Eucharist &
Poetry: dwelling in possibility
Fr. Philip
Neri Powell, OP, PhL, PhD
Notre Dame
Seminary, NOLA
Do
I need to define the term “eucharist” to a group of Catholics?
We've all been there, to eucharist. We know the words, the gestures,
the scents and sights, all the in's and out's. Whether we've been
doing eucharist for 80 years or 8 months, we know all about
gathering, singing, listening, responding, taking and eating and
drinking, and then going out to do likewise in the world. We might
even know some of the history of the eucharist, some of the theology
and philosophy that gives it its shape and flavor. And we certainly
know about the conflicts, the divisiveness, and the compromises we've
endured around how the eucharist is useful, used, and changed over
the past few decades. It would be easy for me to spend my time this
evening reminding you what you probably already know about the
eucharist, or reinforcing ancient teachings around our sacrificial
meal, or even challenging some of your favorite pious beliefs. But
none of that would involve poetry. And I'm charged with involving
poetry. So, what can I do with the eucharist and one of humanity's
oldest arts? Here's what I came up with: poetry grants us permission
to speak about our experiences of the sublime, the ineffable (the
unsayable), the beautiful in a way that no other art form can. It
also lends us the tools, the energy, the purposeful resolve to think
and write and speak about that which we might only rarely dare to
approach.
Our
Latin tradition of theology and philosophy – for all of its
welcomed clarity and concision – sets aside – for now –
questions about how we might craft our responses to that which we can
never fully understand. Granted, we have abundant space in our
tradition for asking questions and shrugging our shoulders at the
mysterious answers. Aquinas himself shrugged at his mountains of
intellectual work after just one sublime, personal revelation. After
glimpsing the perfection he labored to reveal fully in his imperfect
work, he needed a word, an image to convey his failure. He needed a
metaphor: straw.
And this one word fulfills the duty set for it. “Straw” tells us
that his ST, his SCG, his philosophical works on truth, evil, the
soul, all his biblical commentaries, his sermons, and hymns – all
of it. . .fails to express the compressed Truth perfectly delivered
in one fleeting vision. All that he has written is written. True,
good, even beautiful! But it is not nor can it be perfect. What he
left unsaid about the Trinity, about the Christ, the sacraments, the
scriptures, about being, the virtues – what he left unsaid is where
we can turn to the hesitant poking and prodding of poetry and attempt
to find a slice more of perfection, just a jot and tittle more of
what we need to grow in holiness.
Thinking about who in our western poetic tradition does an excellent
job of pointing us toward the unsayable, the sublime, I thought of
dozens of poets. And I settled on three. Emily Dickinson,
Rainer-Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. Now, what to do with them?
Well, what do they have in common? Two Americans and an Austrian. One
from the 19th
c. and two who lived across the 19th
and 20th
centuries. All three lived in a Romantic age of poetry and all three
found the age's themes and style limiting. All three use their verse
to wrestle with what it is to exist in a reality silent about its
designs and intentions. All three see the world as already
interpreted and wholly uninterpretable. There are many other
commonalities. But the one I want to pull at is this: all
three struggle mightily with our experience of the sublime and the
inadequacies of our languages and symbols to speak about the
experience. The
questions they ask, the images they create all gesture toward an
accommodation with both the sublime and the unsayable. That
accommodation – to be present and to be silent – is the
discipline we need while doing eucharist. Not the presence of “just
being there” or the silence of “not talking.” But the presence
and the silence of being disposable in our will and still in our
intellect. We'll look at one poem from each poet and see how he/she
teaches us to be
while we give thanks and praise to God the Father.
But
before we dive into the poems, we need to define some terms. Two in
particular: sublime
and ineffable.
Not exactly words we come across in our daily lives but ones used
quite frequently in writing and talking about the Eucharist. Defining
“the sublime” goes all the way back to the 2nd
c. of the Christian era. We have the classical definition from
Longinus: “...the
Sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of
language...For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience
but rather to
transport them out of themselves”
(1.3,4).
Not to persuade but to transport beyond the self. Latin helps here.
