1. T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

    sharingpoetry:

        Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

               A penny for the Old Guy
    I

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats’ feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
    Remember us—if at all—not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.

    II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
    In death’s dream kingdom
    These do not appear:
    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind’s singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star.

    Let me be no nearer
    In death’s dream kingdom
    Let me also wear
    Such deliberate disguises
    Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
    In a field
    Behaving as the wind behaves
    No nearer—

    Not that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom

    III

    This is the dead land
    This is cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they receive
    The supplication of a dead man’s hand
    Under the twinkle of a fading star.

    Is it like this
    In death’s other kingdom
    Waking alone
    At the hour when we are
    Trembling with tenderness
    Lips that would kiss
    Form prayers to broken stone.

    IV

    The eyes are not here
    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

    In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death’s twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

    V

    Here we go round the prickly pear
    Prickly pear prickly pear
    Here we go round the prickly pear
    At five o’clock in the morning.

    Between the idea
    And the reality
    Between the motion
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow
                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow
                                 Life is very long

    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow
                               For Thine is the Kingdom
     
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

    (submitted by silvercircuit)

  2. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  (Matt. 11:28)

    “So what is it that makes people like us weary? It is not working too hard that makes us weary. It is rather, I submit, living a life that is against the grain of our true creatureliness, living a ministry that is against the grain of our true vocation, being placed in a false position so that our day-to-day operation requires us to contradict what we know best about ourselves and what we love most about our life as children of God. Exhaustion comes from the demand that we be, in some measure, other than we truly are; such an alienation requires too much energy to navigate.

    So consider this option. We are the weary ones whom Jesus invites in gentleness, because we are overly busy and overly anxious about the maintenance of our world. We are overly busy and overly anxious because we believe that one more pastoral call, one more committee meeting, one more careful preparation, one more street demonstration, one more published article, one more golf game, one more staff review, one more check to make sure the lights are out and the dishes washed and the mail answered, one more anything will make this a better place and enhance our sense of self.

    But of course it is never enough, for our anxious sense of responsibility will never touch the truth of creation. For the truth of creation, without any regard for us or our need to make it right, is that God has ordained the world in its abundance; it will perform its life-giving exurberance without us, as long as we do not get in the way. Our exhaustion, I propose, is rooted in anxiety that mistrusts the abundance that God has ordained into creation and, as a result, we—like the creator on the sixth day—have our naphshim completely depleted. But we, unlike the creator, take no seventh day for refreshment, because, unlike the creator, we are too anxious to rest. And he says, ‘Come to me, all you that are weary.’ True creatureliness, like birds and lilies, trusts the abundance of the Father. But we imagine we know better in our wisdom and in our intelligence. We spend ourselves in the futility of trying to take the place of the life-guaranteeing God. We are weary because in the end we can guarantee the life of no one and certainly not the life of the church.

    So what causes people like us to bear heavy burdens? It is because, is it not, we are coerced, driven kinds of folk, responding to the endless echoes of some Pharaoh in our present life or from our past life. Pharaoh, of course, has insatiable demands, and as long as we live in the regime of some Pharaoh, we will never make enough bricks. I notice one other element in Pharaoh’s narrative. When he died, the slaves cried out in hurt. But until he died, they did not cry out. They were silenced. They kept it all in. They did not dare to speak their pain. That is how Pharaoh works and how Pharaoh works in your life and mine. As a result we dare not say what we know best, or we say it so carefully and so guardedly that we siphon off our passion. And when it gets said in that way, it has no power. The church—or surely dominant society—is pharaonic in its silencing. Such silencing gives us a visa to the realm of death. We die a little every day in silence because we know better, and yet we dare not speak. 

    Jesus invites people like us—the anxious weary who try to compensate for the lack of abundance that we do not trust, the silenced burdened who become zombies of denial! People liks us are invited away from our contradictions.

