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Tag Archives: Paul

“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

Tags

1 Corinthians 13, First Corinthians, Gore Vidal, Mark Jarman, Paul, Poems, Poet, poetry, Spencer Reece, T.S. Eliot, The Clerk's Tale, The New Yorker, Writing

Irish Coast

How long do we wait for love?
Long ago, we rowed on a pond.
Our oars left the moon broken—
our gestures ruining the surface.
Our parents wanted us to marry.
Beyond the roses where we lay,
men who loved men grew wounds.
When do we start to forget our age?
Your husband and I look the same.
All day, your mother confuses us
as her dementia grows stronger.
Your boys yell: Red Rover!
We whisper your sister’s name
like librarians; at last on the list,
her heart clapping in her rib cage,
having stopped now six times,
the pumps opened by balloons,
we await her new heart cut
out from the chest of a stranger.
Your old house settles in its bones,
pleased by how we are arranged.
Our shadow grows like an obituary.
One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”
Your children end their game.
Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.
The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

__________

“1 Corinthians 13” by Spencer Reece.

I can’t understand Spencer Reece. His CV: Born in Hartford, Connecticut; Master of Theology, Harvard; Master of Divinity, Yale; Missionary to the Nuestras Pequenas Rosas orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Missionary to the homeless and ordained priest of the Episcopal Church in Madrid, Spain; Manager of a Brooks Brothers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s that last bit which is, as Gore Vidal would say, the joker in the deck. French cuffs and Windsor knots hardy pair with homeless shelters and Honduran slums. But then again, rarely does religious poetry move with such a frantic, almost manic, energy, so perhaps Reece is capable of registering and giving voice to an usually wide spectrum of human experience. I once wrote, in a stroke of mild hyperbole, that Mark Jarman (a reader of this blog and my favorite living religious poet) wrote like T.S. Eliot in a fever dream. There is certainly something feverish to “1 Corinthians 13” as well, though Reece seems to be less in a reverie and more in a careful though entranced plod through the wilderness of memory.

When I first found it, I was so moved by this poem that I reread it about six times and immediately ordered the containing collection, Reece’s The Road to Emmaus. I think this poem is the strongest in the book, though Emmaus also contains “The Clerk’s Tale”, a poem so intricate and strangely stirring that The New Yorker, in an unprecedented editorial move, devoted a full back page to it. Oh yeah, and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who works at a men’s clothier at the Mall of America in Minnesota. I suggest you give it a slow and careful read.

By the way, in the 13th chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, among other things:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing…

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

I took the above picture in Ireland.

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The Days of Misfortune

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Religion

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

1 Corinthians, Christianity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nazism, Paul, Who Am I?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my prison cell poised, cheerful and sturdy, like a nobleman from his country estate.

Who am I? They often tell me I would speak with my guards freely, pleasantly and firmly, as if I had it to command them.

Who am I? I have also been told that I suffer the days of misfortune with serenity, smiles and pride, as someone accustomed to victory.

Am I really what others say about me?

Or am I only what I know of myself?

Restless, yearning and sick, like a bird in its cage, struggling for the breath of life, as though someone were choking my throat; hungering for colors, for flowers, for the songs of birds, thirsting for kind words and human closeness, shaking with anger at capricious tyranny and the pettiest slurs, bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur, fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away, weary and empty in prayer, in thinking, in doing, weak, and ready to take leave of it all.

Who am I? This man or that other? Am I then this man today and tomorrow another?

Am I both all at once? An imposter to others, but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?

Does what is in me compare to a vanquished army, that flees in disorder before a battle already won?

Who am I?

They mock me these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, you know me, O God.

You know I am yours.

__________

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letter “Wer Bin Ich?” (Who Am I?). You can see it along with other essential reflections in Letters and Papers from Prison.

These words get me every time. Even now, as I read them in a sterile, comfortable office cubicle, and think about my friend M. who is displaying such fortitude in weathering his own days of misfortune.

On March 4th, 1945, Bonhoeffer asked Who Am I? from Tegel military prison, where he was awaiting trial for subverting the Reich’s final solution, or Shoah, against the Jews. Twenty-seven days after writing these words, Bonhoeffer was sentenced to the gallows, and on the morning of April 9th, 1945 — twenty-three days before the Nazi surrender — Bonhoeffer was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp. As he was led away from his prison cell, Bonhoeffer asked British prisoner Payne Best to remember him to George Bell, the then-Bishop of Chichester, if he were ever to make it home. Bonhoeffer then uttered his final recorded words: “This is the end — for me the beginning of life.”

