Poems I Journey With 21

A young S.T. Coleridge

One of my favourite Romantic poets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was lucky to study him from two angles, once in an English Literature course at undergraduate level and once at the level of philosophical theology whilst studying at postgraduate level. That means that I have been lucky to have studied both his poems and his literary/theological/philosophical prose works. Coleridge (1772 –1834) was a complex individual and an extremely erudite dilettante, being a poet, a literary critic and philosopher as well as being an avid walker and lover of nature. He was also a wonderful raconteur who loved to regale his friends with stories and witticisms. Again, he was more Dionysian than Apollonian in temperament, yet in his philosophical and theological musings he could readily access and use profitably and aptly the higher reaches of logical argument and thought, thereby embracing both heart and head in a splendid and felicitous harmony.

With his friend and colleague William Wordsworth, Coleridge was a founder of what is called the Romantic Movement in England. His most anthologised poems and well known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan while his major prose work Biographia Literaria is an amazingly erudite, eccentric and extremely sui generis  work of his literary imagination. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was and is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture through his studies in the German language and German philosophy at Gottingen University.  Coleridge, as a result of his concentrated studies, coined many familiar words and phrases, including “suspension of disbelief, the “esemplastic power of imagination” and many more. He is noted as a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism. In short, then, we may summarise by saying that it was through Coleridge’s writings and translations that German transcendentalism entered the English and American Romantic Movements.

On a personal level, throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Some have speculated that he had bipolar disorder, though that is impossible to prove definitively. However, it is important to note that he became an addict of opium through its medicinal and all-too-easily attainable form called Laudanum. All of this feeds into the wonderfully complex and inspiring thought of a great poet and marvellously talented critic.

The poem I wish to offer the reader this evening is one of what is called his “conversation poems” namely “Frost at Midnight.”

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. 

Briefest of Commentaries

Here in this wonderful poem we encounter the very quintessence of Romantic poetry: an openness to the splendour, wonder and magic of nature where even “[t]he frost performs its secret ministry.” In other words, from the very first line of this poem we encounter the mystery of nature in the wonderful patterns frost forms all around us on a winter’s night. It is important to note that Coleridge attributes power to the frost, namely the power to perform a ministry or ritual that brings the believer into communion with the very heart of nature, namely the Creator revealed through the mysterious and wondrous patterns performed by a minister called “frost.” Again, what we have here is the personification of nature in the workings of the frost. It is significant, also, the Coleridge ends the poem with a second reference to the frost’s ministry in the third last line of the last stanza.

From the first we are drawn into the profound solitude that obtains in the poet’s country cottage in Cumbria. We encounter all the sights and sounds of Coleridge’s surroundings depicted in wonderfully clear and vivid images: “my cradled infant slumbers peacefully,” “the thin blue flame lies on my low-burnt fire,” the “film which fluttered on the grate,” “the old church-tower,//Whose bells, the poor man's only music,” “My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart//With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,” “For I was reared//In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,” and so on and so forth.  Unlike his father, his son Hartley will be reared, attuned to the sounds of nature and not in a great and noisy city. Again, all these images and this last aspiration for his son are essentially Romantic in nature, that is, they serve to help us to commune with God in and through nature.

In conclusion, let me repeat here the final eleven lines of the poem, which essentially sum up the Romantic credo to which Wordsworth et al subscribed and that S.T. Coleridge so eruditely wrote about in his prose writings.  With that thought I leave the reader to contemplate these last lines of this great poem:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Journal of a Soul 71

The Journey Continues

Howth, Christmas Eve, 2014

A New Year has begun.  Another year has been clocked up on that strange weak vehicle of self or soul we call the body.  The calendar cycle has begun once again.  There is a wisdom in the seasons that seems to suggest that everything is cyclical, that progress is an illusion.  The way of wisdom is by the gradual erosion of our superficial beliefs bit by slow bit - like that proverbial drip that wears the stone.  Nothing is constant - all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus says, is "in a state of flux," and yet there is a paradoxical cyclical repetition to change. 