Sublīmis
is literally “beneath the line” or “up to the line.” We can
assume for now that the line is limit of the Self, the horizon over
which the Self is lost to Self – one's experience, one's language,
one's memories. Encountering the sublime is encountering that which
both threatens
and elevates
the totality of who I am. Properly understood, the Eucharist is a
sublime liturgical act that moves me from Me to Us – me, you, and
God. We are elevated into the Divine by the Divine, and this
elevation threatens our merely creaturely being.
If
sublime language elevates, and The Sublime is that which elevates and
threatens, then we can define The Ineffable as that which leaves us
speechless, inarticulate. We can go further and say that there are
experiences of the sublime that we cannot put into words. Why?
Precisely because the experience stretches us to our limits. That we
are faced with the ineffable in the sublime may tempt us to quietism,
to simply going still and mute before the unsayable. This could be an
involuntary, temporary reaction to encountering the sublime. But as
rational animals – human persons, body and soul – we are built to
comprehend, created to investigate and understand. And we do this
through art, music, science, philosophy, theology, and poetry. Each
discipline provides its unique tools and vocabularies for
investigating and describing what the disciple finds in the created
world. For the Catholic artist, musician, poet, scientist the created
world reveals the Divine – granted, imperfectly, incompletely, in
hesitant and imprecise gestures, words, notes, and paints. But
nonetheless prayerfully, sacramentally, and ultimately,
sacrificially. The ineffable tempts the intellect and will to keep
approaching; to exhaust the hesitancy, the imprecision of our tools
and materials. Our tool tonight is the imprecision of language, the
music of words grasping at their limits.
Our
first disciple in the art of exhausting the imprecision of language
is R.M. Rilke. Considered the last German Romantic poet and the first
modernist poet from his homeland, he completed his best known work,
Dunio
Elegies,
in 1922 and published it a year later, one year after Eliot's
ground-breaking poem, “The Wasteland.” We'll consider the opening
fourteen lines of “The First Elegy.” Here we find a soul crying a
lament for his insignificant existence, mourning the disdain with
which the higher things of creation (“angelic hierarchies”)
regard him. We can ask him: why are you crying out? What's happened?
Why do you
merit attention from heaven? He doesn't answer. All he says is that
if one of these angels were to embrace him, he would “perish/in
the embrace of his stronger existence.”
Does he desire to vanish? Is he threatened or elevated by this
superlative being? Apparently, both: “For beauty is nothing but the
beginning of terror...” Elevated to beauty; threatened by terror.
But why should beauty terrify? If beauty is Sublime, why should we
find terror in its contemplation? His answer is straightforward:
“[we] are awed because it [the angel] serenely disdains to
annihilate us.” We are that sort of being that is annihilated in
the contemplation of beauty. Not only annihilated but annihilated
with serene disdain. And it's not entirely clear if we are to be
terrified by our imminent non-being or by the fact that we can be
snuffed out with such peaceful contempt. It's almost as if the angel
who would take us to its heart is unaware of our fragility, too
perfect to note that it's our dire imperfection – our whole being –
it destroys. Since “[e]ach single angel is terrifying,” our poet
retreats from his subjunctive, elegiac vision, forcing himself
instead to “swallow and hold back/the surging call of my dark
sobbing.” Here we see Rilke struggling with two existential
realities: our apparent helplessness in face of eternity and our
inability to express this helplessness in any way more coherent than
“dark sobbing.” IOW, we have our stance before the Sublime
(helplessness) and the consequences of our stance, the Unsayable. The
ineffability of this encounter with the terrifying angel is made
clear: “Oh, to whom can we turn for help?/
Not angels, not
humans...” Angels cannot help us articulate our helplessness b/c
their beauty terrifies. Humans cannot help one another b/c every
human is terrified by angelic beauty. The non-human animals of
creation may sense our anxiety, but they do not interpret the world;
they do not create language-worlds to live in. That we humans must
interpret what we experience alienates us from the things of the
world, leaving us bound to concept, words, symbols, and gestures –
all artifice and inadequate, in the end. Is this why Rilke
contemplates crying out to the angelic hierarchies? And then,
hesitates? He's trapped between the annihilating superabundant being
of the Sublime and the maddeningly imperfect Unsayable.
