Sense-able God Conference Article
This article, written by Michael Dennis Browne, was originally presented at the "Sense-able God" conference at Saint John's University, October 15, 2004, and was printed in ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies 16.2 (2004) 20 -23. (www.artsmag.org)
Something Stood Still in My Soul
The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend.1
D. H. Lawrence, a very great poet and a very anxious Englishman, encountered something in New Mexico that slowed him down-slowed him to the point of causing something in his soul to stand still. He wrote: "I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever."
When I remember what Lawrence said, I always also think of William Blake, and two of my favorite proverbs from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; one says: "When thou see'st an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!" And the other: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." It's strange, perhaps, to think of an eagle as a "production of time," but ever since Blake, I always do; its wings, amazing as they are, are of this world. And by that one fact, they make this world amazing. (Of New Mexico, Lawrence also wrote: "What splendour! Only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendour of it all.")
The new world landscape of New Mexico had that eagle genius for Lawrence. It made him begin to pay attention-to be, as he says elsewhere, "a man in his wholeness, wholly attending." "Woman," I would want also to say. Again and again, in imaginative literature, in books and teachings on meditation and centering prayer and spirituality, we read of such exchange-moments when, through attentiveness, we come to glimpse, and even sometimes experience, a changed way of being in the world. What happens? We go from the usual condition, one in which we are neither here nor there-scurrying and spiraling, spinning, toppling, fluttering, despairing, losing hold, losing heart, far from any nest-and there comes upon us an experience of blessedness, a sense, however passing, of being steeped in confidence in the universe. It is, perhaps, like what the poet Paul Eluard means when he writes: "There is another world. It is inside this one." Or Gerard Manley Hopkins: "There lies the dearest freshness deep down things." The cause may be a landscape, as it was in this case for Lawrence, or the consequence of a consistent spiritual practice such as meditation, but it is, essentially, unbidden. It comes, or it does not come. A short poem by Lawrence says: "There are gods, / or there are no gods, / like a pool into which we plunge / or do not plunge." "Be still," says the scripture," and know that I am God." First, and always, the stillness, as a precondition of whatever may come-including, perhaps, a sense of the divine presence.
When I have been working with a student for a number of years and we are about to part company and I am asked for advice, typically I will say: "Keep good company." For the purposes of these remarks, I would say that the present moment is the very best company we can keep, and learning to be in it, to enter fully into it with our alert but relaxed attention, is the most beneficial practice, both spiritually and poetically. And it does take practice, this reverencing of life, this homage to its moment by moment by moment. Like Mary, we sit at the feet of the moment with our attentiveness, while our busy Martha mind has other tasks for us and likely fusses in the background, obliged to wait-not too happy with us.
And if, as a writer, I am to make actual poetry, some articulation that may cross from my own life into the lives of others, then the unbidden also is the case: we can expect nothing; as in the advice of the great Thich Nhat Hahn, we must wash the dishes-the words, the syllables, the rhythms, the images-to wash them, for their own sake, for the doing of it, not with thoughts of getting them clean-we do it to do it, never to have it done. The process has its own wisdom and will, or will not, generate something beyond itself in language. What I must first do is pay attention to the moment, to the genius of the landscape of language, for its own genius self.
The advice on this subject from so many sources, advice on the wisdom of this way of proceeding is, in my experience, so consistent, that it is almost amusing to see the resistance we put up to the practicing of stillness. It may be that our own encounters often take place, typically, in far less dramatic circumstances than Lawrence's-in the sound of freeway traffic, perhaps, and with ten or twelve minutes to spend before leaving to drive a child to school or walking the dog or going to work-whatever it is the reality of our lives is asking of us. No eagles; no arroyos.
But the possibility, wherever we are, remains the same-we begin to go below the day and into another sense of time. We become aware, we focus on, the breathing, the miraculous reliable breathing; we are present to that also-perhaps for the whole duration of our sitting. On occasion, we can be brought to awareness of some deep with-us, the nameless one who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, to whose presence we consent by being there in silence. None of our usual agendas, our Martha-ness, will bring us there.
And yet, for all these riches, the resistance is there. Jack Kornfield says it brilliantly: "The mind dismisses the present moment." And again, he says: "Our first task is to get here"-suggesting, I think, that we have to work at it. Something in us wants anything at all other than to be present to each moment. John Tarrant, another superb teacher of Zen, often ends a teaching (this from my reading only) with: "Each moment full and complete." That is the goal; such mindfulness. It can be so rare, for most of us, and yet we can put up such resistance-or somebody in us does-to the possibilities of the blessed experience. "Why do we live so much not here?" Jack Kornfield asks.
