A reflection on "Love Winter When the Plant Says Nothing," by Thomas Merton1
Poetry asks us to love it, even when it seems to say nothing. For people who are used to approaching the world straightforwardly and rationally, poetry can be challenging. What it means is often uncertain, and how we relate to it might vary each time we encounter it, depending on what else is happening in our lives. Mary Oliver contrasts poetry’s fluid grasp of meaning with informational language. Informational language, while it has its place lacks some capabilities. It is afraid to be imprecise and ambiguous, “to cast two shadows2,” as Oliver says it. This way of communicating wants to be precise and unambiguous. And this is exactly what poetry refuses to offer us. It asks us to love winter when the plant says nothing. To love it when it doesn't seem to be productive in its communication. And that is where its spiritual power comes from.
This poem is a great example of poetry’s ambiguous spiritual gifts. Here, Thomas Merton seems filled with wonder - a basic spiritual experience. We can imagine the poet walking through a forest in winter, perhaps a familiar place. But now that place has become unfamiliar, uncertain. This unfamiliarity could be frustrating, but here it seems to be a source of playful glee. The world is cast in a new light. How we expect it to be is gone. The world under snow has been transformed from something familiar into something strange. Perhaps something that we used to know had a purpose and order, but now that purpose seems far away, obscured. Without familiar order, we're faced with a conundrum. We can be frustrated by the disorder, trudging through the snow to find our favorite trail. Or, we can accept the invitation to meet this world in a new way.
As I listen to this poem, I join what I imagine the poet felt: awe and wonder. Awe and wonder at words that are all familiar, but whose exact meaning seems out of reach. Now the words are playing with each other in ways I wouldn’t have expected. The fire turns inward instead of burning outward, to some weak fort, to a house of nothing3. When I reflect on these words I feel encouraged to abandon an ordinary task. The ordinary task of extracting meaning and order and purpose from my surroundings. Instead, these words ask me to go play in the snow and leave order behind.
When I listen to these words, I feel calm. I feel the calm that comes when I stop trying to force meaning out of the world. Like I'm squeezing blood from stones for every last drop of important information. The calm I feel when I let the world be. This reminds me of how I want to be in community with other people. I value clarity, but certainty might not give me it.
Winter and poetry teach us to embrace uncertainty, even if we don’t love it. Letting go of certainty and the rigidity it brings opens us up to the new ways of living in the world. Living with other people – at home, at church, at work or school – asks us to embrace some amount of uncertainty, too. Living with each other opens us up to each other’s quirks and habits, perspectives and opinions. But poetry, like community, asks us to slow down and check our assumptions. Why should those words fit together this way and not that? Why should we run meetings or facilitate classes that way and not this?
Poetry teaches us to love each other through discomfort and less-than-total understanding. It reminds us to love community when when we slow down each other’s decision making. Winter and poetry are both skillful teachers in what we need if we’re going to live together. We won't be saved or satisfied by one right way of making coffee, or drafting a budget proposal, or creating worship. No matter how long we've been at it, someone new is right around the corner. Ready with a fresh perspective, fresh questions, fresh experiences. All things that they bring to the table, which might make no kind of immediate sense to us.
A reflection on "i am running into a new year," by Lucille Clifton4
Lucille Clifton feels rushed here. Like us, she is running headlong into yet another new year. But listen to her words. I get the sense that its the old years that are pulling her forward, even as they blow back on her face. Like a wind that she catches in her hair. Like strong fingers, fingers from hands that are both pushing her forward into the future while pulling her back into the past. There's a tension here. A tension in remembering who she used to be. Remembering all of the things that she's believed about herself along the way. Now she has to let go of them5.
If there was any option to carry her old beliefs and attitudes forward with her, they got left out of the poem. We are rushing back through the years along with her until we reach a sudden end. It takes my breath away. She’s recalled all of those things she told herself about herself. Maybe that she wasn’t funny enough, or smart enough, or thin enough, or white or black enough. She’s told herself that she has to keep going forward. That she can't bring these things with her. And she begs them all for forgiveness.
As I listened to these words I also felt a rushing tension. I want to stop and be quiet in this time, poised on the brink of a new year. I don't want to rush forward but the world seems to be pulling me that way anyway. And I also know that I also can't carry everything forward into it with me. I can't grasp all of who I was at eight or sixteen, or who I will be at thirty-two. Not all at the same time. I can feel those years blowing back in my face. All of the mistakes I've made, all of the things that I told myself. That I'm not funny enough, that I'm not quick enough, that I’m not smooth enough. And here I wonder again, “What does it mean to ask all of my old convictions to forgive me?”
