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Tag Archives: church

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Catholicism, church, Commonweal, interview, John Updike, Matthew Sitman, Poem, Poet, poetry, Pope Francis, The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry

Ireland 2005 504

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

__________

“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. Find it in his Selected Poems.

Thanks to my friend Matt Sitman for bringing this one to my attention. If you don’t read Matthew’s work on Commonweal magazine, I recommend you do. You can start with his newest piece, “Sex and the Synod”, about the church’s posture toward the sexual revolution. I especially liked this:

The task of genuine Christian discernment in these matters is to sift through the gains and losses of the sexual revolution rather than dismiss it in one swoop and reply only with a steadfast no. Christians, and the church, must be able to distinguish between learning from history and experience and simply being fashionable. There really is a difference…

In his opening homily at the Synod on Monday, Pope Francis spoke of a “Church that journeys together to read reality with the eyes of faith and with the heart of God.” That posture of critical openness, of believing the realities we experience might actually teach us something, finds its negation in Reno’s no. It all reminds me of a line from a favorite novel of mine, found in a letter written by an aging minister to his son: “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

It echoes Updike’s liberating response about his belief, pulled from this interview:

Questioner: I remember reading that you said that other belief systems were religions of No, and you chose a religion of Yes.

John Updike: Yes, I did. And that terminology I got from Karl Barth, who I found of the twentieth century theologians to be the most comforting as well as the most uncompromising. He does dismiss all attempts to make theism naturalistic… He’s very definite that it’s Scripture and nothing else. I find this hard to swallow, but I like to see Barth’s swallowing it, and I like his tone of voice. He talks about the Yes and No of life, and says he loves Mozart more than Bach because Mozart expresses the Yes of life.

I took the above shot in Ireland.

Three more from Berry:

  • “To My Mother”
  • “How to Be a Poet”
  • “II”

Berry Center

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Jefferson and the Bible

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Jefferson and the Bible

Tags

Agnosticism, American Founding, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Christianity, church, doubt, Faith, founding fathers, memoir, religion, Reminiscences of Distinguished Men, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's Religion, Was Thomas Jefferson a Christian?, William Slaughter

Thomas Jefferson

“Mr. Jefferson was a public professor of his belief in the Christian religion. In all his most important early State papers… there are more or less pointed recognitions of God and Providence. In his two inaugural addresses as president of the United States, and in many of his annual messages, he makes the same recognitions… declares his belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of ascriptions of praise of the Author of all mercies; and speaks of the Christian religion as professed in his country as a benign religion, evincing the favor of Heaven. Had his wishes been consulted, the symbol borne on our national seal would have contained our public profession of Christianity as a nation. There is nothing in his writings or in the history of his life to show that his public declarations were insincere, or thrown out for mere effect. On the contrary, his most confidential writings sustain his public professions, and advance beyond them into the avowal of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments…

From his second Inaugural Message, December 15th, 1802: ‘When we assemble together, fellow citizens, to consider the state of our beloved country, our just attentions are first drawn to those pleasing circumstances which mark the goodness of that Being from whose favor they flow, and the large measure of thankfulness we owe for His bounty. Another year has come around and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion, at home.’

From his third annual message, October 17th, 1803: ‘While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved, let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence, which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative counsels while placed under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.’

He contributed freely to the erection of Christian churches, gave money to Bible Societies and other religious objects, and was a liberal and regular contributor to the support of the clergy. Letters of his are extant which show him urging, with respectful delicacy, the acceptance of extra and unsolicited contributions on the pastor of his parish, on occasions of extra expense to the latter, such as the building of a house, the meeting of an ecclesiastical convention at Charlottesville, etc. He attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation — sometimes going alone on horseback, when his family remained at home. He generally attended the Episcopal Church, and when he did so, always carried his prayer book and joined in the responses and prayers of the congregation. He was baptized into the Episcopal Church in his infancy; he was married by one of its clergymen; his wife lived and died a member of it; his children were baptized into it, and when married were
married according to its rites; its burial services were read over those of them who preceded him to the grave, over his wife, and finally over himself. No person ever heard him utter a word of profanity, and those who met him most familiarly through periods of acquaintance that they never heard a word of impiety, or any scoff at extending from two or three to twenty or thirty years, declare religion from his lips. Among his numerous familiar acquaintances, we have not found one whose testimony is different, or who entertained any doubts of the strict justice, sincerity, truthfulness and exemplariness of his personal character.”