What
can Rilke's lament teach us about the Eucharist? If we take these
dense fourteen lines as an introduction to an existential crisis, a
cry of grief at realizing what it is to be, to be human, then we can
ask: what does the Eucharist teach us about being imperfectly and
perfectly human in the presence of the Divine? Rilke gives us one way
of answering the question – though he never explicitly addresses
the question in terms of the Eucharist. Our ancient teaching on the
Real Presence of Christ places us directly in front of the Divine
during the Eucharist. We employ an arsenal of words, symbols,
gestures, smells, sounds, and colors to create an interpreted
liturgical world. That world – we know – is inadequate to the
given task of cleanly, wholly representing who we are in the Divine
presence. It is also inadequate to the challenge of communicating the
Divine to its creatures. Rilke recoils, halting his frustrated cry,
b/c to be embraced by the angel is terrifying, annihilating. Is this
our response to being in the presence of the Divine? If not, should
it be? If so, if we recoil, then how are we welcoming the Divine
into our interpreted world? These few lines from Rilke's first elegy
reveal the necessity of remaining disposable and still while in
Christ's sacramental presence. If beauty is the beginning of terror,
as Rilke says, then we can retort: fear of the Divine is the
beginning of wisdom. Rather than shrink away, swallow our cry, and
look to the things of the world for consolation, we respond as
creatures being perfected in our humanity. We can do what Rilke never
considers: give
God thanks and praise.
Not for threatening to annihilate us in the beauty of His
superabundant Being but for coming to us perfectly human and for
opening the possibility for us to become Divine w/o losing our
humanity. The Eucharist is our way of welcoming and receiving this
promise with praise and thanksgiving. In the purest sense of fear, we
abide in awe before the sacramental Christ, take him in – Body,
Blood, Soul, and Divinity – and then, take him out. . .into the
world to be all for all.
We've
noted that Rilke seemed – at least in the beginning – to be
trapped between the perfected being of the angel (the Sublime) and
his inability to bring the Sublime into his interpreted world (the
Unsayable). Our next artist, the Cloistered Poet of Amherst, is quiet
at home, writing through the imprecisions of language. In fact, she
happily declares: I
dwell in Possibility –/A
fairer House than Prose –/More numerous of Windows –/Superior –
for Doors –.
Possibility. Potential. Contingency. Maybe probability? Poetry as
possibility may strike our modernist ears as old hat. We're used to
the hesitancy, the deferral, the subjectivity, the prominence of the
otherwise interior confessional in poetry. But Dickinson was no
modernist poet. Set against her contemporary, Walt Whitman – the
wild man prophet of American Exceptionalism – Dickinson's voice is
the voice of a cloistered contemplative. Spare, indirect, demur,
merely hinting-at but often brightened with bursts of searing
clarity. The poem we're using tonight is just four lines: The
words the happy say/Are paltry melody/But those the silent feel/Are
beautiful—.
So, there's a distinction to be made between the happy who sing and
the silent who feel. What is she implying? We can feel w/o singing?
Singing betrays feeling? Maybe the crux of the question has more to
do with the melody, which is paltry. It's thin, meager. Maybe
worthless? Words, tune, pitch. . .the hymn is adequate but not
fulsome? What's missing in the melody to make paltry? Obviously,
there's more. In the presence of the Sublime, what counts as an
adequate response, what manages to be sufficient in conveying how we
feel? And does this response matter. . .to
the Sublime?
Here we get to the root of the reality: does the Sublime have a
response to us? That is, is there a required, a necessary response to
our being so close to the Perfect from the Perfect? Sure, we –
being imperfect – feel compelled to shout out, to reach out, to
stretch out toward the perfect – but does the Perfect need our
shouting, our stretching? No. The Sublime is perfect; therefore, it
needs nothing. Yes. The Sublime is only sublime in our viewing of its
sublimity. Otherwise, it is what it is. “Sublimity” is a function
of our interpreted world. It's what we “add” to the reality. But
notice: Dickinson writes that it is those words the silent feel. .