For myself, when I falter, which is often-it is, indeed, a "moment faith" I Live by-I take courage from writings that describe these states and struggles familiar to me. Where would I be without these poems, these prayers, these meditations? I carry them with me. Here is Lao Tzu, writing in China around 600 BCE; he says this:
Go into the desert at night and look out at the stars. ...
The superior person settles her mind as the universe settles the stars in the sky. By connecting her mind with the subtle origin, she calms it. . . . ultimately her mind becomes as vast and immeasurable as the night sky.2
Is this the same subtle origin whose presence Lawrence felt in the new world, that made his soul stand still? Whether or not it is so, what a miracle-to use that word again-this act of attention-to use that word again-toward what is not the mind, what is not the anxiety, what is not the projection, what is not the fantasy, what is not the incessant interpreting interpreting interpreting we all do-what Charlotte Joko Beck, yet another great Zen teacher, calls the thought-feeling barrier. What we attend to, what invites us into stillness, does not originate with us but is, rather, the bounty of reality, an intrinsic generosity of being, something of immeasurable limitless depths that we are born to and intended for, but which we experience too rarely. We let the world take it away from us little by little, we allow ourselves to be closed down, governed by our habits and not our acts of attention, not our mindfulness of each moment and the possibilities of each moment, which can bring, as Wordsworth writes of "the meanest flower that blows," "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It is the "dearest freshness" Hopkins speaks of. It does lie deep; we do need to practice our going and being there.
There is genius in the moment. There is genius in each object, each element of creation. "If we could understand the rose," says Wittgenstein, "we could understand the universe." Wordless, the Buddha holds up the flower. Christ calls us to consider the lilies. Only contemplation of them can begin to suggest the depths to which their being goes, and our being with them. I think of painters, who cannot leave the light alone, cannot leave the landscape alone, who return to it again and again in all conditions of light, who return again and again to the human face, the human figure, the bowl of fruit or the vase of flowers on the table or the table itself or the grain of the wood of the floor. All subject matter is sufficient, for painter, for poet, given to us as it is by the genius of the divine imagination, however disguised it may appear to us in the world as we walk around in it, glazed over by our inattentiveness. By consistent practice, it is possible for us to turn our useless anxiety into attention, our default fear into the deepest experience of blessedness and love. Bede Griffiths, whom I think of as Benedictine
pioneer, describes the experience of blessedness in this way:
During most of our waking hours we live on the surface of our being in contact with all the different things which are presented to our senses. Sometimes when we are deep in conversation with a friend or reading a book or perhaps in a dangerous situation, we lose the sense of time and enter into a deeper region of the soul, where it is withdrawn from the outer world: but we are still not far from the surface. Beyond this, beyond all thought and feeling and imagination, there is an inner sanctuary into which we scarcely ever enter. It is the ground or substance of the soul, where all the faculties have their roots, and which is the very centre of our being. It is here that the soul is at all times in direct contact with God. For behind all the phenomena of the world, behind the sights and sounds, behind the forms and energies of nature, there is the ever active presence of God, which sustains them in their being and moves them to act.3
This does not disparage the senses-the poet, says the Spanish poet Lorca, is "a professor of the five senses." It does not disparage imagination or intellect; it puts them in their place, as threshold elements, as entrances to what lies within and beyond the anxiously interpreting self. Poets, like painters, necessarily love the things of the world-signs, symbols, tropes, figures, syllables, meters, devices and recurrences of all kinds-all the while knowing that the ground of reality is not that, not that-"neti, neti"-none of these things we necessarily love so well. It is complex, this love of what thrives, blazes up, what does not last-those things that are of the world but, like the wings of the eagle, suggest worlds beyond themselves. This is the way of the via positiva: the palpable beauty and weight of things, that invite us, by our attention to them, to descend below the day, below secular time, and dwell there, for at least some blessed while; there we may, on occasion, meet the changeless one who dwells in us, who is Spirit, who is miraculously poured out, moment by moment, upon the world.
In everything we do, we are sustained by the love of God-the Maker, the Lover, the Keeper, in the language of Julian of Norwich-the God by whose genius of imagination the humble hazelnut is "all there is." In the most profound conditions of attention, the poem of the world is revealed to us by way of its most supposedly ordinary objects, its "meanest flowers," which often we rush by. This rushing ungrounds us, pulls us away from hope and into states of being where the old despair, in Yeats' phrase, can call whatever it wants to us and so undo us.
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1 D. H. Lawrence, "New Mexico," in Phoenix: The Posthumous papers of D.H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936) 142.
2 Phil Cousineau, ed. Prayers at 3 a.m. (San Francisco: Harper, 1995) 172.
3 Bede Griffiths, The Golden String (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishiers, 195) 116.