from the library

God’s First Temples

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 09:19:36 -0700

Clouds at noon occupying about half the sky gave half an hour of heavy rain to wash one of the cleanest landscapes in the world. How well it is washed! The sea is hardly less dusty than the ice-burnished pavements and ridges, domes and canyons, and summit peaks plashed with snow like waves with foam. How fresh the woods are and calm after the last films of clouds have been wiped from the sky! A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fibre thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

- from My First Summer in Sierra

John Muir (1838 - 1914), the father of American conservation, was born in Scotland and spent many of his years in the mountain wilderness of the United States. At Muir’s campaigning, Congress passed the National Park Bill in 1899, securing Yosemite and Sequoia as protected lands. Muir wrote with fluid poetry of the beauty found in nature and with fiery ache for the devastation being brought against the sacred spaces of creation.

Three Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:39:25 -0700

* a note before beginning: Neglecting to read aloud the poems below is akin to enjoying a dance party while seated in your chair. Modern poetry is rarely so near to music as in the hands of Hopkins, so take a chance, live out loud, and let your reading join in the dance.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—    For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:                                                           Praise him.
—
Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord, If I Contend

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

  Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

—
The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,-the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

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!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889) bore in his life the very human tensions which make his poetry inexorably rich. An Englishman who lived most of his adult life in Ireland, Hopkins was a celibate homosexual and a Catholic priest, a brilliant poet who served as an often mediocre and isolated teacher, and lived a life laced with loneliness. Lying on his death bed, nearly spent upon typhoid fever, Hopkins, who battled depression for much of his adult life, left with the dying words, “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.” Hopkins’ daring and remarkably modern poetic form were not widely known until his poetry was published in 1918 (almost thirty years after his death) by his friend Robert Bridges. Even three decades after his death, Hopkins’poetry resounded with freshness and marked ingenuity, and took the literary community by lyric storm.

The Actual History of Mankind

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 10:05:02 -0700

Excerpted from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
(Writing upon the nature of love as both embracing a thing as it is and wanting to see it become its fullest self, Chesterton turns the discussion towards Pimlico, a poor and neglected neighborhood of Victorian London.)
Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

… The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem.

Six Brief Poems by Rumi

Wed, 26 May 2010 16:47:15 -0700

Oh Beloved, take me. Liberate my soul. Fill me with your love and release me from the two worlds.  If I set my heart on anything but you let fire burn me from inside.
Oh Beloved, take away what I want. Take away what I do. Take away what I need. Take away everything that takes me from you.
—
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.

—
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about— language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.

—
I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering
in the street. Come out!”

“Leave me alone,
I’m sick.”

“I don’t care if you’re dead!
Jesus is here, and he wants
to resurrect somebody!”

—
A lifetime without Love is of no account
Love is the Water of Life
Drink it down with heart and soul!

—

May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
May it be sweet milk,
this marriage, like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
our every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion,
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name,
an omen as welcome
as the moon in a clear blue sky.
I am out of words to describe
how spirit mingles in this marriage.