . . .
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence.

…

. He describes her as a maternal figure who "came to mould (Christ's) limbs like ours" (lines 104-5) as well as stating that "her hand leaves his light/ sifted to suit our sight" (lines 112-13).

Worldmothering air, air wild
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child." [lines 124-26]

~Catherine Hay, Mother's love — How Maternal projection is used to explore spirituality in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins and Charles Algernon Swinburne

………………….

During his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges who, with a few other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition.

Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J. "A False Interpretation Of Vatican II"

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J. "A False Interpretation Of Vatican II"
Excerpt:

Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J.

Mimì Santoni, the prostitute, saw Jesuit Cardinal Jean Danielou fall to his knees with his face on the floor before he breathed his last. And to her "it was a good death, for a cardinal." He had gone to bring her money to pay for a lawyer capable of getting her husband out of prison. It was the last of his works of charity carried out in secret, on behalf of despised persons in need of help and forgiveness. The Jesuits conducted exhaustive investigations to discover the truth. They ascertained his innocence.
...The rupture between Daniélou and his other Jesuit confreres in Paris and the rest of France was in effect the true origin of the neglect that fell upon this great theologian and cardinal.  A rupture that preceded his death by at least two years.  Since 1972, in fact, Daniélou had no longer been living in the residence of "Etudes," the leading cultural magazine of the French Jesuits, where he had lived for decades. He had moved to a convent of sisters, the Daughters of the Heart of Mary.  The clash had been precipitated by an interview with Daniélou on Vatican Radio in which he harshly criticized the "decadence" that was devastating so many men's and women's religious orders, because of "a false interpretation of Vatican II."
In 1974, the year of Daniélou's death, Ribes positioned "Etudes" in open disobedience with respect to the teaching of the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" on contraception. And he collaborated with other "progressive" theologians – including the Dominicans Jacques Pohier and Bernard Quelquejeu – in the drafting of the law that in that same year introduced unrestricted abortion in France, with Simone Veil as health minister, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as president, and Jacques Chirac as prime minister. The following year, 1975, Father Ribes left the helm of "Etudes." And afterward Ribes abandoned the Society of Jesus, and then the Catholic Church...