Friday Morning Meditations at MIAU on Zoom
Our meditations are for everyone: please feel free to join us in the fall and spring semesters Fridays at 9am EST.
We sit for a half hour with some guided support, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. Please keep your microphone off to respect the silence for others.
Dear friends,
Thank you to everyone who joined our sit last Friday. Our next session will be this Friday, April 4, at 9 am EST. If you are attending for the first time, please leave your mics muted but feel free (if you like) to turn your cameras on to join the group.
Last week, our poem on the flavor of a loving heart was Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.” If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:
“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend”
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend,” among a late cycle called "The Terrible Sonnets," describes a faltering of faith. How is it possible, he writes, that the drunks and slaves of lust in this world would prosper, when I cannot make "one work that wakes"? Even the chervil, a kind of parsley, grows wildly in the dirt and proliferates. The birds build fine. But this speaker’s experience is quite different, one of impotency and isolation within the framework of his love for this God whom he addresses as “O thou my friend.” "Send my roots rain," he exhorts God. He is experiencing a dark night, appealing for grace.
In Buddhism there are three types of faith. Bright faith, which flowers at the start of the spiritual journey, is like the enthusiasm of the convert and the fresh student. It is shiny like foil and can be easily crushed. Verified faith is more protected and steady, but the weather can be unpredictable. There are periods of doubt. In verified faith some personal experience provides a groundwork for what we have been told. Despite disappointment, we see first hand that this stuff really works. Then after years of gem tactics, to use Dickinson’s term, “playing at paste,” there rises in the practitioner an unshakable faith, the diamond-dense and luminous certainty that what we have right now is what we want, that in this inevitable moment, the product of billions of years of cause and effect, all that is is as it has to be.
Throughout his life, Hopkins’ faith wavers and varies. His poems are the mirror. Some betray the bright faith of the convert, all ecstatic opening, opening, opening. The poems are actually spilling out of their forms. (See his great “The Windhover.”) Some poems come by divine insight, unshakable and confident: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Full stop. And some of the faith we infer in his work is verified: he struggles on his journey. He was torn between his poet’s eye, which saw the beauty in the mortal—the inner laws of all the dappled things in nature, each a manifestation of God—and the orthodoxy of the Catholic church (“thy cause”) to which he devoted his life. He is so sure his work, as priest and poet, is not waking. Yet exactly as he wrote these words, it already was. While the "sots and thralls" have been replaced by others, his poetry still calls to us, still manifests his singular devotion.
You might say that verified faith is comparable to the state of souls in Dante’s Purgatorio. As I’ve written, those souls have been spared the infinity of hell’s pain (most in hell don’t know they are in hell, their days on endless loop), but the penitents are full aware of their sentence, their suffering, their climbing, burning off old errors. The difference is that they know their condition is impermanent. The difference for those figures is that as they climb, they sing.
Hopkins (1844-1889) converted to Catholicism from a Lutheran background in 1866. He had been influenced by Cardinal John Henry Newman. The child of an affluent English family, he chose poverty. His poetry was displaced by his life of service. He came to actively discouraged his own writing, yet it could not help but enter through the windows and sidewalk-cracks of the heart. It flooded from whatever channel was available, and it was directed toward subjects in nature, mostly, birds, trees, the perfectly disorganized, corporeal, mutable, messiness of creation. By the end of his life, he was living in Ireland, where he taught Greek and Latin at University College Dublin. It was difficult work he did not always enjoy. The Jesuit path was isolating and lonely. He died of typhoid at the age of 44.
When I read “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend,” I am reminded of a scene with my mother, who, in the last year of her life as her body succumbed to ovarian cancer, left Catholicism and entered the Episcopalian tradition. One night she told me, “I’m mad at God.” It was like nothing I’d ever heard her say, this lifelong devout and accepting servant. It was a claim one may only make in a verified state. You have to be close to the boss to offer sincere criticism. Note the ways Hopkins, too, respects the recipient of his language. “Sir.” “O thou my friend.” “Thou art indeed just.” And he speaks the “thou,” the you of intimacy and familiarity, as one would use it with a beloved. My mother, too, said “mad at” rather than “angry with.” That little touch is enough to reveal the layers of love underneath her completely honest inquiry. It was a stone in the river of her questions, a disturbance which she managed to use as a bridge for her crossing. She died in a peace I hadn’t imagined possible. Her heart, by then, was unshakable.
Tools for Meditation
What work is waking now in you that you do not see? What work have you told yourself is failing, collapsing? How are you so sure about this? What work do you believe is foundering, falling apart? Once we strip away the concept of belief, we may see how the seed is quietly, undeniably waking.
We will know a waking work by its qualities of kindness and equanimity. The verified faith is questioning, but it wishes no harm on others, no spite or revenge. It asks for the grace of skillful understanding. It leads on to the unshakable peace of knowing that this is the place, this is the work we have to do, this is how it is, and how it has to be, and we say yes to that.
Let Hopkins’ honesty and directness be our brave scout going out ahead into the darkness. In this practice that we do, we rise to the top of the escalator with our breath. Breathing in, I know this separateness is an illusion. At the top of the escalator we turn around and look back down at who is struggling there. Breathing out, I choose this world, I choose to stay with compassion for the suffering of others. The work we are doing has two parts. We align our view to the truth, to wisdom. And then we turn with compassion and teach that truth by example, day to day, moment to moment, in any way we can.
With that, let’s alchemize Hopkins’ plea into a vow:
That I may become the rain of skillful understanding for others who are suffering;
That I may become the rain of assistance for others who are in need;
That I may become the rain of joy in this parched world, not afraid of or craving any outcome.
With love,
David