__________

Pulled from the Jefferson chapter of William Slaughter’s 1878 book Reminiscences of Distinguished Men.

I’m sorry for the recent hiatus. I’ve been really busy with real business.

In a letter to his eldest daughter, Jefferson cited his personal declaration of faith, which he made in the following letter to his friend, Benjamin Rush, on April 21st, 1803:

Dear Sir:

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.

To this rather elastic, New Testament self-definition of Christian, it’s worth adding that Jefferson — who spent a good chunk of his retirement splicing his own, naturalistic version of the Gospels — was found to have hand-written the entirety of Psalm 15 on the inside cover of the prayer book mentioned by Slaughter.

As a small additional note: in 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was appointed along with Franklin and Adams to the committee to design a national seal. Adams suggested Hercules as the seal’s central figure. Franklin recommended Moses standing atop the Red Sea. Jefferson sided with Franklin, but also wanted it to include Pharaoh and Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic brothers who led the Anglo-Saxons in their fifth-century conquest of Britain.

Read on:

  • How Jefferson brought the parties together to fix the national debt
  • Jefferson’s advice to his teenage grandson
  • What evidence is there that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship?

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“Nuclear” by R.S. Thomas

07 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

church, God, Nuclear, Poem, Poet, poetry, prayer, R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas

It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognize
as speech

__________

“Nuclear” by R.S. Thomas. Find it in his excellent anthology Uncollected Poems.

Luke Coppen answered the question, ‘Was RS Thomas a Great Religious Poet?’ below:

“Was [R.S. Thomas] a great religious poet? Seamus Heaney thought so. He described him as ‘a loner taking on the universe, a kind of Clint Eastwood of the spirit’. You certainly can picture him entering a church like the Man With No Name bursting through saloon bar doors: tough and inscrutable, ready to do battle with the powers within. In his poems we see him kneeling hour after hour before a bare altar waiting for God to break his silence. But Thomas does not see this silence as proof of God’s absence.

It’s this sense of the difficulty of the search for God, of its cost, that makes RS Thomas a major religious poet. He challenges the tendency of modern Christians to offer easy answers to questions people are not asking. There is no cheap feeling in his poetry, no glibness. If you could measure smugness on a scale of one to 10, with Mother Teresa at one end and Jonathan Ross at the other, Thomas would be in minus figures.

Lesser religious poets do little more than set Chicken Soup for the Soul to verse. RS Thomas didn’t aim to soothe but to unsettle with an unflinching record of his inner life. He saw God in workaday things, such as a field lit up by sunlight.

RS Thomas was big enough to contain paradoxes. He was a ferocious Welsh nationalist who spoke with a cut-glass English accent. His poems alluded to advanced physics but he refused to install central heating. He was a devoted parish priest but admitted to a ‘lack of love for human beings’. And he seemed utterly humourless, but one journalist counted him among the three funniest men he had ever met (alongside Lenny Bruce and Ken Dodd).”

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“Threshold” by R.S. Thomas

01 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

church, creation, Faith, Poem, poetry, R. S. Thomas, Threshold

Michelangelo

I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?

__________

“Threshold” by R.S. Thomas. You’ll encounter it in Thomas’s consistently powerful Collected Poems.

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“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, Religion

≈ Comments Off on “Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas

Tags

belief, church, doubt, God, Nuclear, prayer, preaching, R. S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

__________

“Kneeling” by R. S. Thomas, which you can read in Collected Poems: R. S. Thomas.

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Orthodoxy

04 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Apologetics, Atheism, Christianity, church, doctrine, G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Chesterton

“This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartle-pool. I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child’s mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.”

__________

From Orthodoxyby G.K. Chesterton.

I’m always astounded that I’ve never heard this (or, for that matter, any of Orthodoxy) quoted — even one time — by a Christian in an apologetics debate. Defenses of Christianity do not get more pugnacious than these words. My astonishment here grows all the more in light of the methods employed by the so-called “New Atheists” (whose critiques of the church, I should say, I often find compelling).

These words are over a hundred years old; they’ve never been truer than they are now.

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