Years ago I was talking with a therapist about things that no longer serve me. She said that part of the process of addressing the things that we felt but which no longer serve us is to accept that they had a responsibility. That ultimately even when they become out of covenant with the rest of us, the things that we feel deeply - anger grief shame hypervigilance - all came to us for a reason. To serve some kind of purpose to the rest of me. It is hard, but I have come to thank those feelings that no longer serve my whole self. I thank them when I release them because I have to move on. This feels like asking them to forgive me.
Our life together also asks us to leave some things we love behind. Things we leave in order to show up as our most loving selves. As our most insightful selves. As our most patient selves. We want dearly to be in a place that allows us to be whole. We want radical authenticity for each other. This is good and true. And sometimes I see us forget that not every part of us will serve our lives together. Sometimes we get in our own way along the path to loving one another.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith promises radical belonging by centering Love. Sometimes it asks us to leave things behind in order to love one another in each other's authenticity. We leave behind the will to be right all the time, in order to make room for each other. We set aside the will to be perfect and to expect perfection from one another. These things we have clung to often come from old, hard lessons in our lives. And old habits die hard. But if we want to be together, if we want to love each other as much as we can, then there are some things that we have to lay down. We are running into a new year. Into new relationships. Into new commitments to our old relationships. There are things life asks us to love and leave. May we forgive ourselves for these things we leave behind, and may they forgive us in return.
A reflection on "Midsummer" (1992), by Louise Glück6
Imagine yourself, sitting at a family gathering. The conversation is humming along until you notice that the temperature in the room has been rising. Voices are getting louder and shriller. Fists and palms slam down on the table. Your uncle looks like he could throttle your brother-in-law. Maybe you’re in there throwing verbal elbows yourself. Or maybe you’re sitting in the corner wondering, how did we get here? We were just talking about grandma’s favorite pie recipe – when did we start talking about Fox and Friends and The Rachel Maddow Show?
Or perhaps something like this happened to you at a board meeting, or a work meeting, or over coffee. There you are wondering how people get so fixed on their own singular point of view. I can only imagine what experience Louise Glück was recalling as she put these words to paper. I hear the exasperation in her opening question – “How can I help you when you all want different things?” I hear the frustration as the poet observes each person “calling out some absolute.” And in that name continually strangling each other in the open field7.
And for what? More exasperation, but also dismay. And disappointment. This poem is particularly striking to me, coming to us as words coming from some divine being. How can I help you when you all want different things? This is not a divine being of abundant patience, but also not one of endless wrath. Instead, we meet divine annoyance. Many of us listening along might have felt a twang of discomfort stirring deep in our bellies. Hearing these words, did you re-encounter all of the things you said and were told about God? When we were sixteen, and twenty-six, and even thirty-six? All of the things that we're trying to leave behind now in a new community. I feel that. The discomfort we feel is trying to live up to its responsibility.
But let me tell you something. The first time that I met this poem, I was in a church that was in turmoil. It was full of a thousand voices each convinced that their own need, their own perspective, was absolute. That theirs alone could lead us forward and unite the community. Or so it seemed. And so they fought and argued and hurt one another. And when I met this poem, I thought “Finally!” This is a God who gets it! This is a God who feels the way that I do. A God that understands implicitly how connected we all are. How divine we all are and consequently feels a pit in Hir stomach watching all this unfold. This is a God who asks, “Why are you so wrapped up in yourselves?” “Why do you take your own vision of the world so seriously, so exceptionally?” This is a God for those of us sitting in the corner of the argument at dinner.
I am not, however, making a plea for us to “all just get along” for the sake of getting along. Conflict is natural, and often good. And I am not saying we should sit on our hands when someone says something hurtful, or a nation’s leaders act unjustly. What I am saying is that we cannot take our rightness for granted.
It can be hard to let go of being right when we’ve taken it for granted. Living together asks us to live with a measure of humbleness. Humble enough to wonder, “How do I know my idea is in everyone's best interest?” “How do I know these ends justify the means?” “How do I know I'm right?” Community reminds us that sometimes we have to set aside our own unique brilliance. Living together requires us to crowd-source the solutions to our problems. The truth of what's best for this community is something we discover together. It’s something we discover collectively when we take each perspective into account. We don’t possess any special insight to know what others need. We have to ask them. A poem like this is uncomfortable. But through it’s discomfort, it teaches us to search beyond our own ascendant signs, our own star, our own fire, our own fury8..
1. Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1977), 353.
Note: This poem is sometimes set to music. Here is an arrangement by Steve Norquist, and another by Kate Soper.
2. Mary Oliver, The Poetry Handbook (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), 89.
3. Merton.
4. Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 1987), 134.
5. Ibid.
6. Louise Glück, “Midsummer,” in Poems 1962-2012 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 276-277.
7. Ibid., 276.
8. Ibid., 277.