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With Beth having fun in Mexico, I have volunteered to lower the standards of the VTH by publishing an extra post or two. Here is a poem I just ran across that got me to considering what it takes to express our spiritual perspective.
Woulds’t thou know my meaning?
Lie down in the Fire
See and taste the Flowing
Godhead through thy being;
Feel the Holy Spirit
Moving and compelling
Thee within the Flowing
Fire and light of God.
Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-1297?)
It is short poems like this one I discovered quite recently that make me aware of how very close much of the best of modern spirituality is to that of the 13th century. In these few lines Mechthild captures, but certainly does not domesticate, an image of God as that which flows within all people. More important, by far more important, the poem reminds us that if we “wish to know the meaning” that is, I suppose, if we want any glimmer of understanding of this flowing “Fire and Light,” then we need to abandon language in favor of “seeing and tasting.” Not thoughts, not formulated concepts, but the whole human experience – the senses, the feelings, are the avenue to beginning to know the meaning of what it is to be suffused with the Spirit.
It reminds me of a short introductory speech to Bach’s B Minor Mass I heard Friday night. In the Creed, that statement of the Church’s teaching which gives so many of us such problems these days, our speaker pointed out that Bach used just two voices, singing the same notes but weaving in and out in a beautiful interplay, first one voice leading, then the other, for the part of the creed describing the relationship of the First and Second persons of the Trinity. “God from God, light from Light, True God from True God, Begotten not made. Of one Being with the Father, by whom all things were made.” According to our speaker Bach was using those two voices – one constantly proceeding from the other – to illustrate the doctrinal formulation. It worked, worked way better than the creed itself, which, let us face it, uses language and concepts that no longer play very well to most people. But after hearing that music I was able to say “now I get it.”
Mechthild got it too, or rather first. We don’t apprehend the Spirit – whatever that word denotes or points to – with our mind and our ideas. Worked out concepts – doctrines if you will – are at best pointers. We come much closer to the deeper truth by first letting our minds go away for a while and just sitting in the images without analyzing them, but rather asking them to talk to us.
This, by the way, does not mean I am going Pentecostal. I am not. I don’t trust feelings any more than I trust ideas to capture the truth of the matter – for feelings can lie just as certainly as words can. It does mean that language is a truly inadequate means of getting to the heart of the matter spiritually. And so when we want to express what our spiritual lives mean, better than trying to come up with some sort of formula is simply to point to Mechthild’s poem or Bach’s music and say “it means something like that, that right there.” Or indeed, as we express our own lives, to point to our music, or our poetry and say that same thing. “It means something like that.”
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The poem would also seem to be saying;
Slow Down
Become AWARE (opposite of believing, subscribing, doctrinating)
of all that is within and without
Thanks for that Liz; I hadn’t heard that call to slow down, to become aware. My cerebral approach to life led me into that arena of "what does it mean?" Your comment illustrates so well how the perspective we bring to something really influences what we "hear" in it, and thus, why we need lots of voices in the choir that is life.
Bill – What a great post! I absolutely agree that the word language doesn’t capture "truth" but maybe glimpses of it. And I do find those glimpses in all sorts of other graces too – music, art, the not to be captured certain wave of the hand, …there are certainly things all around that that we don’t ‘know’ as much as ‘recognize’ – and find ourselves shaking our heads ‘yup, that’s it. that’s the stuff’
that is a very good thought; we can’t define, not quite, can’t confine, not at all, but we can "recognize." Thanks for that word, it is exactly what I was trying to get at.
Hi Bill–
Thanks for holding down the fort–and in such style!
I love this poem– Mechthild points to why iconography is such a powerful gateway.
Something like-that there poem is about as close as we can get.
Thanks Bill–and I had a great time in the sun and the ocean–had some remarkable dreams and did a little watercoloring. Soul got a little respite!