    So how to move from weariness to being burdened to Jesus? Well, by sabbath! But not sabbath like one more day of golf, good as that might be. Rather, sabbath rest by taking a break from our contradicted lives of anxiety and our silenced life of coercion. Sabbath rest consists in bringing our daily existence into congruity with our true selves.”

    —Walter Brueggemann, Mandate to Difference: An Invitation to the Contemporary Church

    As someone who has felt quite weary and burdened lately, these words were just what I needed today.  

  3. godthings:

    “[I]f grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change. And in the depths of our confusion and anger, we ask: ‘Where is God? How can this be divine love and protection?’ But if an accident, illness, or sudden reversal of fortune forces us to confront and even change our priorities in life for the better, isn’t that grace?

    The comedy of grace is that it must so often come to us as loss and failure because if it came as success and gain we wouldn’t be grateful. We would, as we are wont to do, take personal credit for what is an unwarranted gift of God. But for grace to be grace, it must take us places we didn’t imagine we could go, and give us things we didn’t know we needed. As we stumble crazily, blindly, through this strange, new landscape — of drought, of illness, of grief, and terrifying change — we slowly come to recognize that God is there with us. In fact, God is enjoying our attention as never before. And maybe that’s the point. We have finally dropped the mirror of narcissism, and are looking for God. It is a divine comedy.”

    — Kathleen Norris, “The Grace of Aridity and Other Comedies,” The Best Spiritual Writing 2004 (edited by Philip Zaleski)

  4. I might as well just dedicate this entire blog to Henri Nouwen and be done with it:

    “The voice of despair says, ‘I sin over and over again. After endless promises to myself and others to do better next time, I find myself back again in the old dark places. Forget about trying to change. I have tried for years. It didn’t work and it will never work. It is better that I get out of people’s way, be forgotten, no longer around, dead.’ 

    This strangely attractive voice takes all uncertainties away and puts an end to the struggle. It speaks unambiguously for the darkness and offers a clear-cut negative identity.

    But Jesus came to open my ears to another voice that says, ‘I am your God. I have molded you with my own hands, and I love what I have made. I love you with a love that has no limits. Do not run away from me. Come back to me—not once, not twice, but always again. You are my child. How can you ever doubt that I will embrace you again, hold you against my breast, kiss you and let my hands run through your hair? I am your God—the God of mercy and compassion, the God of pardon and love, the God of tenderness and care. Please do not say that I have given up on you, that I cannot stand you any more, that there is no way back. It is not true. I so much want you to be with me. I so much want you to be close to me. I know all your thoughts. I hear all your words. I see all of your actions. And I love you because you are beautiful, made in my own image, an expressions of my most intimate love. Do not judge yourself. Do not condemn yourself. Do not reject yourself. Let my love touch the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart and reveal to you your own beauty, a beauty that you have lost sight of, but that will become visible to you again in the light of my mercy. Come, come, let me wipe your tears, and let my mouth come close to your ear and say to you, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”’

    This is the voice that Jesus wants us to hear. It is the voice that calls us always to return to the one who has created us in love and wants to re-create us in mercy.”

    (Found in Show me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings)

  5. "God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down."
    C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)

  6. All I wanted this Friday night was a little bit of quiet and a whole lot of Eliot:

    It seems, as one becomes older, 
    That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
    Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy,
    Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
    Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
    The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
    Fruition, fulfillment, security or affections,
    Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
    We have the experience but missed the meaning,
    And approach to the meaning restores the experience
    In a different form, beyond any meaning
    We can assign to happiness. I have said before
    That the past experience revived in the meaning
    Is not the experience of one life only
    But of many generations—not forgetting
    Something that is probably quite ineffable:
    The backward look behind the assurance
    Of recorded history, the backward half-look
    Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
    Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
    (Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
    Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
    Is not in question) are likewise permanent
    With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
    In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
    Involving ourselves, than in our own.
    For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
    But the torment of others remains an experience
    Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
    People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
    Time the destroyer is time the preserver.
    Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,
    The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.
    And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
    Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
    On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
    In navigable weather it is always a seamark
    To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
    Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