.they are beautiful. The unspoken words are beautiful. Not the muted
speakers. Likewise, the words the happy speak compose the “paltry
melody.” Our Cloistered Poet is pointing us toward the ineffable,
the Unsayable. With her usual intense care, Dickinson is teasing out
the difference between the poverty of spoken words and the beauty of
unspoken words simply felt. For a poet, an artist with words, this is
a strange position to take. It would seem more natural for her to
claim the spoken word as the more powerful. After all, silence makes
no use of metaphors, rhymes, rhythms, or enjambments. So, what's
going on here? One way of reading Dickinson's poem is to see it as a
frame for the ineffable; that is, she is “locating” the ineffable
by identifying where it isn't – the spoken word. The only way she
can do this – as a poet – is with words. These four lines then
gesture toward what cannot be said – the beauty of words simply
felt. Now, why are the words spoken by the happy so impoverished? Is
it because they exhaust themselves, their significance in trying to
say what cannot be said? Yes, I think so. Dickinson wants us to
notice that she's praising the ineffable with words, thus making her
poem a delightful contradiction! And I can't resist quoting here one
of my favorite Dickinson poems: Tell
all the truth but tell it slant — /Success in Circuit lies/Too
bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth's superb surprise/As
Lightning to the Children eased/With explanation kind/The Truth must
dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind —.
As a statement of her overall poetic project, Dickinson could not do
better.
So,
how does our little poem about speaking and silence help us to
understand the Eucharist? There's a lot of speaking in the Mass.
Prayers, readings, the homily, singing. There may even be short
moments of silence. Taking Dickinson's proposition that the ineffable
can only be framed but never spoken, we can ask: how
does the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist – all of the
sights, sounds, smells, motions – how does it frame our experience
of the Divine?
Are we merely happily saying the words? Or are we – in silence –
letting the words be beautiful in us? Rilke challenges us to
contemplate the possibility of being annihilated by the Sublime. He
provokes in us a question about our relationship with that which is
beyond us in every way. Dickinson doesn't seem to be much interested
in the Sublime. Her interpreted world is the world of possibility,
the world of exhausting the imprecision of words. Her challenge to us
is not an existential-crisis-invoking gut punch but rather – like
her strong, delicate poetic lines – a nudge to notice ourselves
failing to participate in the salvific action of the Eucharist.
“Active participation” isn't about getting up and moving around
and having a job at the Mass, like reading or taking up the
collection or serving as a CM. The Latin term translated as “active
participation” is better translated as “actual participation;”
that is, that sort of participation that moves your potential to be
holy to actual holiness. That kind of participation can be done in
silence. Our prayers, the homily, the readings, the singing – all
words. All spoken words. But merely repeating them does not frame the
ineffable. They are the least
wrong way
to understand what we are doing at the Eucharist. What will better
help us approach the fullness of Christ's beauty in the Eucharist is
attending to the silences that frames the ineffable. Most
importantly, the interior silences we construct by muting our paltry
melodies.
Before
moving to our last poet, I want to take a moment to talk about the
Eucharist from within the tradition, making sure – despite my
earlier assurances – that we have a good idea of what of we're
talking about. I said earlier that we all know what the Mass is.
We've all been to Mass, celebrated the Eucharist probably hundreds of
times. And the doing of eucharist is immensely more important to our
salvation than merely understanding it intellectually. This truth
does not mean, however, that we cannot or should not try to grasp at
a rational level what the Eucharist is. To help us here, we turn to
Pope Benedict XVI and his 2007 exhortation on the Eucharist,
Sacramentum
caritatis,
the Sacrament of Charity. I strongly recommend reading this document
b/c it is probably one of the best explanations of the Eucharist
available. He writes, “In the sacrament of the altar, the Lord
meets us, men and women created in God's image and likeness, and
becomes our companion along the way. In this sacrament, the Lord
truly becomes food for us, to satisfy our hunger for truth and
freedom. Since only the truth can make us free, Christ becomes for us
the food of truth. . .Each of us has an innate and irrepressible
desire for ultimate and definitive truth...Jesus Christ is the Truth
in person, drawing the world to himself. . .” (SC2). Lots to unpack
here. In the Eucharist: 1) God comes to meet us; 2) He becomes our
companion along the Way; 3) knowing that we hunger for truth and
freedom, He becomes our food; 4) knowing that only the truth can set
us free, Christ becomes for us the food of truth; 5) our
irrepressible desire for truth is met in the person of Jesus Christ,
who draws the world to himself. BXVI is re-orienting our perspective
on the Eucharist away from the dominant modern view that the
Eucharist is principally (if not only) about
the community of believers, gathering together to reinforce their
identity as followers of Christ. This communal reinforcement of our
identity is certainly a result of celebrating the Eucharist, but it
is not purpose, the telos
of celebrating the Eucharist. What is the telos
of the Eucharist? BXVI continues, “The substantial conversion of
bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the
principle of a radical change, a sort of 'nuclear fission' . . .which
penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a
process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the
transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be
all in all” (SC2). The telos
of the Eucharist is the transfiguration of the entire world so that
God will be all in all. The task of transfiguring the entire world
falls to you and me. BXVI uses the image of nuclear fission. Nuclear
fusion is the process of drawing atoms inward toward a central mass.