Heraclitus in Raphael's School of Athens

The New Year is ushered in by a review of the events - little and great, insignificant and significant, heroic and tragic - of the past twelve months.  It is as if the fires of the last year have all burned themselves down into the ashes of our memory as we look ahead in anticipation and hope to the brighter fires of the year to come. Sometimes one gets the distinct impression that the drudgery of the whole thing begins again.  It's as if our body is growing tired of the whole thing and that the spirit itself is flagging.  When one looks out into the grey skies of winter in this northern hemisphere it feels as if one might be a character in a Kafka novel or a Beckett play - just there on an indifferent stage not understanding what has happened to you in life and that the blessed thing has a habit of just going on and on.  Yes, the cycle begins over and over again. And where lies the meaning?

There are sentences that haunt the mind of this writer - ones indeed of Biblical portent and intensity. These are sentences that come whistling like boys walking past graveyards on a dark shadowy night. "There is nothing new under the sun," says Qoheleth, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes and he proceeds in Kafkaesque and Beckettian tones, in absurdist or existentialist terms with these rather anachronistically modern lines that are paradoxically over 2000 years old:

A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after. (Eccles. 1: 2-9)

And so here we go with another year. Where does that leave the writer of this blog? What about the progress on the spiritual way for this pilgrim soul?  I often wonder how far I have come and if any progress has been made at all.   Am I just beginning all over again? It often seems as if the spiritual journey is one of a cyclical nature too.  It feels as if the whole journey is beginning all over again from the start and that any progress that had apparently been achieved has now turned out to be a mere illusion.  With this in mind I can empathize with the young boy who informed me today that he had to get a repeat of his operation of four years ago to replace his VNS device (Vagus Nerve Stimulator) under the skin in his upper chest. This procedure is a modern treatment for trickier cases of epilepsy.  Or still again I can appreciate the predicament of anyone who has had a relapse of one or other disease that plunges them back to the beginning once again.

TS Eliot

And yet,  the words of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) lift me, as they always do, with their dearly-bought but deep wisdom:

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. ("Four Quartets")

As any teacher or indeed any maker of poems will tell you a question like "what does this poem or these lines mean?" is a rather inappropriate one to ask of any such work.  Poems are an intricate interweaving of words, feelings, inspiration and sound, and their meaning lies somewhere in the interaction of the reader with that complex phenomenon.  So meaning is a very dynamic experience that cannot be reduced to a mere paraphrase.  

Let's try, though, to tease out some of the connotations and implications for our lives from Eliot's intriguing lines: 

Most of us are searchers and explorers who want to make some sense of our lives.  And moreover, we may never cease from doing so as Eliot suggests.  Oftentimes, and indeed our poet suggests always, we arrive back where we started out and see the place anew.  On one level the place is obviously the same, but now we are seeing it with "new" eyes, with a new optic, from a new or deeper or even different perspective.  Now there are new dimensions to our experience - new depths and/or new heights to it!

Making Sense of Life and the Turn to Meditation

If we don't seek to make some sense of our lives we are somehow consigned to a rather humdrum, boring and meaninglessly repetitious existence.  In short, we are meaning-making creatures and were meant to be.  In so doing, we are in a growing mode, ready to embrace happiness or that state called "flourishing" or "eudaimonia" by Aristotle.

However, searching and exploring can tire the spirit and the body.  I remember many years ago attending a spiritual retreat where each group was asked to come up with a name for their group.  The names suggested were along these lines: Searchers, Explorers, Sunflowers, Wayfarers, Pilgrims, Brothers and Sisters and so on.  The name that showed the least sense of struggle, obviously, was that of Sunflowers.  That particular group explained that they were so aware that they were respondents to sheer gifts and graces that were lavished upon them by God, the Universe or Life itself that they could come up with no other appellation.  This, at first sight, is a rather strange way of responding to life, is it not?  And yet it a legitimate experience of thanksgiving for life's bounty or bounteousness  that quite a number of people experience.  Sunflowers turn towards the sun and are led to blossom under its rays.  There are people who experience living as such a response to what they experience as the sheer giftedness of their being.

In those dry periods when its seems that I am going around in meaningless circles, as so brutally expressed in my opening paragraphs, that I am seemingly in the same old place or predicament, I often find myself turning to meditation.  Meditation for me can be done at three levels, and often I can do it at each of the three levels according to how I feel in any given situation.  At level one we can meditate at a physical level, that is, we can engage in it  solely as an exercise to relax our body.  At level two we can go deeper still and relax our mind - that is, where the mindfulness exercise is one of mental or psychological relaxation.  As a believer in the spiritual realm, I accept and indeed experience meditation as allowing me to experience a sense of being in touch with a deeper ground of my being, namely a divine or spiritual level to my life and to the world.  