    (From “The Dry Salvages”) 

  7. There is so much truth in these words:

    “The mystery of God’s presence can be touched only by a deep awareness of his absence. It is in the center of our longing for the absent God that we discover his footprints and realize that our desire to love God is born out of the love with which he has touched us. In the patient waiting for the loved one, we discover how much he has filled our lives already. Just as the love of a mother for her son can grow deeper when he is far away, just as children can learn to appreciate their parents more when they have left the home, just as lovers can rediscover each other during long periods of absence, so our intimate relationship with God can become deeper and more mature by the purifying experience of his absence. By listening to our longings, we hear God as their creator. By touching the center of solitude, we sense that we have been touched by loving hands. By watching carefully our endless desire to love, we come to the growing awareness that we can love only because we have been loved first and that we can offer intimacy only because we are born out of the inner intimacy of God himself. 

    In our violent times, in which destruction of life is so rampant and the raw wounds of humanity so visible, it is very hard to tolerate the experience of God as a purifying absence and to keep our hearts open to patiently and reverently prepare his way. We are tempted to grasp rapid solutions instead of inquiring about the validity of the questions. Our inclination to put faith in any suggestion that promises quick healing is so great that it is not surprising that spiritual experiences are mushrooming all over the place and have become highly sought after commercial items. Many people flock to places and persons who promise intensive experiences of togetherness, cathartic emotions of exhilaration and sweetness, and liberating sensations of rapture and ecstasy. In our desperate need for fulfillment and our restless search for the experience of divine intimacy, we are all too prone to construct our own spiritual events. In our impatient culture, it has indeed become extremely difficult to see much salvation in waiting.

    But still … the God who saves is not made by human hands. He transcends our psychological distinctions between ‘already’ and ‘not yet,’ absence and presence, leaving and returning. Only in a patient waiting in expectation can we slowly break away from our illusions and pray as the psalmist prayed.”

    —Henri Nouwen, Show Me the Way 

  8. Over the past week, I’ve been making my way through Frederick Buechner’s Stories in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. Today I read a chapter called “The Two Stories,” which quickly became a favorite due to passages like these: 

    “The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light. It is a story that hides more than it reveals. It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it, yet is by no means a pretty story, though that is the way we’re apt to peddle it much of the time. We sand down the rough edges. We play down the obscurities and contradictions. What we can’t explain, we explain away. We set Jesus forth as clear-eyed and noble-browed, whereas the chances are that he can’t have been anything but old before his time once the world started working him over, and once the world was through, his clear eyes were swollen shut and his noble brow as much of a shambles as the rest of him. We’re apt to tell his story when we tell it at all, to sell his story, for the poetry and panacea of it. ‘But we are the aroma of Christ,’ Paul says, and the story we are given to tell is a story that smells of his life in all its aliveness, and our commission is to tell it in a way that makes it come alive as a story in all its aliveness and to make those who hear it come alive and God knows to make ourselves come alive too.”

    “And God knows we have all had our wilderness and our temptations too—not the temptation to work evil probably, because by grace or luck we don’t have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one—to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth. And miracles too are part of our story as well as of his, blind though we are to them most of the time and leery as we are of acknowledging them, because to acknowledge a miracle is to have to act on it somehow—to become some kind of miracles ourselves—and that’s why they scare us to death. The miracle of our own births when the odds were millions to one against them. The miracle of every right turn we ever took and every healing word we ever spoke. The miracle of loving sometimes even the unlovely, and out of our own unloveliness. And the half-forgotten miracles by which we’ve turned up here now, such as we are, who might never have made it here at all when you consider all the hazards along the way.