Nuclear fission is where atoms are scattered, pushed out and away
from the central mass. In this image from physics, we can see that we
come together in the Eucharist (fusion) and then we scatter into the
world (fission). But – like the particles in a nuclear reaction –
we do not scatter unchanged. In the Eucharist, we offer Christ –
BBSD; we offer ourselves individually and as a Body to the Father,
surrendering everything we have and are to be transfigured into
imperfect Christs. Our task is to go out – as living, breathing
tabernacles – and bring Christ to the entire world.
I'm
arguing in this talk that our poets can help us investigate how we
participate in our own transfiguration during the Eucharist. Rilke
and Dickinson give us insights into how we encounter the Sublime and
struggle to articulate what we experience – the Ineffable. They are
especially useful to us b/c they come to us from outside our Catholic
tradition. Their questions and pokes and prods assume nothing we take
for granted. Our last poet, Wallace Stevens, spent his entire career
as a poet rejecting the very idea of God's existence. In fact, he
proposes poetry as a replacement for religion altogether. There is
good evidence that he made a deathbed conversion and was received
into the Church before he died. But his life-long rejection of
Christianity and his search for Something Else to ground his humanity
fueled his poetic project.
Stevens'
poetry is notoriously difficult. It is also spectacularly beautiful.
That combination of difficulty and beauty makes choosing a poem for
this talk frustrating. I've settled on “Sunday Morning.” I'll
start with a quote from his Adagia,
a book of aphorisms, “After
one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes
its place as life's redemption.” Or, as he put it in one of his
most famous poems, “Poetry//Exceeding music must take the place/Of
empty heaven and its hymns,/Ourselves in poetry must take their
place”(TMWBG). Neither Rilke nor Dickinson advocated for the
abandonment of religion. Rilke was, at best, wary of it; and
Dickinson shared his wariness, if not his post-Romantic despair at
losing it. Stevens, on the other hand, being a good disciple of
Emerson, easily shifted from the simple Lutheranism of his family
into a humanist exaltation of things, the things of the world. Not
worldliness. By all accounts, his personal life resembled that of a
monk. But a fascination with how poetry, the poetic imagination,
shapes and polishes the furniture of the universe. He believed this
shaping and polishing was the limit of worship. Joan Richardson, a
Stevens biographer, succinctly summarizes our poet's work: “Reading
his poems, we learn the same habit of close attention, intense
concentration, demanded by prayer; his body of work a breviary, a
primer in practicing a 'constant sacrament of praise' for mere
being”(HTLWTD 18-19).
While
Rilke wrestled with the deadliness of the Sublime and Dickinson
carefully picked her words to frame the ineffable, Stevens chose to
construct the necessary fictions of life that a non-existent God
never created. His poems are those necessary fictions. His first
fiction tonight is “Sunday Morning” first published in Poetry
Magazine in 1915 and later included in his first volume, Harmonium,
published the same year as Rilke's Duino
Elegies, 1923.
Stevens was 35yo when “Sunday Morning” appeared in print. He was
well away from his family's Lutheranism and very much in the thrall
of Emerson, William James, and George Santayana, the self-professed
“Catholic atheist.” “Sunday Morning” announces his departure
from religion in general and Christianity in particular. The poem
opens with a woman enjoying her Sunday morning – oranges, coffee,
a cockatoo, all working together, dissipating “[t]he holy hush of
ancient sacrifice.” She dreams, walking “[o]ver the seas, to
silent Palestine,/Dominion
of the blood and sepulcher.” Stevens sets the scene, contrasting a
bright, pleasant modernity with the dark, bloody history of
sacrifice. And then he asks the question modernity demands: “Why
should she give her bounty to the dead?/What is divinity if it can
come/Only in silent shadows and in dreams?” Why should someone
possessed of worldly beauty surrender it to tradition – the dead?