The camp doctor at Flossenbürg reflected years later on witnessing Bonhoeffer’s execution. “I saw Bonhoeffer… kneeling on the floor whispering fervently. I was most deeply moved by the way this man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of Providence.”

I’m not exactly sure between which pages lay the ribbon in Bonhoeffer’s Bible, but if I had to venture a guess, it’d be Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Chapter 4, in the New King James:

2 Moreover it is required in stewards that one be found faithful. 3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. 4 For I know of nothing against myself, yet I am not justified by this; but He who judges me is the Lord.

12 And we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure; 13 being defamed, we entreat. We have been made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things until now.

Watch a very powerful reading of Who Am I? below.

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“If I Were Paul” by Mark Jarman

21 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Bible, Christianity, If I Were Paul, Mark Jarman, New Testament, Paul

Mark Jarman

Consider how you were made.

Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull’s cup.

Consider the first time you conceived of justice, engendered mercy, brought parity into being, coaxed liberty like a marten from its den to uncoil its limber spine in a sunny clearing, how you understood the inheritance of first principles, the legacy of noble thought, and built a city like a forest in the forest, and erected temples like thunderheads.

Consider, as if it were penicillin or the speed of light, the discovery of another’s hands, his oval field of vision, her muscular back and hips, his nerve-jarred neck and shoulders, her bleeding gums and dry elbows and knees, his baldness and cauterized skin cancers, her lucid and forgiving gaze, his healing touch, her mind like a prairie.  Consider the first knowledge of otherness. How it felt.

Consider what you were meant to be in the egg, in your parents’ arms, under a sky full of stars.

Now imagine what I have to say when I learn of your enterprising viciousness, the discipline with which one of you turns another into a robot or a parasite or a maniac or a body strapped to a chair. Imagine what I have to say.

Do the impossible. Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed, goodness to what you have poisoned, trust to those you have betrayed.

Bless each other with the heart and soul, the hand and eye, the head and foot, the lips, tongue, and teeth, the inner ear and the outer ear, the flesh and spirit, the brain and bowels, the blood and lymph, the heel and toe, the muscle and bone, the waist and hips, the chest and shoulders, the whole body, clothed and naked, young and old, aging and growing up.

I send you this not knowing if you will receive it, or if having received it, you will read it, or if having read it, you will know that it contains my blessing.

__________

“If I Were Paul” by Mark Jarman.

Wailing Wall

As more informed readers will know, Jarman is a Christian; and as Christian readers will understand, the title “If I Were Paul” is a reference to a certain Saul of Tarsus.

In this poem, Jarman is Paul the Apostle speaking through the voice of a poet. The words are a poetic distillation of what Paul was trying to say in his letters to the churches of Phillipi, Corinth, and Collosae.

The opening five sentences each begin with the command to “consider,” calling us to reflect on the numinous beauty and fragility of our lives. In this, he is the contemplative conscience of Paul. Jarman then makes the abrupt transition to Paul as a figure of authority — “imagine what I have to say” — and channels all of Paul’s mind into condemning, in a striking phrase, the “enterprising viciousness” of those in the early churches. His call to “do the impossible” is the central command of Christian dogma: live and forgive like Jesus Christ.

The final sentence of the poem is absolutely essential to its message. For in the first century, Paul had no guarantee that his letters, which required considerable time and effort to pen, would actually be delivered to those in the various Mediterranean churches to whom he was writing. So Paul sent them not knowing if they were ever to reach their destination. More still, the limits of words, especially written ones, demand that tone is extremely difficult to convey.

Thus Paul was unsure all the more. He felt what fathers and mothers feel in disciplining their children, the uncertainty of knowing whether one’s lofty standards and strict condemnations will actually be received for what they are: a blessing.Wailing Wall

The pictures were taken at the Western “Wailing” Wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The folded papers are prayers traditionally placed into its cracks.

__________

Update — I sent Jarman a message with a link to this post and he was nice enough to write back:

Dear John,

Thank you for this more than generous and sympathetic reading of my poem, “If I were Paul.” If I were to add anything, it would be that my aim was to sound like a contemporary Paul. Though you rightly, I think, hear the tone of the first century Paul, speaking to the early churches, my hope is that I could talk to a contemporary audience in that tone, and also one that might not be exclusively Christian. My best regards to your aunt, a wonderful painter and person.

Mark Jarman

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