A Rainy Morning, by Ted Kooser

National Poetry Month comes to a close today, so here's a poem from former Poet Laureate (2004-2006) and longtime Nebraska resident Ted Kooser. Click through to browse the many titles of his poetry we have in stock. 

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

from Delights & Shadows © Copper Canyon Press, 2004

"I still plod along with books…"

Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, which you may have heard if you tune into The Writer's Almanac on NPR or subscribe to the Almanac's daily email. We lift the following quote from there, with thanks.

I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. [...] Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. 

Harper Lee 

Shusako Endo's Silence

[While the following post was written the last week of Lent (and was meant to be published in those days), Shusaku Endo's Silence belongs among those "perennial favorites" we're always going on about.   Rather than a straight book review, we offer more of a personal reflection. One note: if you haven't read the book, this review contains spoilers.]

As a kind of Lenten supplement, I have been reading Shusaku Endo's Silence. It has been a balm to me, in a strange "bright sadness" kind of way. Set in seventeenth-century Japan, it tells the story of Jesuit missionaries and the hidden Christians they serve. Throughout the book, Endo explores the silence of God as the Christians (most of them peasants born into, what seems to be, a life of hardship and suffering) are tortured. The priest need only trample on the image of Christ and the torture will cease.

A Judas figure, Kichijiro, figures prominently throughout. Having apostatized several times, the priest questions him:

"And yet you know how to look after yourself. Mokichi and Ichizo have sunk to the bottom of the sea like stones and yet . . . . ."

"Mokichi was strong---like a strong shoot. But a weak shoot like me will never grow no matter what you do."

He seemed to feel that I had dealt him a severe rebuke, because with a look like a whipped dog he glanced backwards. Yet I had not said these words with the intention of rebuking him; I was only giving expression to a sad reflection that was rising in my mind. Kichijiro was right in saying that all men are not saints and heroes. How many of our Christians, if only they had been born in another age from this persecution would never have been confronted with the problem of apostasy or martyrdom but would have lived blessed lives of faith until the very hour of death . . .

Men are born in two categories: the strong and the weak, the saints and the commonplace, the heroes and those who respect them. In time of persecution the strong are burnt in the flames and drowned in the sea; but the weak, like Kichijiro, lead a vagabond life in the mountains. As for you (I now spoke to myself) which category do you belong to? Were it not for the consciousness of your priesthood and your pride, perhaps you like Kichijiro would trample on the fumie [the image of Christ].

I keep thinking about this passage. Maybe I would be strong; maybe I would trample to keep myself or those I love (my children, my sisters, my family, my friends) from suffering. But hypothesizing is futile, and the distinction between strong and weak matters little. The strong are just as likely to stomp on the weak as they are to help them. Endo (through the priest Rodrigues) says as much in his definition of sin: "Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious to the wounds he has left behind."

What matters, what Endo brings up in myriad ways, is that we share the suffering. We bear it together. We try to ease it for each other as we can. In the beginning before the two priests split up, they are able to share the hardships they encounter: "When I was with Garrpe we could at least share our fear as one shares bread, breaking it in two; but now I was all alone in the black sea of the night and must take upon myself the cold and the darkness and everything else."

When the silence is finally broken, the priest hears (what he believes in the voice of) Christ tell him:

Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.

The only way God makes sense to me is Christ. So many things in the world scream that God is dead or doesn't exist. But love is real, as real as weakness. And the upside of weakness is that it can lead to great love.

Near the end of the book, when Kichijiro seeks out the priest for confession, Rodrigues reflects again on what he has done and who he is:

He had lowered his foot on to the plaque, sticky with dirt and blood. His five toes had pressed upon the face of one he loved. Yet he could not understand the tremendous onrush of joy that cam over him at that moment.

"There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can one say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?" The priest spoke rapidly, facing the entrance. "Since in this country there is now no one else to hear your confession, I will do it . . . Say the prayers after confession . . . Go in peace!"

Kichijiro wept softly; then he left the house. The priest had administered that sacrament that only the priest can administer. No doubt his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege; but even if he was betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love. "Even now I am the last priest in this land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him."

Flying under the radar (The mystic path)

Wonderful and Dark Is This Road: Discovering the Mystic Path

by Emilie Griffin; 191 pp. paper $15.95

Because of the hiddenness of mystical knowledge, mysticism has sometimes been described as the experience of “God as a ray of divine darkness.” For Emilie Griffin, it is “a deep and sustained intimacy with a loving God.” While there have been instances in which a mystic gains unusual abilities or receives stigmata, which lead us to imagine that mystics are not present in our lives today, Griffin suggests that many mystics are quiet and anonymous, and their unique spirituality is invisible to the casual observer. This book explores mysticism thematically, drawing on an assortment of mystical experiences recorded both in Scripture and Christian history. Griffin lays out the mystic path for those who wish to travel it—noting, however, that one can never ask, “Lord, please make me a mystic,” but rather, “Lord, I want to know you better.”

From the book:

I believe that we are meeting mystics every day, but we do not recognize them. Their humility and modesty is such that they pass into the crowd ("So they picked up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple" John 8:59). Perhaps we could spot them by their spiritual disciplines: prayer, meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. It is possible, but not likely. For real mystics practice their deep love and service to God in ways that may fly below the radar, unobtrusively, transforming the lives of others in ways that seem sublimely plain spoken and level-headed. Except when they receive extraordinary mystical gifts (not everyone does) it is hard to pick them out in a crowd. We have noted earlier that Padre Pio looked much like the next monk in the procession. More to the point, the Roman soldiers needed Judas to point Jesus out to them. To them, he looked more or less like any other Galilean.

Both Thomas Merton and Karl Rahner, a major modern theologian, insist on a mysticism of ordinary living. For Merton, the incarnation has sanctified all of human living. Far from taking the contemplative above and beyond the ordinary, contemplation, if authentic, roots the human being in the ordinary. The ordinary routine of daily life becomes the texture of contemplation for the devoted Christian. Merton insists that there is a "latent, or implicit, infused dimension to all prayer." 

Idiot Psalms, Scott Cairns

Yes, it's National Poetry Month, so you might see a little more verse than usual here. Let's kick things off with a favorite poet (and friend) of ours, Scott Cairns.

Idiot Psalms: Poems
by Scott Cairns; 96 pp. paper $17.00

Fourteen “Idiot Psalms” ground this collection of poems by one of our favorite poets. This meaty work is the newest within a reputable oeuvre, including other works of poetry, essays, and memoir. 

Acclaimed poet B.H. Fairchild says of Cairns: “Among American poets of religious belief at the present time, none is more skillful, authentic, or convincing than Scott Cairns. Far from the old stereotype of such poets as naive and otherworldly, Cairns in every poem reveals his attachment to ‘the ten thousand things’ and to their participation in the mysteries of ultimate Being. He is steadily making himself and his work indispensable to the richness and breadth of contemporary poetry, an ascent confirmed both beautifully and movingly in Idiot Psalms.” Cairns’ poems convey in full a trembling awe in the face of what he calls the sacramental fullness of words, their capacity to bring us to the edge of the divine Abyss, which is yet endless Love. From the book:

O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind—while apparently aloof—allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will.