What is the power of divinity if it cannot be seen and heard in the
things of the world? Shadows and dreams aren't a reliable means of
revealing reality! The poet tells us the secret that will relieve her
worry: “Divinity must live within herself...” Despite this
revelation, she insists, “But in contentment I still feel/The need
of some imperishable bliss.” And the poet answers, “Death is the
mother of beauty...” Without an end, a conclusion nothing is
beautiful. Look to your death, then attend to the things of the
world, know that you and they will pass – there
is your bliss,
knowing you are impermanent.
This
early declaration of nihilism (1915) prompts us to consider “[t]he
holy hush of ancient sacrifice”
as we live and move and have our being in a world bereft of religious
enchantment. Stevens' secular religion seems almost sterile, lacking
in the jagged edges that makes belief so vital to the human soul.
Where's the praise? The thanksgiving? The offertory of self and
other? Even his confessed despair comes off like a distant object
observed behind glass: “At
evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they
sink,/Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” Beautiful. But
hopeless. So, we can ask ourselves during the Eucharist: does
my actual participation in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving
fill me with hope?
Do I experience the telos
of this liturgy – the perfecting of my humanity into the Christ? We
don't have to stay at home on a Sunday morning with coffee and the TV
to refuse to be transfigured. We can do that from a pew while
reciting the Creed and queuing up for Communion. The service Stevens'
poem performs for us is this: he starkly contrasts the existing
options for those who lay claim to the faith. As beautiful as this
poem is, and it is, its beauty works to seduce us away from the
demands of sacrifice; its eros
tempts us to just stay in bed – whether we actually leave our beds
or not. The transfiguring power of the Eucharist only works for us if
we dispose ourselves to be worked upon. This means having the courage
to encounter the Sublime in God and one another; it means having the
patience to trust our limitations and wrestle with the ineffable; it
means surrendering ourselves to the telos of our common work – the
liturgy – and sharing the fruits of that work with the world; and
finally, it means practicing suffering-well for the redemption of
creation.
Can
we do any of those things without God? Or, minimally, without some
sense of the Sublime, some impulse to recognize that there is
Something larger, more fundamental that sits beyond the limits of our
immediate humanity to know and love? In 1915, Stevens announced his
allegiance to what many critics called a hedonistic nihilism. “Sunday
Morning” was described as the work of an aesthete. In 1936, he
published Ideas
of Order,
which includes the poem, “The American Sublime” – our second
necessary fiction for this evening. Sharp, spare, unadorned, our poem
gets right to the question at hand: “How
does one stand/To behold the sublime...?” It's striking that
Stevens wants us to meditate on how one stands to behold the sublime.
We might expect a question about the nature of the sublime, or
whether or not the sublime is knowable, or how beholding the sublime
will change us. What we get is a question meant to turn our
contemplation back on the beholder. The move here is not a denial of
the reality of the sublime but rather than emphasis on the role of
the imagination in beholding the sublime. Of course, this begs the
question somewhat. Am I asking myself how I am to stand to behold the
really real sublime? Or am I simply invoking my imagination to create
the sublime? Stevens absolutely delights in this sort of ambiguity.
But he insists that we not exclude an interrogation of the
imagination's role in beholding the sublime – whether it's an
exterior or interior phenomenon: “When
General Jackson/Posed for his statue/He
knew how one feels.” We have two historical events: Jackson posing
for the sculptor and how Jackson felt while posing. Neither of these
is available to us to question. What we have is the statue. Does the
statue capture that which is beyond us, the sublime? If so, we have
access to the sublime. If not, we have to imagine the sublime at work
in the statue. Then he announces something like a secular Pentecost:
“And
the sublime comes down/To the spirit itself,/The spirit and
space,/The empty spirit/In vacant space.” The progression of
emptying out here is telling. What exactly is the sublime descending
upon? The Holy Spirit descended on the apostles and disciples at
Pentecost. But Stevens' sublime is descending first on spirit, then
spirit and space, then empty spirit, and finally, vacant space. Is
the Sublime sublime if there is no imagination to behold it? He
answers with a deceptively pedestrian set of questions: “What wine
does one drink?/What bread does one eat?” These questions leave the
ambiguity of the sublime's existence open to the how the reader
understands the significance of the bread and wine. If bread is just
bread and wine just wine, then the sublime descends on a vacant
reader. If the bread and wine signify something more, something
transubstantiated, then the sublime descends on an imagination used
to imagining sacramentally.
