An Afternoon of Reading

Meditating on our shared home and connection

I spent Easter Sunday reading.

What a luxury. An entire afternoon pulling down one book after another, dwelling on a meditation, sitting with a poem, and pondering several essays, all appropriate for the day.

First, it feels important to remind you that I have always tried to steer clear of politics and religion in my writing here. My faith is not the same I had as a child and young adult. I have no interest in discussing theology, doctrine, or policy. At the same time, it is impossible to separate my beliefs from who I am. I can define and analyze home intellectually and academically. And, how I know and feel home, however, is fully within my experience of the Divine—that which is greater than us, however you define that and whatever that may be.

This experience of God comes to me through a variety of traditions, all of which share fundamental tenets: love thy neighbor, show compassion even when it is not shown to you, be honest and truthful, forgive, and refrain from violence. It is in this spirit then that I share with you the things I read last week, the thoughts that brought me home once again.

It’s tradition for me to spend Easter with Wendell Berry’s poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, which seems to me not only perfect for this day but also as a general instruction for life. From this poem comes the sage and hope-filled advice: Practice resurrection. (Some of you may remember me sharing this poem in this post from last year.)

Then I revisited one of my father’s favorite’s by the early 17^th Century priest and poet, John Donne: Holy Sonnet X. I have fond memories of my dad reciting this dramatically, most especially at the end of what he called his “Celebration of Life” party six months before he died. In part:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,

For, those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me. …

. . .

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

And this led to me reading (again, as it is a favorite), perhaps Donne’s most well-known piece, a devotion written when he was quite ill, a devotion with one line in particular that is often quoted.

Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

-  John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No.17, 1624.

This devotion is worth reading in full or, at the very least, listening to Orson Wells’ oration:

Then, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, by Robert Benson. This book has been a treasured companion for a few decades now. First gifted to me by a friend, I have shared it with many others over the years. The copy I read on Easter was the one I gave to my mother in 2008 and is inscribed, “Dear Mom, This is the God I believe in, Dabhar who dwells in and among us (p75), the God who speaks to and through children (p43), the one who dreamed me into being. Happy Valentine’s Day. Love, Jan”

The essay I want to share with you is Six, that begins with A Collect for Vocation in Daily Work:

Deliver us from the service of self alone, that we may do the work you have given us to do, in truth and beauty and for the common good. For the sake of the One who came among us as one who serves.

In this essay, Benson talks about visiting the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and later Saint John the Divine Cathedral in New York. Construction of Saint John began in 1892 and is still not completed. It is the largest cathedral in the United States and one of the six largest in the world. Benson’s visit led him to contemplating all the people who worked and continue to work on this building, much as John Donne expresses in Devotion No. 17.

Benson writes:

“I spent an afternoon once wandering and wondering in the plaza of a great cathedral in Germany. There was a lot to wonder about there—the sheer beauty of the place, the crowds of people who had come from all over the world to see such a thing, the architecture, and the workmanship itself. But what I found myself wondering about mostly that day, and still do, is the people who built it. And the people who dreamed it.

“My working knowledge of the actual process of cathedral building is pretty limited. However, it does seem reasonable to assume that if it took a couple of hundred years or so to build one, then the people who dreamed it up never actually saw it completed. In fact, whole generations would have passed between the time the dream was dreamed and the time the choir made its first grand processional through the nave to the great high altar that the dreamers had envisioned.” . . .

“A cathedral is a testimony to a lot of the best things about us: creativity, hard work, devotion, patience, craftmanship, ingenuity. But it is also a testimony to dreams and those who believe in them. Someone dreams of a great house of worship, and someone else dreams of where it might be built. Someone dreams of where to find the stone for it, and then somebody dreams up a scheme to acquire the land rights. Then a whole lot of somebodies get caught up in the tide of the great dream and start cutting stones and hauling logs, raising money and driving nails, negotiating contracts and pounding iron. Whatever else such people are, they are dreamers.” (p85-87)

an architectural rendering of Saint John the Divine Cathedral in 1891 and the western facade today

Several pages later, he continues:

“On the wall of one of the cathedral bays at Saint John’s, the one called the Poet’s Corner, there is an inscription carved into the stone that quotes Willa Cather: “Thy will be done in art as it is in heaven.” Amen, I say. And in plumbing and paper pushing and publishing as well. And in teachering and board-membering and doctoring and bricklaying, for that matter. Or in whatever else it turns out is the work you and I are given to do…. The work that we do for the Cathedral is in front of us each day. It is the work that we do for each other, with each other, and beside each other. It is work that we can and must do ….

Not because we will see the Cathedral in our lifetime or even see our own work completed or because we will be hailed as the cornerstone itself, but because it is part and parcel of the reason the Dreamer sent us here.” (p96-97)

Whatever your faith, and however you answer the question of why we are here, it cannot be denied that we are in this life together. All of us. The earth is our shared home. Everyone of us is a part of the whole. Even science tells us this: we are all connected, everything is connected. What happens to one of us, affects all of us.

It seems to me that if we all could—myself included—be a little better at loving our neighbors, showing compassion even when it is not shown to us, being honest and truthful, forgiving, and refraining from violence, well, we can make this world a better place.

If this seems to you just a dream, then it is the same dream of Martin Luther King Jr, of John Lennon, John Donne, Wendell Berry, Robert Benson, and every person who ever worked building a cathedral. We can, together, dream it into being.