I
promised last week an excerpt from my talk this past Sunday for Atlanta’s First
Existentialist Congregation, but the Spirit or a spirit has led me to do
otherwise. I had completed writing my talk when I noticed I had overlooked a
comma, which changed the meaning of my “scripture,” requiring changes to the
talk itself.
Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
This
is from Mary Oliver’s poem “Magellan” about his ambitious sail around the
world. Initially I left out the comma between comfort and despair, which
suggests “comfort” and “despair” are co-equal results of failing to “risk the
wildest places.” Instead, I realized she intended despair as a result of
comfort. She is warning that succumbing to mere comfort may lead to despair.
As
I made the necessary changes in my talk to interpret my new understanding of
the line, I laughed to myself that this would make a good lesson in a high
school English class about the importance of proper punctuation!
But
the morning after my talk the spiritual nature of my error came to
me like a slap on the head from a Zen master. Now reading the mystical poet Kahlil
Gibran’s The Prophet in my morning prayers, I read the Prophet’s
response to a mason’s petition to “Speak to us of Houses”:
Would that I could gather your houses into my
hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow... In their fear your forefathers gathered you
too near together.
The
Prophet ponders what seduces us in our houses, ending with:
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for
comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a
host, and then a master?
Then
adds:
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of
the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
As
I age, comfort and security become more attractive than ever. At an ingathering
of LGBTQ prophets a couple of years ago, I inquired why a particularly
courageous prophet was not there. “She and her partner are in a retirement
home,” it was explained, “And she said they really liked it because they ‘didn’t
have to go outside.’”
This
past weekend a friend with mental health and addiction issues was released
after eight months in jail. Though I’m familiar with so-called “institutional
personalities,” those who repeat offenses to stay in the comfort and stability of
incarceration, I had thought he would be overjoyed with his newfound freedom. But
it has apparently deepened his anxiety. I witnessed something similar when he escaped
a rigid, religious belief environment.
For
me, the most memorable line (paraphrased here) from the old British film Thank
You All Very Much featuring Sandy Dennis came when her character finally completed
her doctoral dissertation: “So much freedom is so damn inhibiting!” Some of us
in retirement experience the same sort of confusion, I guess one of the reasons
I keep blogging.
In
my talk Sunday, I drew a connection between Oliver’s “wildest places” and the
“wilderness” as a frequent setting for spiritual enlightenment and pilgrimage
in almost all religions.
Warning
“your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing,” the Prophet addresses
us as “children of space” and seems to anticipate Oliver’s sailing metaphor:
But you, children of space, you restless in rest,
you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. …
For that which is boundless in you abides in the
mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the
songs and the silences of night.
“Your
house shall be not an anchor but a mast.”
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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser.
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