It is at this third level that I experience graced moments of contact with a deeper or higher level reaching into my own little world.  This is very hard to describe because quite simply one has to experience it, to be touched by it and moved by it so as to appreciate it in any way at all.  It is at this level, I believe, that the human meditator can become like a sunflower responding to the Sun or Ground of life that some dare call God.  It is at this deeper (or higher depending on one's spatial metaphor) level that in T.S. Eliot's words we recognize or "know the place for the first time."  It is also at this level that one realizes that despite the seeming stagnation, the apparent atrophy and the stupefying stasis, there indeed has been a significant shift at the level of meaning, at the level of being, at the level of the spiritual journey.

And so the spiritual journey goes on.  As any pilgrim will tell you, the road is often twisting and troublesome, sometimes dangerous and impassable and yet one knows one can never turn back.  It is the persevering on that journey that counts.  Paul Tillich, the great German-American theologian and philosopher, called on us to "dare to be!"  He reckoned that this was the call issued to every human being in the task of making life meaningful in a very secular age.  For the wayfarer on the journey to self-knowledge and wisdom, this call can be re-written as "dare to journey onward" or "dare to risk" digging deeper or climbing higher or journeying further in the task of knowing your real self!  That way we will encounter our true and authentic self in all its dimensions.

Journal of a Soul 31

Beyond Debate III

Personal Experience

(i) Preliminary Remarks

It is hard to contradict or deny personal experience.  It is, moreover, more difficult still to do so when someone declares they have had a religious experience.  We literally have to take them at their word, or write them off as simply hallucinating. I'm sure we have all encountered sincere and rational individuals who are convinced that they have encountered the divine  or the transcendent in their lives.  There are many millions upon millions of people on this earth who have declared their witness to the truth of these experiences.  Such cannot be denied.  No matter what our debaters on the negative side of the debate say - like Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens et al - there is no persuading these many millions that they are simply deluded. 

Firstly, let me declare the obvious truth of the observation that many individuals from the lunatic fringe are quite easily drawn to religions of all kinds.  Let us take this as a given. Indeed, I have known a certain few individuals who have manic depression (or more correctly bipolar disorder) and at least one of these individuals goes on a hyper-religious trip during his manic phase.  This is a given, but it is certainly and obviously NOT a valid argument against the truth of religion.

Secondly, let me declare the equally obvious truth that much harm in the form of wars, attempted genocide, torture and suffering of all kinds have been done in the name of religion and by individuals who claim to be firm believers in God.  Once again, this is a given.  And yet, logically it can never be adduced as an argument against religion per se.  Why?  Simply because the operative and significant phrase in the above sentence is "in the name of religion."  Who is at fault when a nation goes to war inspired by religion - the religion qua religion or the fallible fault-ridden human interpreters of that religion?  I would argue logically for the fault of the latter.  

Again, my favourite author on this topic is Fyodor Dostoevsky who, in his inspiring parable "The Grand Inquisitor" in his wonderful novel The Brothers Karamazov deals exactly with this persistent problem of the corruption of power within official religious circles.  Whether one accepts that religion is a sociological phenomenon that naturally grew up for societal needs from the earliest of times or that it is a divinely inspired organisation, one still has to grant that one is relying upon fallible human beings within that organisation.  Having spent some three years of my life within a Roman Catholic religious order in my younger years I can attest to (i) the existence of people who loved power  and who equally loved exercising it and who delighted in lording it over others.  It's the natural lust for power in all humans that comes to the fore in every organisation under the sun. However, I can also attest to (ii) much good done by many sincerely motivated and genuinely good people in the name of the vision which they attribute to their founder, to Jesus and to God ultimately. 

I am no sociologist, but an understanding of the sociological basis of all religions as well as the sociological understanding of organisations both need to be considered here, not just the abstract notions, considered or otherwise, of the negative side of the argument against religions and God as adduced by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett et al. 

