please read slowly, enunciating the space, the quiet, the stillness
the peace, love, and joy always present if allowed.
How to Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Wendell Berry
The General Dance
The Lord made His world not in order to judge it, not in order merely to dominate it, to make it obey the dictates of an inscrutable and all-powerfull will, not in order to find pleasure or displeasure in the way it worked: such was not the creation either of the world or of man.
The Lord made the world and made man in order that He Himself might descend into the world that He Himself might become Man. When He regarded the world He was about to make He saw His wisdom, as a man-child, "playing in the world, playing before Him at all times." And he reflected, "my delights are to be with the children of men."
The world was not made as prison for fallen spirits who were rejected by God: this is the gnostic error. The world was made as a temple, a paradise into which God Himself would descend to dwell familiarly with the spirits He had placed there to tend it for Him.
The early chapters of Genesis (far from being a pseudo-scientific account for the way the world was supposed to have come into being) are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation, a completely true, though not literal revelation of God's view of the universe and of His intentions for man. The point of these beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a garden in which He Himself took delight. He made man and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine care for created things. He made man in His own image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homo faber, as the gardener of paradise. He let man decide for himself how created things were to be interpreted, understood, and used: for Adam gave the animals their names (God gave them no names at all) and what names Adam gave them, that they were. Thus in his intelligence man, looking upon things, reproduced the divine idea, the divine truth, in man's own spirit.
As God creates things by seeing them in His own Logos, man brings truth to life in his mind by the marraige of the divine light, in the being of the object, with the divine light in his own reason. The meeting of these two lights in one mind is truth.
But there is a higher light still, not the light by which man "gives names" and forms concepts, with the aid of active intelligence, but the dark light in which no names are given, in which God confronts man not through the medium of things, but in His own simplicity. The union of the simple light of God with the simple light of man's spirit, in love, in contemplation. Thew two simplicities are one. They form, as it were, an emptiness in which there is no addition but rather the taking away of names, of content, of subject matter, of identities. In this meeting there is not so much a fusion of identities as a disappearance of identities. The bible speaks of this very simply: "In the breeze after noon God came to walk with Adam in paradise." It is after noon, in the declining light of the created day. In the free emptiness of the breeze that blows from where it pleases and goes where no one can estimate, God and man are together, not speaking in words, or syllables or forms. And that was the meaning of creation and of Paradise. But there was more.
The Word of God Himself was the "firstborn of every creature." He "in Whom all things consist" was not only to walk with man in the breeze after noon, but would also become man, and dwell with man as a brother.
The Lord would not only love His creation as a Father, but He would enter into His creation, emptying Himself, hiding Himself, as if he were not God but a creature. Why should He do this? Because He loved His creatures and because He could not bear that His creatures should merely adore Him as distant, remote, transcendent, and all powerful. This was not the glory that He sought, for it He were merely adored as great, His creatures would in their turn make themselves great and lord it over one another. For where there is a great God, then there are also god-like men, who make themselves kings and masters. And if God were merely a great artist who took pride in His creation, then men too would build cities and palaces and exploit other men for their own glory. This is the meaning of the myth of Babel, and of the tower builders who were to be "as Gods" with their hanging gardens, and with the heads of their enemies hanging in the gardens. For they would point to God and say: "He too is a great builder, and has destroyed all his enemies."
(God Said: I do not laugh at my enemies, because I wish to make it impossible for anyone to be my enemy. Therefore I identify myself with my enemy's own secret self.)
So God became man. He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place. And He refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way superior to His own creatures. He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend. He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made Him The Most Important Person. That is another matter: for though it is quite true that He is the King and the Lord of all, the conquerer of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet He is also the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable. He can be killed. And when the Son of Man was put to death, He rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for He said: "Kill me, it does not matter."
Having died, he dies no more in His own Person. But because He became man and united man's nature to Himself, and died for man, and rose as man from the dead, He brought it about that the sufferings of all men became His own sufferings; their weakness and defenselessness became His weakness and defenselessness; their insignifigance became His. But at the same time His own power, immortality, glory, and happiness were given to them and could become theirs. So if the God-man is still great, it is rather for our sakes than for His own that He wishes to be great and strong. For to Him, strength and weakness, life and death are not dualities with which He is not concerned, being above them in His own transcendent unity. Yet He would raise us also above these dualities by making us one with Him. For in becoming man, God not only became Jesus Christ but also potentially every man and woman that ever existed. In Christ, God became not only "this" man, but also, in a broader and more mystical sense, yet no less truly, "every man."
The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man, in some measure, depends on men. Not that we can do anything to change the mystery of the Incarnation in itself: but we are able to decide whether we ourselves, and that portion of the world which is ours, shall become aware of His presence, consecrated by it, and transfigured in its light.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for the brief moment of earthly existance, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by His Love, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live "in Christ."
Yet we must not deal in too negative a fashion even with the "external self." This self is not by nature evil, and the fact that it is unsubstantial is not to be imputed to it as some kind of crime. It is afflicted with metaphysical poverty: but all that is poor deserves mercy. So too our outward self: as long as it does not isolate itself in a lie, it is blessed by the mercy and the love of Christ. Appearances are to be accepted for what they are. The accidents of a poor and transient existance have, nevertheless, and ineffable value. They can be transparent media in which we apprehend the presence of God in the world. It is possible to speak of the exterior self as a mask: to do so is not necessarily to reprove it. The mask that each man wears may well be a disguise not only for that man's inner self but for God, wandering as a pilgrim and exile in His own creation.
