Thanksgiving |
“I love Gerard Manley Hopkins; he is my all-time favorite poet. I think he and I have more than a thing or two in common, not least of which is the tendency to depression and beating oneself up with extreme efficiency. Here's what he wrote that sings to my heart, and I hope to yours as well. I’m grateful for the poetry.” Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, Charitable; not live this tormented mind With this tormented mind tormenting yet. From a letter written October 2004 by Benedictine monk Jerome Leo, quoting from the Hopkins poem, My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On _____________________________
with a grateful heart By Jim Boushay At home in the living room we have a five-foot-high easel on which family members write or clip occasional seasonal or personal messages. They stay there for a while as ideas to reflect on or talk about—an interesting quip, a curious saying from a TV show, a revealing passage from a book being read at home. These enduring insights are quiet reminders of ideas and people, and of events to recall, including the coming celebration of Thanksgiving. For my partner, Rickey Sain’s birthday last January, for example, I wrote him a humorous greeting. Nearly a year later that message is still on the easel, along with other, more serious passages of inspiration and gratitude. As time wears on, a certain compelling message gets taken down and then is replaced here and there by a few favorite lines of poetry or by yet another quip or compelling idea, whether positive or negative or in between. In particular the passages of consolation will again have the power this year to capture our attention at warm family gatherings over the four-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Up until two weeks ago actually, the easel carried a favorite Easter-season message of consolation from British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) in the form of three lyrical lines from "The Wreck of the Deutschland," written on Easter Sunday 1876. Hopkins wrote the poem and three climatic lines in response to the deeply tragic deaths of five women friends who were shipwrecked, forever lost at sea, never to hope or pray again. The ship's crew and passengers came upon the worst sea storm imaginable, and all was gone in flashes of violent chaos. The loss made Hopkins despondent and suicidal, leading eventually to a nervous breakdown. Only after several years did he recover, fortunately, but not without suffering emotional and physical agony in the process. He later went on to give thanks for what the terrible experience taught him about loss and grief. His torment was undoubtedly similar to the human torment resulting, for example, from the out-of-nowhere bomb explosion in Oklahoma City in 1995, or from the September 11 explosion and disintegration of the World Trade Center six years later, human torment resulting altogether from the unimaginable deaths of more than 3,000 and from the suffering and grieving at home and around the world. Referring to the creator, to God who is a shepherd and guide, the three lines communicate Hopkins' courageous yet grateful answer to the pain of a terrible tragedy:
Let Him Easter in us Be a day-spring to the dimness of us, Be a crimson-cresseted east
In the first line, the word "Him" refers to God. In Hopkins’ need to deal with the upheaval of the tragedy, the shipwreck, the poet tells us that allowing God to rise within us is the answer. In the words of Psalm 23, one of the best known of Old Testament psalms, God is the all-comforting shepherd, restoring Hopkins' tormented soul, cleansing him in peaceful waters after having walked through the shadow of the valley of death. Piercing through dark pain Hopkins urges us to make God the Easter light of the sun rising in the east on a new day, even in the face of the great loss of life, in the face of the dimness of the drab life through which we seem to be speeding. The familiar image is of the Phoenix rising from the ashes, an image which the poet describes as piercing through dark pain to somehow discover the whispering ways of giving thanks with an enlightened and grateful heart. On another level, the image of God, as the new-day light joyfully rising in the east, reflects something of my own tender feelings. In May when I celebrated my 56th birthday, it was an occasion for annually reviewing my life. I remember feeling deep appreciation for so much, especially for my children and beloved partner, for family and friends and colleagues, for our community at home. The feelings of deepest gratitude led, among other things, to the experience of sensing the creator "Eastering" in me, of discerning a new spirit of goodwill and understanding—an experience of reconciliation, one gracing and renewing me and others with a richer, brighter, deeper life through the everyday actions of living. The occasion was a reminder of something once said by Frederick Buechner, the celebrated writer on daily spiritual renewal. He tells us to listen to our life and see it for the bottomless mystery it is. He believes that all moments of life—everything seen and unseen, the positive, the negative—is the grace of God. Buechner says that God is made real "in the everydayness no less than in the crises of our own experience." American pop singer Whitney Houston sings with great lyrical power of that "One Moment in Time" (1991) when we can be the best we can be, when we can feel eternity and express the deepest kind of gratefulness. I happen to believe that the business of living, of loving, of hoping, of being the best we can be is always this moment in time, the moment we’re living right now. To give thanks for
