Art, like all good things, is given. Even as we hone our crafts, we are hoping at best to be made fit for something we can only passively receive. For what do you have that has not been given to you? This is part of what T.S. Eliot gets at in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” when he talks of poetry as a use of personality toward impersonality: “a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable.”[1]
If this givenness is always true of the artistic work, I think most of us artists have found it to be manifestly and memorably true at particular times (in much the same way as the Sacraments make manifest particularly a Truth universally present throughout creation). That is to say—there are times when, as poets, it becomes quite clear that we are channeling, communing with, receiving something beyond ourselves. These times are great blessings. They are what keep us coming back. They are almost never expected. They are always given.
The following poem was the result of one such time. It narrates my first time attending an Adoration service and the (at least ostensibly) mystical experience I underwent therein. In the moments I loitered in the lobby after service, the poem was given to me, as unsought as the experience itself. Candidly, it was the easiest poem I ever wrote.
Eucharistic Miracle
A perfect modern skeptic, I must fulfill my station:
I ask my Catholic friend what’s meant by “Adoration.”
“What happens? — besides much adoring —
Four hours worth, in fact,” implying
That our time is better spent
Discussing, than looking at, the sacrament.
But sitting there, still, to ponder,
My mind, at first, begins to wander.
Or — wonder, rather, what might I cede,
If that wafer, there, began to bleed?
If I could even glimpse, like Moses in the cleft,
What need for faith would then be left?
But, of course, I’ll leave with no such signs
My only ink the pew-back catechism’s lines.
Except that looking up and past the Host, I notice
For the first time, through the window, roses —
A fearsome, flaming red upon the hills,
Their blood across the landscape spills.
And as I look, in quiet, to the mountain,
I can scarcely help but hear the fountain
Trickling with Holy Water, I’d assume?
But, raised a Baptist, I hear the echoed tune,
That of another fountain, muses on,
Which “from Emmanuel's veins” is drawn.
To my surprise, this change begins to spread;
Could wine undrunk be going to my head?
The cars upon the road outside, it seems, are groaning —
Creation, always for another’s fault atoning.
I smell, ascending from the bench — the stench — beneath, the piny wood,
Another tree which crowned that cursed Friday good.
I feel within my chest a beating heart —
A burning — did we not feel it from the start?
I see, perhaps the first time of the night,
The friend who sits beside me to the right —
Remember her in your kingdom, Lord, I pray,
And hear, she’ll be with me in paradise today.
I could not have guessed, a guest at Luke’s Emmaus toast,
What changes present in the presence of the Host.
Perhaps the Bread remains unmoved upon the shelf,
But moves the world; remakes it to itself.
Perhaps all things are transfixed, transformed, shriven —
By that which, for the life of all the world, is given.
The service ends, and with a sheepish bow,
An awkward crossing of my chest and brow,
I shuffle out, the frenzied feeling fades.
The world returns to normal sounds and shades.
There’s nothing like a walk to clear the head;
After all, it’s only just a piece of bread.
***
Written in sestets that make fluid use of rhyme/slant rhyme and oscillate between tetrameter and hexameter, I view the thing as “stretching” into form; the narrator, almost in spite of himself as it were, finds that he is speaking in form, just as he sees the world around him transfigured through no effort of his own beyond the simple, passive act of attention.
The piece begins with a note of irony. In truth, I am far from a perfect skeptic. And yet my identification as such belies the functional atheism that is too easily our natural mode as moderns.
Baptized in a low-church Protestant denomination, in recent years I have been increasingly drawn to liturgical expressions of the faith. In particular, I am compelled by the Sacraments and by Jesus’s teaching in John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Thus, when a Catholic friend invited me along to an Adoration service this past year, I was a very human mix of curiosity, faith, hope, and skepticism. As we walked into the service, I thought of Eucharistic miracles throughout Catholic history, thought of my own faith and doubt, and began to
wonder, rather, what might I cede,
If that wafer, there, began to bleed?
If I could even glimpse, like Moses in the cleft,
What need for faith would then be left?
The skepticism appears to win the day as the poem begins:
But, of course, I’ll leave with no such signs
My only ink the pew-back catechism’s lines.
But unexpectedly, something happens which I did not intend, expect, hope for, or even doubt. Something is given. In attending prayerfully to the Eucharistic Host, I begin to notice, through the clear window behind the altar at my local parish, the bleeding red roses on the hill.
In the preface to his Tremendous Trifles essays, G.K. Chesterton muses:
As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen.[2]
Having been in the parish dozens of times, I had never seen the roses until that moment. If prayer, as Simone Weil has it, is sustained attention to God, and if the Sacrament is the quintessential example of the incarnational presence of Christ which animates all things, then how might sustained attention to the Sacrament change our perception of the world?
At the time, I did not have any such philosophical metacognition on my mind. Rather, I simply attended and noticed, as almost inexplicably, even the most disparate elements of the scene around me began to take on Cruciform character.
To my surprise, this change begins to spread;
Could wine undrunk be going to my head?
The cars upon the road outside, it seems, are groaning —
Creation, always for another’s fault atoning.
I smell, ascending from the bench — the stench — beneath, the piny wood,
Another tree which crowned that cursed Friday good.
As the poem goes on, the pattern proceeds—across each of the five senses as various aspects of the Passion narrative are made manifest in the everyday elements of the church. It is unsurprising to me, looking back, that this newfound attention, which begins with attending to the Eucharistic Host, ends with attending anew to my neighbor.
I see, perhaps the first time of the night,
The friend who sits beside me to the right —
Remember her in your kingdom, Lord, I pray,
And hear, she’ll be with me in paradise today.
C.S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory” concludes:
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified.[3]
The poem hinges on the seventh stanza, shifting from the recounting to the analysis of phenomena. Walking into the service, I had expected (and doubted) a miracle—a verifiable, physical change in the Host, like those recorded throughout Church history. Like Christ’s companions along the road to Emmaus, what I had not anticipated was that it was not an external change that was required, but an internal one. That my own eyes were what needed opening. That
Perhaps the Bread remains unmoved upon the shelf,
But moves the world; remakes it to itself.
Perhaps all things are transfixed, transformed, shriven —
By that which, for the life of all the world, is given.
The poem ends back where it started—with another bit of detached skepticism—there’s nothing like a walk to clear the head. There is something here of Lewis’s prescient observation in the opening chapter of The Screwtape Letters that rarely are our personal struggles toward faith counteracted by actual, rational argument. More often, they are merely brushed aside by busyness, the affairs of “real life” or merely a dismissive sneer. Lewis’s demonic interlocutor gives a haunting account of a human he once tempted:
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic.” He is now safe in Our Father's house.[4]
The note of irony is again struck in the final line; it is, of course, definitively not “only just a piece of bread” as the narrator concludes. And yet the irony belies an ambiguity that underlies much of the life of faith.
What constitutes a genuinely mystical or miraculous experience? How can you confirm that it was not “all in your head”? Where is the line between what is truly “miraculous” and what is available to you at any time if you will only attend to the sacramental life of a world charged with the grandeur of God?
Does such a line even exist? Does it matter?
[1] T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Poetry Foundation.
[2] G.K. Chesterton, “Preface,” Tremendous Trifles.
[3] C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory.”
[4] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, ch. 1.
