Above: La Barque by Odilon Redon, 1902, pastel
A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. - William Blake
Blake was fond of such provocations. For me, this oracular pronouncement seems to form a sort of diptych with Karl Rahner’s almost equally provocative claim that “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.” The two seem to mean something very similar, perhaps fundamentally the same claim seen from different angles.
I have returned to these two quotes repeatedly in reflecting on the online Lenten retreat led by Therese Schroder-Sheker, and sponsored by the Cathedral Arts program. I wrote about my hopes and expectations for this workshop in a previous post on this blog (here), and I was not disappointed, though I was certainly surprised more than once.
Early on, Therese shared two insights that laid a foundation for our time together. First, that there are two uses of language: to inform or to transform. I doubt any words can be exclusively informative or transformative, but the emphasis does tend to fall to one side or the other. Assembly instructions for an Ikea desk inform, but - and this is the second insight - the words of poets and mystics transform. Poetry and mysticism invite us to enter the consciousness of the authors.
This, of course, is why a poem cannot be reduced to prose. To say “A man pauses while traveling and becomes strangely absorbed in considering snow falling in the forest” conveys hardly anything of the transformative meaning of the poem“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” through which the reader herself becomes absorbed in contemplating and attending to the real.
Without prejudice to the value of formal theology and philosophy, mystical literature is equally incapable of being reduced to metaphysical propositions, though theological and mystical reflection should support and nurture each other. As Simone Weil put it with characteristic force “When genuine friends of God — such as was Eckhart to my way of thinking — repeat words they have heard in secret amidst the silence of the union of love, and these words are in disagreement with the teaching of the Church, it is simply that the language of the market place is not that of the nuptial chamber.”
All this is a kind of preface, because what I really want to communicate is that the whole time, gathering together with Therese and a small group of fellow retreatants each Tuesday of Lent, was far more transformative than informative. Certainly, a good dose of information was shared, and Beauty formed a focus for our times of reflection together. Still, when a friend asked me what the talks were about I had to reply “It’s not that kind of program.” I did not leave each session with a folio of facts in hand, still less with any techniques of the spiritual life. But in each session, I felt I was invited to enter and share a particular, poetic kind of consciousness.
Therese encouraged us to consider transformative moments or images, themes that had emerged over the course of our lives. She also shared a number of practices which she encouraged us to make use of, that she has found personally helpful in attending to transformative memories and, in a marvelous phrase, “to feel forward into possibility.” There was nothing arcane or occult about these practices - some were as simple as gardening in a prayerful and attentive way. But each was an occasion to cultivate attention in the robust sense which Simone Weil used the term, to describe the mind “waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.”
If prayer demands the faculty attention, however, it also demands the complementary faculty of Imagination - again, in the most robust sense of that term. For Romantics like Blake and Coleridge, imagination was not to be confused with the unreal or with daydreaming. Rather, the imagination is the power by which we perceive and know the deepest reality of God’s creation, and further, by which we participate in God’s creative activity.
Sergius Bulgakov, a great Russian theologian of the last century, deeply pondered the relationship between Divine and Human freedom. In a musical metaphor, he described all things in creation - especially human persons - as being given a “theme” of their being by God. While the theme is given, it is the task of human persons to expand upon and play the variations of this theme. Humans are given a share in God’s creative activity, a freedom to realize God’s will in their own genuinely creative way. This means that “creative activity is not something that is merely possible… it is man’s duty, God’s will concerning him” (Bride of the Lamb. 332). In another analogy, the primordial human call was to tend a garden. The gardener does not create plants, but does cultivate them, bringing out that fullness of life and beauty that is within them. This is human creativity, and is the “task of all natural human kind, called to dress and keep the Earth” (Bride of the Lamb. 322).
Returning to the Romantics, we could say that imagination is that human power which allows us to engage in this task. When we give attention to the world God has created, it is imagination which allows us both to perceive something of the themes God has implanted in the cosmos, and to elaborate upon them, bringing them to fruition. This is why Coleridge could say that the imagination is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”
Which brings me, at long last, back to Blake and Rahner. In saying Christians must be poets and mystics neither Blake nor Rahner mean that a Christian must conform to the various stereotypes of poets and mystics that these titles may conjure up. Blake’s Christian poet may never put pen to paper, just as Rahner’s mystic may never see visions, retreat to a cave, wear flowing scarves, or be possessed of any of the other standard accouterments available at your local Whole Foods Market. ™ Nevertheless, spiritual maturity calls for a poetic and mystical way of being in the world.
Of course, mysticism is a notoriously slippery word. As we discussed the nature of mystical language in our retreat, we fell back on a working definition of mysticism drawn from the writings of Bernard McGinn, as “simultaneous experience of loving, knowing, sensing the active presence of God in our lives.” This is the fruit of attention, and is indeed a poetic and imaginative way of being in the world.
I once read a quote, the source of which I cannot now recall or discover even by aid of Google, along the lines of ‘rhyme is a negotiation between memory and hope.’ And so it is for all worthwhile human thought and action. We live between deep memories, our intuitions of the Being of the world, those moments of rapt attention when we perceive a few bars of God’s creative themes, and the future age when all those themes will be united into one grand music. Above all, it is in Jesus Christ, the one in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17), that we find these themes revealed. Looking to Jesus the “author and perfector of our faith” (KJV Hebrews 12:2) is an act of Imagination, which allows us to ‘feel forward into possibility.’ Blake was surely right then, that the Christian life is a poetic life, a life which becomes a work of art, a hymn of praise to God.
There was one image in particular which Therese used, that seemed to hold many of the insights that I gained from this retreat. There was a monastic practice in Celtic Christianity of seafaring as a spiritual practice. Of course, the most famous monastic seafarer was St. Brendan, who may have actually reached North America. Other monks, however, embarked on more modest journeys in coracles or currachs - simple boats made of hide and willow branches. Sometimes, these journeys were undertaken without the aid of a paddle; the monk would simply get in and allow himself to be carried by wind, wave and providence. I do not know how widespread this practice was, but it has certainly become part of the symbolic lexicon of Celtic Christianity.
Therese pointed out in our retreat that the curragh is “a symbol of embarking upon a transformative life changing experience – one can never return to who or how we were prior to the risk. Genuine prayer is also a coracle if we are praying as Simone Weil defined it – prayer as rapt attention. Listening, receiving, waiting, making room for.” Prayers, poems and art are our coracles, when given over to God, can be vessels which carry us forward into possibility. They are moments the Divine-Humanity of Christ, the Wisdom of God, calls us forward toward the horizon of the age to come. This retreat, too, was a curragh, and I am grateful to divine providence for providing it.