A Little Something from "Four Quartets"

{I took this photo at our church on the Sunday of the Cross, a few weeks ago}

The Fourth Part of "East Coker"

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

- T.S. Eliot

Also, here's another poem for Holy Week, this one by Boris Pasternak:

He had renounced with no hostility
as if returning property on loan
his works of wonder and his might
and now,like us,was mortal.
Nights distance seemed the brink
of annihilation of nonexistence
the universe's span was void of life
the garden only a ground of being...
Seest thou, the passing of ages is like a parable
and in its passing it may burst to flame
In the name then of its awesome majesty
I shall in voluntary suffering descend into my grave
I shall descend into my grave.
And on the third day rise again
And even as barges float down a river
So shall the centuries,trailing live a caravan,
come for judgement,
out of the dark, to me.

- Boris Pasternak

"The greatest of these is..."

I have written before about why I appreciate Valentine's Day. So I today I simply offer these words to my Valentine, my Beloved Krista:

"A loaf of dry bread and bare earth for a bed
In the company of the beloved, is full of happiness.
Let humility be the word,
Resignation the offering,
The tongue be the mint of sweet speech."

-Anand Karaj, Sikh Marriage Ceremony, 1552

At Superstore with the Iconographer

Lately Krista and I have been reading a fair bit of poetry since she splurged and bought me Rilke's Book of Hours. And some might know that "On His Blindness," by John Milton, is one of the poems closest to my heart, describing acutely what I felt at a few times on my journey to the Orthodox Church. (I can identify somewhat with this friend and fellow traveller).

On His Blindness

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

- John Milton, 1608-1674

Last night I had the experience of going grocery shopping with the master iconographer, Heiko Schlieper. He is 76. We are friends. I've known Heiko only 3 years, since I moved to this provincial city in the Spring of 2003, a city locked in winter for seemingly half the year. I started working very closely with Heiko just as his eyesight was dimming. I watched him paint his last icons, a panel of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, and Christ's Last Instructions to the Apostles, over the door exiting the narthex of St. George's Church. I interviewed him on tape each morning for about six months, before I went to work at the Tree Stone Bakery, gathering information on the several-year-long project of painting his masterpiece of St. George's.


After some intense training, in December '04, I helped him gild the last icon in the Church (not the dome pictured here, which he did solo in the early 90s). He used double-weight German gold leaf from the Ruhl company, "gold-beaters" Heiko calls them. We mistakenly applied 12-hour gold size and so it was nearly midnight when we climbed the ten-foot scaffold to start gilding. It was incredible. Specs of gold floated in the sacred air. As I recall, Heiko didn't offer his traditional incense (Benson & Hedges 100s) that night. I worked very slowly and carefully. Heiko, nearly blind, worked quickly and perfectly, his fingers knowing his image and the gold so well. Is it sacreligious to admit that we blasted Mahler that night as we gilded?

Since the Fall, we have shopped together with Heiko. It is an everyday activity that one can easily take for granted. Heiko had carefully arranged a service called "Seniors Driving Seniors," to take him shopping, but they only drive you, and he needs assistance in the store to procure his gourmet ingredients. So he had arranged with another company to have an assistant meet him there, but when he finally did, the guy they assigned admitted that he could not read! So, it works out much better this way. We go together - and since Krista and I have the requisite skills of both driving and literacy, grocery shopping goes much more smoothly. And, Heiko generously cooks amazing sauces and treats for us to freeze and use at home, always adding, "It's easier to make a larger amount." Last night we went to both the Italian centre and Superstore. Heiko cracks wise, usually with salty limericks about our former Governor General. It is good simply to be with him, to help him find his quail eggs, sardines, and pork fat for his homemade sausages. I sometimes think he can do more blind, at 76, than most people can who have sight and the prime of life. He "best bears His milde yoak."
May God grant him many years...

The south transept of St. George's Church.

The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Baptism

Since the cold sea first learned to speak in tongues
and howled aghast at its madman's chains,
since the Eden break, since the winterspring,
since the star-aspired spires rained
back to earth with stone disdain,
who's thanked the Lord for broken things?

Down the babbled days that brook no praise
or blame - no everlast, no stay -
the brutal waters waste to bless:
the transubstantial stones decay,
the solid monstrance wears away.
Nothing is its inwardness.

The greenhill blood the green heart beats,
even this at last must cease.
From the sudden shade, from the owl light,
a sparrow falls and falling, dies.
The blood tide dims. Dark waters rise
till lowered sky and lakeshore meet

and all things fade: this pine, this tree,
this life, this scene, this this - now not.
And yet, not not. In dark, we see:
nothing's found where nothing's sought,
in silence is the silence caught,
and still breath moves the unmoving sea.

- Joseph Bottum

My good friend and colleague (another Matthew) gave me this poem this morning. There are many echoes in these words, of philosophy, and perhaps even of good ole' Eliot going on about the "still point." To me it has shades of Pseudo-Dionysius, and of Abbot Suger, in its emphasis on the particularity of what is experienced. The specificity and irreduceableness of humanity's suffering and glory, and also the strange possibility of hope. Since Bottum is a doctor of medieval philosophy, I have no doubt he knows Duns Scotus, who would have called it haecceitas - "thisness." What is unassumed is unhealed. Perhaps the meaning is this: Water was chaos, but the chaotic waters were calmed one night on stormy Galilee. All has been assumed, and in the waters of baptism we become totally immersed in that assuming.

Home is where one starts from...

On Thursday I am flying to the city of my parents' meeting and courtship, the city of their wistful nostalgia at the mention of its name. It is the city of my pre-history, and the burial ground of my paternal grandparents. If time allows, I will try to spend a moment at their graveside. On Thursday, I am flying to Montreal.

To my knowledge, I've never been there. My mom and dad took us on a trip that way when I was two or three, but our car broke down in a small Francophone town called St. Isidore, and I fell out of the car, smashing my forehead on the curb. Blood spilled everywhere. My dad informed me (as he rushed me into some hospitable old lady's house to provide some First Aid), that I had broken my "pumper vein." So we didn't make it then to Montreal.

This time, I am going to lend a hand in the awe-inspiring, fatiguing, harrowing work of the Church (to attend our Archdiocesan Council meeting on behalf of the younger generations), a role I'm honoured to play - as an assistant to Fr. Richard. We go to parish rich in history, Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral... almost 100 years old. It has struggled, and flourished, and declined, and now, again begins to open up. They have extended a warm invitation to us. It is the Church of the Apostles who at times vehemently disagreed, but continued to love each other anyway. It is the Church of Iron Sharpening Iron (Proverbs 27.17 ).

So it's time here again to return to Four Quartets, now to East Coker.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.