And indeed, if Christ became man, it is because he wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What to God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts himself in the garden of His Creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyse them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve oursleves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But is does not matter much, because no depair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
Thomas Merton
-anthony
How to Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Wendell Berry
The General Dance
The Lord made His world not in order to judge it, not in order merely to dominate it, to make it obey the dictates of an inscrutable and all-powerfull will, not in order to find pleasure or displeasure in the way it worked: such was not the creation either of the world or of man.
The Lord made the world and made man in order that He Himself might descend into the world that He Himself might become Man. When He regarded the world He was about to make He saw His wisdom, as a man-child, "playing in the world, playing before Him at all times." And he reflected, "my delights are to be with the children of men."
The world was not made as prison for fallen spirits who were rejected by God: this is the gnostic error. The world was made as a temple, a paradise into which God Himself would descend to dwell familiarly with the spirits He had placed there to tend it for Him.
The early chapters of Genesis (far from being a pseudo-scientific account for the way the world was supposed to have come into being) are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation, a completely true, though not literal revelation of God's view of the universe and of His intentions for man. The point of these beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a garden in which He Himself took delight. He made man and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine care for created things. He made man in His own image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homo faber, as the gardener of paradise. He let man decide for himself how created things were to be interpreted, understood, and used: for Adam gave the animals their names (God gave them no names at all) and what names Adam gave them, that they were. Thus in his intelligence man, looking upon things, reproduced the divine idea, the divine truth, in man's own spirit.
As God creates things by seeing them in His own Logos, man brings truth to life in his mind by the marraige of the divine light, in the being of the object, with the divine light in his own reason. The meeting of these two lights in one mind is truth.
But there is a higher light still, not the light by which man "gives names" and forms concepts, with the aid of active intelligence, but the dark light in which no names are given, in which God confronts man not through the medium of things, but in His own simplicity. The union of the simple light of God with the simple light of man's spirit, in love, in contemplation. Thew two simplicities are one. They form, as it were, an emptiness in which there is no addition but rather the taking away of names, of content, of subject matter, of identities. In this meeting there is not so much a fusion of identities as a disappearance of identities. The bible speaks of this very simply: "In the breeze after noon God came to walk with Adam in paradise." It is after noon, in the declining light of the created day. In the free emptiness of the breeze that blows from where it pleases and goes where no one can estimate, God and man are together, not speaking in words, or syllables or forms. And that was the meaning of creation and of Paradise. But there was more.
The Word of God Himself was the "firstborn of every creature." He "in Whom all things consist" was not only to walk with man in the breeze after noon, but would also become man, and dwell with man as a brother.
The Lord would not only love His creation as a Father, but He would enter into His creation, emptying Himself, hiding Himself, as if he were not God but a creature. Why should He do this? Because He loved His creatures and because He could not bear that His creatures should merely adore Him as distant, remote, transcendent, and all powerful. This was not the glory that He sought, for it He were merely adored as great, His creatures would in their turn make themselves great and lord it over one another. For where there is a great God, then there are also god-like men, who make themselves kings and masters. And if God were merely a great artist who took pride in His creation, then men too would build cities and palaces and exploit other men for their own glory. This is the meaning of the myth of Babel, and of the tower builders who were to be "as Gods" with their hanging gardens, and with the heads of their enemies hanging in the gardens. For they would point to God and say: "He too is a great builder, and has destroyed all his enemies."
(God Said: I do not laugh at my enemies, because I wish to make it impossible for anyone to be my enemy. Therefore I identify myself with my enemy's own secret self.)
So God became man. He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place. And He refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way superior to His own creatures. He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend. He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made Him The Most Important Person. That is another matter: for though it is quite true that He is the King and the Lord of all, the conquerer of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet He is also the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable. He can be killed. And when the Son of Man was put to death, He rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for He said: "Kill me, it does not matter."
Having died, he dies no more in His own Person. But because He became man and united man's nature to Himself, and died for man, and rose as man from the dead, He brought it about that the sufferings of all men became His own sufferings; their weakness and defenselessness became His weakness and defenselessness; their insignifigance became His. But at the same time His own power, immortality, glory, and happiness were given to them and could become theirs. So if the God-man is still great, it is rather for our sakes than for His own that He wishes to be great and strong. For to Him, strength and weakness, life and death are not dualities with which He is not concerned, being above them in His own transcendent unity. Yet He would raise us also above these dualities by making us one with Him. For in becoming man, God not only became Jesus Christ but also potentially every man and woman that ever existed. In Christ, God became not only "this" man, but also, in a broader and more mystical sense, yet no less truly, "every man."
The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man, in some measure, depends on men. Not that we can do anything to change the mystery of the Incarnation in itself: but we are able to decide whether we ourselves, and that portion of the world which is ours, shall become aware of His presence, consecrated by it, and transfigured in its light.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for the brief moment of earthly existance, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by His Love, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live "in Christ."
Yet we must not deal in too negative a fashion even with the "external self." This self is not by nature evil, and the fact that it is unsubstantial is not to be imputed to it as some kind of crime. It is afflicted with metaphysical poverty: but all that is poor deserves mercy. So too our outward self: as long as it does not isolate itself in a lie, it is blessed by the mercy and the love of Christ. Appearances are to be accepted for what they are. The accidents of a poor and transient existance have, nevertheless, and ineffable value. They can be transparent media in which we apprehend the presence of God in the world. It is possible to speak of the exterior self as a mask: to do so is not necessarily to reprove it. The mask that each man wears may well be a disguise not only for that man's inner self but for God, wandering as a pilgrim and exile in His own creation.
And indeed, if Christ became man, it is because he wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What to God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts himself in the garden of His Creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyse them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve oursleves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But is does not matter much, because no depair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
Thomas Merton
-anthony