Our
poets have given us the chance to look at the Eucharist in ways we
may have never thought of. Rilke's subjunctive and elegiac cry for
meaning in the face of his terrifying angel asks us to consider how
we encounter the Divine. In fact, it asks: do we encounter the Divine
in the Eucharist? Surely, God comes to us in our liturgy, but we do
go to Him? And we if go to Him, do we bring everything we have and
everything we are? What Rilke calls annihilation, we call being
perfected in Christ – not going into nothingness but being
transfigured into living, breathing tabernacles to carry Christ to
the world. Dickinson, so meticulous and coy, asks us to acknowledge
the ineffable, to give a hesitant nod to the Unsayable and dig in to
offer it a fleeting frame. Words said
are happy. But in the face of the Real, they sing a “paltry
melody.” The truly beautiful words are silently felt. Left unsaid,
these words remain tied to the imagination in their lack of physical
expression. She asks us to consider silence as a means of
encountering the ineffable, as a way to pick-out the unsayable,
experience it to the limits of our capacity, and then let it go. In
the Eucharist, we have the Church's collective response to God coming
to us. Our response is words, smells, colors, gestures. But these
sacramental elements remain merely ritualistic if they are not framed
by the silence of a properly disposed soul and stilled intellect. For
the whole person to be present at Mass, the possibility of the
unsayable must be too. Maybe Ms Dickinson meant to write, “ I dwell
in possibility/a finer house than prayer”?
Stevens offers us the chance to take on the larger dare – set
religious tradition aside in favor of shaping and polishing the
things of the world with language. For him, poetry must displace
prayer as our primary means of finding and keeping some semblance of
enduring meaning. The tombs and chapels and old rugged crosses of the
ancient world cannot reveal the divine – not b/c they are too small
to contain greatness but b/c there is no divinity for them to
contain. He asks us to abandon the eros
of sacrifice for the “[c]omplacencies of the peignoir,” a
beautiful but ultimately infertile nihilism.
At
the beginning of this talk, I suggested that the task of poetry is to
exhaust the imprecision of language. This task – wringing out every
drop of a word's inadequacy – cannot be accomplished. Whether the
poet is showing us his rage against existence, or sharing the fruits
of her contemplation, or daring us to ground our faith in the
creative imagination – language will always ultimately fail to
capture the Real. This failure extends even into our liturgies. And
thanks be to God! If getting the formula right were enough to achieve
salvation, then it would be enough for us to memorize the formula,
repeat it when necessary, and then simply get on with our day. IOW,
following Christ and becoming Christs would be a matter of magical
incantation, not a liturgical labor. That we must actually
participate in our own salvation puts the burden on us to choose –
freely choose – to be members of the Body. Just showing up and
being still is necessary but insufficient for growing in holiness.
The Eucharist calls us to make of ourselves an oblation to God. Not
b/c He needs a sacrifice but b/c we need to be sacrificed, to be made
holy in surrender. The only language that even begins to capture the
sublimity of God and articulate His ineffability is the language of
praise and thanksgiving. The Eucharist and our attentive
participation in it is just the beginning of our dwelling in
possibility. What we possess of possibility that none of our poets
did is the Catholic imagination; that is, the faculty to interpret
our lived-world through the complimentary lens of sacramentality and
incarnationality – God reveals Himself continuously through created
things and
those created things live and move and have their being in Him. We
are participatory beings, beings who are held in being by Being
Himself. The Eucharist is our received means of perfecting our
participation in His divinity, thus everything about each one of us
who celebrate the Eucharist is suffused with the gift of experiencing
and interpreting creation as a fellow-being participating in the
divine. Where we see grace, we see God working. We see God b/c He is
His work. Our poets gave us liminal insights into the Sublime, the
ineffable and prompted us to ask questions we may have never
considered. They may have pricked our conscience to attentive
contemplation, telling us all the truth but telling it slant. That
slant – that squinting hesitancy – can never overcome faith, but
it can move us out of complacency and routine and along the ragged
edges of growing in holiness.