In this moment—repeated a thousand times over throughout our lives—we’ll be free to be who we are, free to give thanks for, and celebrate, our humanity and the grace of God embracing it. My birthday was a moment for remembering that we are fortunate to experience the presence of God as the fresh day-spring lighting the dimness of existence. While long gone this year now that we’re in the Thanksgiving season—and while still yet to come again next year in the spring—the Easter season itself traditionally is a reminder of the crimson-cresseted east that is possible for all, the new-day season of re-thinking and re-evaluating, the season of rebirth and gratitude for new growth when, once again, we’re free to be just who we are deep inside. Spring seems to conquer death through new and freshest growth, allowing things to rise again, us to live more openly. Thanksgiving is also a little like that. The holiday provides an opportunity to remember and be thankful for the ways we are free to be ourselves, free to be reborn as thankful and reconciled creatures of a larger world beyond our foolishness and frail limitations. More important, however, than my own testimony here is that Hopkins' hope—and the torment and painful struggles leading to it—brings us directly to my real subject, a reflection on moral visioning as a form of powerful prayer. A hundred times over we can be thankful for that abiding power and potential. Moral visioning is the capacity to imagine—to envision—improved and more compassionate human relationships as an ever renewable choice available to us at home, on the job, in community. These thoughts and prayers here might informally be called “living is praying.” The invitation to improved moral visioning comes on the heels of the national elections and the voluminous commentary generated by the election results. No secret is it that many "immoral" and "moral" meanings have been ascribed to the vote and voter turnout as well as to the resulting analysis of electoral victories won and defeats sustained, both imagined and real. It ought not to come as any surprise that Hopkins himself, like almost anyone, endured defeats here and won victories there. In 19th Century England as a cleric and teacher, he was entrenched in the religious aspects of life as a priest of the Jesuit order, founded in Spain 300 years before by Ignatius of Loyola. Hopkins pretty much did as was expected of him by his superiors. That's life. During preparation for priesthood and pastoral ministry, he learned about formal and private prayer in theology and spirituality classes. His daily religious practices had him singing and praying out loud with his brother seminarians in church as well as praying alone in chapel or in the quiet of more private spaces. Following Hopkins' ordination—says biographer David Anthony Downes in his analytical study (1959) Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of His Ignatian Spirit—he gave sermons and theological lectures on such forms of prayer as praise, thanksgiving, petition, meditation, others. To the parishioners who came to him for counseling, he often suggested prayer as one important option in answer to life's upheaval and pain. Seems like a fair enough, reasonable approach to his educational work and ministry. Really, nothing remarkable here. William Henry Gardner's critical definitive biography (two volumes, 1948) of Hopkins also tells us that the poet and devotional writer pretty much lived out a sincere and ordinary life as a priest and teacher. He pretty much prayed the prayers learned as a cleric. Yet throughout this religious upbringing and training, Hopkins wrote in his journal that he pretty much had almost no spiritual life. All that training and education about prayer and things theological, and all that praying. Yet no spiritual life? Pretty much. Until a bomb-like explosion came out of the sea's turbulence, and his five nun friends perished all at once in that shipwreck. He felt the chaos and fear of losing someone or something close. He was burned by the heat of life spinning out of control, running amuck, life crashing into himself. Hopkins' experience, variations of which we’ve all likely had in similar and different settings, is a reminder of a famous and infamous quip: "Religion is for people afraid of going to hell, and spirituality is for those who've been there." Rediscover hope and faith and gratitude
The burning pain of violent separation from those five beloved friends ignited in Hopkins a hellish spiritual journey to find himself and God. It flamed the fires that forced his soul somehow—just somehow—to rediscover the hope and faith and the gratitude deep inside. This was a cleansing, transforming spiritual journey, leading Hopkins from inner confusion back to the clarity of his true self, the self God made. This was that proverbial John of the Cross "dark night of the senses and the spirit” (1590, En una noche oscura). Similarly into our own time, the now-deceased Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks uses the phrase, “having faith in despair and darkness." For Hopkins this dark experience was an emotionally fiery journey born of the depression and desperation that comes from uncontrollable feelings of fear and helplessness—feelings all of us know, some more intimately and intensely. The hellish journey of getting in touch with himself—of going deep within to find the meaning of this great loss of life—pushed Hopkins to the rediscovery of the existence of the Spirit and of things Spiritual, with a capital "S." Some call the Spirit by other names: God, or Jesus, or Allah, or Yahweh, or a higher power, or a cosmic entity, or sometimes even a thunderous force for self-acceptance. Whatever the name, seems it’s categorically the greatest power of compassion unimaginable, the power to forgive and hold dear, again and again...and again. Jesus in the New Testament is reported to have told the religious authorities in the temple: "My sheep hear my voice. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand." Hopkins eventually heard the voice of the creator, reminding him that through the life of the spirit no harm comes our way in spite of terrible things that happen. That universal cosmic force—God, the highest power, the Holy One, Allah Most Merciful, Jehovah, whatever beautiful name—is there providing a certain hope that those who believe and keep faith are protected, comforted, made more secure. Thus we come closer to the secrets of Hopkins' and our own courage in times of darkest despair, in times of pain from great loss, in times of rejection, in times of perceived and real national confusion. With that spring-like and born-again understanding, Hopkins discovered prayer and praying in a more dynamically intimate dimension. The discovery freed him to recover his personal sense of purpose. This was perhaps a truer kind of supplication than the formulaic and ritualistic prayer learned and practiced in a denominational religion. It’s the kind of prayer that the ordained and non ordained—or those of any faith, or none—are familiar with. These tender yet more passionate forms of spoken utterance and silent thoughts are the prayers shaped precisely by the traumatic experiences met along life's hellish journey.