(ii) A Higher Spiritual Power 

I know a certain few individuals who are recovering alcoholics and they have informed me that but for their trust in a higher spiritual power they would indeed be lost, if not dead. This belief in a higher power is an integral part of the twelve steps programme developed by that wonderful international organisation Alcoholics Anonymous.  Strangely, or maybe not so strangely after all, these twelve steps read like a spiritual/religious programme.  The first four principles or steps run:  

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to  sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  (See this link for the web page of the Irish branch of the AA and for more information on The Twelve Steps.) 

Now, the operative phrase I'd like to stress is the underscored one, "God as we understand Him" as it defines God in an absolutely non-denominational sense, or in an open or broad religious sense, leaving it to the individual to interpret who they believe that God to be in their own lives.  

Once again, let me stress here that these persons who have encountered their own demons through the struggle with alcohol, and indeed others through their fight with addictions of all kinds, are utterly convinced that they can do nothing from any of their own inner resources (which are at their lowest ebb, like a totally drained battery, if I may use a metaphor here.) Therefore, they insist that they have to rely on an outer or outward power which they might call God. Admittedly, space is left for the addicted to call that higher power an Energy Source if they do not wish to call it God as such.  

(iii) My Own Spiritual Experiences

I readily admit that I prefer the term "spiritual" to "religious", quite simply because religion has got such a bad press through the actions of so-called believers of all hues and due to the negative press given by the debaters on the negative side of the God-debate.  That I was a religious/spiritual boy goes without saying:  as a young lad I remember being transfixed by the beauty of the old Latin Mass with its Gregorian chant, smell of incense, and the whole aesthetics of that ceremony and others. Also much of the music associated with the traditional Roman Catholic Church is exquisite to say the least.  Each year I still attend the annual performance of Handel's wonderful Messiah and certainly I can attest as can anyone who attends or rather participates in that musical experience, that deep spiritual depths are touched in the human heart through its sheer beauty and overwhelming power.  

I have also had other experiences where I felt I was close to a primal Energy which somehow was sustaining me and indeed the world around me - an experience of God in nature.  I can still remember once when I was a young monk walking around the wonderfully wild and green grounds of our novitiate and experiencing a cloud-burst on a sunlit day. It was more experientially for me than a mere and thorough drenching.  It was, in fact, in a very real sense what is called in theology a theophany, or at least that is the way I remember describing it when I was later writing down the experience in my spiritual diary at the time. A theophany is the appearance of God through nature, or at least, through the power of nature, literally a showing or manifestation of the divine.  Indeed, James Joyce also adverted to such inspirational and transfixing moments as "epiphanies."  In other word we experience a profound spiritual depth in a through a physical occurrence. 

Another link I would make here is what the philosophers have described as "the experience of the sublime." Here is how the WIKI defines this specific notion, and I believe it is a wonderfully clear definition at that: 

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. (See Sublime )

As an erstwhile hill walker, I believe that we cannot not be captivated by the sheer beauty and power of nature.  Some of my friends have stood beside either Niagara or Victoria Falls and have been overcome by the sheer frightening and transfixing power and beauty of nature, by its sublimity. I have stood by the Cliffs of Moher here on the west coast of Ireland and have marvelled at their sheer power and beauty.  Then there is the Grand Canyon and many many other beautiful, awe-inspiring and powerfully overwhelming wonders of nature besides these few I have mentioned here. They have been written about widely and many have attested to their awe-inspiring power.  When people declare that they have been moved by a power beyond them, by a deep spiritual energy which is both within and beyond them at one and the same time, who are we to deny the validity of their experiences? Indeed, one can argue that such is a mere psychological or para-psychological experience and not a religious or spiritual experience of a sustaining God.  Atheists could certainly argue that.  However, there are atheists who, while denying the existence of God, readily admit that we humans have a spiritual dimension.  This latter point is one to which I shall return later in these notes here, but for the moment such a diversion is beyond our present purposes. 

What I simply want to underscore here is the validity and authenticity of religious or spiritual experiences no matter whether one can attribute such to a divine source or to a powerful energy beyond us.  To deny the testimony of our lived experiences and those of millions upon millions of believers over thousands of years and well as those of our own times is surely to deny the complexity of human nature and the role of powers beyond our limited ken.  It must surely also betray our pride or hubris in thinking that we know more than fallible creatures actually could ever possibly master.