    And crucifixion is part of our stories too, because we too are men and women of sorrow and acquainted with grief. Maybe our crucifixion is in knowing that for all we’d like to believe to the contrary, we don’t have the stomach for even such few, half-baked chances to give up something precious for him as come our way, let alone for giving up, in any sense that really matters, our selves for him. Yet we’re raised up nonetheless. We’re raised up, and we have that to tell of too, that part of our story. In spite of every reason to give the whole show up, we’re here still just able to hope; in spite of all the griefs and failures we’ve known, we’re here still just able to rejoice; in spite of the darkness we all of us flirt with, we are here still just a little, at least, in love with light. By miracle we survive even our own shabbiness, and for the time being maybe that is resurrection enough.”

    “Where he is strong, we are weak, God knows. Where he is faithful, we are what we are. Where he opens himself to the worst the world can do for the sake of the best the world can be, we arm ourselves against the world with the world’s hard armor for our own sweet sakes. Our stories are at best a parody of his story, and if, as Paul says, we are the fragrance of Christ, then it is like the fragrance of the sea from ten miles inland when the wind is in the right direction, like the fragrance of a rose from the other side of the street with all the world in between.

    Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that by his absence as well as by his presence in our lives we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.” 

  9. godthings:

    “The Japanese haiku poets understand perhaps as fully as anyone on earth the significance of inbreath and outbreath in poesis. A haiku poem is a breath poem that can be uttered in a single outbreath. It is a long outbreath — seventeen syllables, more or less. A long, slow, deep inbreath is needed to fuel the poem, and then:

    An hour’s snow —
    Heaven and earth briefly settle
    All their old differences.

    The green of pine trees
    Never tires my eyes
    So, too, the face of my friend. [James Luguri, To Make a World: One Hundred Haiku and One Waka]

    To utter these poems properly, one has to breathe deeply and release slowly — instructions any yoga or meditation teacher will give as prerequisite to relaxing into the work to be done. The poem itself is a teacher. Light as a breath, it alights in the mind and opens a space of quiet around it. These two poems, like many haiku, harbor a little gentle humor, so the breath it takes to utter them may end in a final release of laughter.

    The Japanese are masters of this form. But in English poetry as well, metrics, the study of poetic rhythms and cadences, can teach us to breathe text as song. Every breath space — period, comma, line break — allows a silence in which words just spoken may echo and resonate. We learn this most easily in song; but what we learn from song can be applied to the way we read and speak a sentence, making it available for hearers in a way that gives it full weight. As we read a text aloud, we literally breathe life into it. [George] Steiner observes that ‘The meanings of poetry and the music of those meanings, which we call metrics, are also of the human body. The echoes of sensibility which they elicit are visceral and tactile’ [Real Presences]. Which is to say that breathing the text actually confers a dimension of meaning. Phrase by phrase, pause by pause we open small silences in which to take in the words. They need those silences to grow in. Meditative practices like breath prayer and centering prayer, as well as lectio divina, can inform our lives as readers and slow us into deeper receptivity. When we hear the voice of the psalmist singing ‘Whatever has life and breath, praise the Lord!’ (Ps. 150:6), we might consider how breathing itself may be a form of thanksgiving — receiving and releasing what the Lord gives and takes away. So all the words we utter have their roots in prayer and enter our minds and hearts by inspiration.

    Our lives are lived in relationship to words, written and spoken, sacred and mundane. They are manna for the journey. As embodied beings we take our whole bodies with us into the act of reading, which, at its best, is spacious, full-bodied, wholehearted, and infused with the breath of life.”

    — Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (via bookofwriting)


    The English major in me just swooned a little. I especially love the last paragraph. 

  10. "Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, ‘Prove that you are a good person.’ Another voice says, ‘You’d better be ashamed of yourself.’ There also is a voice that says, ‘Nobody really cares about you,’ and one that says, ‘Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.’ But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, ‘You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.’ That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us ‘my Beloved.’"
    Henri Nouwen

About me

a collection of quotations, poems, images, and songs that inspire me