To go deeper in our imaginative capacity for envisioning This is the prayer of living and of struggling, the prayer that marks us with the sign of alternately being tough and fragile, and everything in between. This is true human prayer worth calling attention to here. English mystic Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) and American contemplative monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) each tell us frequently in their writings to pay attention. She and he, uniquely in different eras, insistently ask us to go deeper in our thoughts, our prayers, our imaginative capacity for envisioning. These are the prayers of fighting day-in and day-out to maintain hope. The struggle occurs against a cultural background of painful national uncertainty as well as the certain suffering and tragic loss of life on the battlefield. Or there’s the prayer coming from the pain of learning the lessons from the political deception and manipulation during the recent election campaign.
Altogether these prayers arise from authentic daily struggles with ourselves and others. These prayers go out in desperation, trying to help overcome the challenges of crass consumerism and to help reduce the burgeoning of the homeless and to help treat physical and mental sickness and to help lessen the social stresses from our culture's neurotic and sociopathic tendencies. The challenges also extend to the economic and health disparities being generated by globalization and to the American tendency toward denial of the truth about how—and whether—we can really work together to fix some of the baffling social/moral problems dragging us down. Could each of us surely make our own troubling lists of these daunting global perplexities? Even perhaps venturing to list the localized problems of our closest family members or friends? The point is that so much of this, lists included, is wrenching prayer. It is the prayer:
These are the prayers we live and are living, whether we’re aware of them or not, whether we do or don't make our lists! The prayers go on without us, often taking on a life of their own, precisely because we're human. They go on because we live life, in whatever way we each choose to express that life. The common good yearns for vigorous fulfillment and hopeful meaning through improved connection to the other and with ourselves. It’ll happen of course that there are few or no words to go along with this kind of praying and yearning. Yet it’s there, because we struggle to be who we are and who we’re going to be. In the very act of being, of loving, and of wanting for ourselves first and then for others, our hearts continue to pray, to cling to hope, to believe things will turn around. Our hearts ask for life to give us that one continuous moment in time when we can gratefully and gracefully be the best we can be. For prayer and hopefulness to have purpose
For prayer to have real meaning, we don't have to be in a religious setting, on our knees in a church pew, or in a chapel or temple, or kneeling on a Persian prayer rug in a mosque. For prayer and hopefulness to have purpose, we don't have to be sitting at table sharing a meal, engaging a group of scholars or public intellectuals or energetic journalists, all intent on helping solve the evils of having too little in a world of too much. For a prayer of thanksgiving or petition to have deeper meaning, it can of course be mundane as well as charismatic. Prayer happens in what some might view as either a sacred or secular place. Prayer will happen of course in places both beautiful and banal.
We don't really need to belong to any one form of religion or faith—or attend an interfaith gathering—in order to pray our prayers, to hope our hopes for making things better. Yet all of these prayerful experiences listed here can be “religious”…or not. The social and cultural contexts of that rich word are replete with many meanings across different times and places. Surely common to all those meanings, however, are the desires and actions that can heal the broken-hearted in the name of a blessed good beyond ourselves, beyond our seemingly diabolical persistence in securing our self-interests. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One. Our own struggles to overcome and heal our fears
In 1818, British poet and journalist James Montgomery (1771-1854) wrote a profoundly simple hymn that today is heard in congregational and faith settings across America, a polyglot nation of religious pluralism. In a sense, the simple words tell the complex and tormented story of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The words perhaps tell something of our own unique struggles to overcome and heal our fears:
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed, The motion of a hidden fire That trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burden of a sigh, The falling of a tear, The upward glancing of an eye When none but God is near. Prayer is each person's vital breath, Our common, native air, Our watchword in both life and death— We enter heaven with prayer.
As each person's vital breath, prayer is the act of communicating our needs and hopes...our feelings...our gratitude…to ourselves first and, in turn, to our God and others. Deep within ourselves is where we find God. Deep within is how we find God. Yet we don't need to know that the deep withinness happens or that we call it something. It goes on anyway—in our beating and breathing hearts, in our compassionate selves, both conscious and unconscious. Dreaming and planning and hoping—simple human activities—is everyday praying. Living is praying. Giving thanks is praying. Holy day and holiday
Maybe the Thanksgiving celebration will again have the prayerful, hopeful power to renew in the citizenry—in us—a grateful heart. Perhaps the season will recharge and strengthen our capacity for a moral visioning that is more compassionate toward ourselves and the other. When we pray—ardently hope for something—we encounter ourselves anew. Perhaps in that newness we'll encounter a Godness that loves us as created, in the image and likeness of a compassionate and forgiving God.
_____________________________ Jim Boushay, president of Resources Unlimited Foundation, has published on faith-based and social justice matters since 1976.
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