Apple Bees

Specked with wet but tawny in the sun;
red like lips of children as they run
to rummage near the roots
of grass where next to ground
the apple hollows, ringed with brown.

Ringed with brown and rotting in the green
like Samson’s lion, spawning in the heat
both sour bees and gospel sweets.

Those bowery bees.
So cider-drunk they couldn’t find their hive
and had to cavern out the corpse
and sleep inside.

The apple starts to buzz
and seems to crowd a pent-up core
or rumble like saloons
when losers tumble out the door
but ear to brain is slow
and can’t (like nightmares) can’t…let…go
before the apple (move!) explodes
and spews mad bees out through the hole.

Rene Girard on Mousetrap Atonement

…Origin and many of the Greek fathers elaborated a thesis that played a great role as the first centuries of Christianity unfolded, that of Satan duped by the Cross. Satan means the same in this formulation as those St. Paul names as the “princes of this world.” In Western Christianity this thesis has not met with the same favor as in the East, and finally, as far as I know, it disappeared. Western theologians suspected it of being “magical thought.” They have wondered whether it attributes a role to God that is unworthy.
The thesis interprets the Cross as a kind of divine trap, a ruse of God that is even stronger and cleverer than Satan’s ruses. Certain Fathers amplified this idea into a strange metaphor that contributed to the distrust in the West. Christ is compared to the bait the fisher puts on the hook to catch a hungry fish, and that fish is Satan.
The role this discourse ascribes to Satan troubles the Western mind….
Western theology, in rejecting the idea of Satan tricked by the Cross, has lost a pearl of great price in the sphere of anthropology.
Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger, must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t look seriously in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion, which is the same thing as Satan. They speak much of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.

…The idea of Satan duped by the Cross is therefore not magical at all and in no way offends the dignity of God. The trick that traps Satan does not include the least bit of either violence or dishonesty on God’s part. It is not really a ruse or trick; it is rather the inability of the prince of this world to understand the divine love. If Satan does not see God, it is because he is violent contagion itself. The devil is extremely clever concerning everything having to do with rivalistic conflicts, with scandals and their outcome in persecution, but he is blind to all reality other than that. Satan turns bad contagion into something I hope not to do myself, a totalitarian and infallible theory that makes the theoretician deaf and blind to the love of God for humankind and to the love that human beings share with God, however imperfectly.”

– Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightening. (Orbis Books) p. 149 – 151

Quod non assumpsit, non sanavit

“What He did not assume, He did not heal.”

Gregory Nazianzen, -letter to Cledonius

Cappadocian response to Appollonarian Christology, which tried to solve the problem of the unity of the Incarnate Logos by omitting the humanity.

The Moment the Bottom Fell Out

And when,

that evening at summer’s end,

on the sun-warmed stone of the church steps,

you spoke of the rooms within rooms in inner silence,

your words pressed Kingdom shapes on my vague suspicions.

Notes From Dreams

1.
“I thirst.”
We thought He said:
“O send someone to dip a finger in the spring and cool my tongue.”
There was a sponge, a javelin, and vinegar there.
He turned His swollen tongue away.
We saw that instant what deep and spanless gulfs we listened across.

2.
I saw the high priest standing as if in a vision.
A fierce accuser made it cold there like in the courts of law.
An angel stepped across and draped the priest in swaddling robes.
I cleared my throat: “Well, let them, then, endow a turban on his head.”
And at that sound a turban angel flew from out the throne.

3.
“Hold still.”
He burned me like a kindling stick; I fainted from the pain.
When I came back He said:
“Now let the satan fire his blue-flamed torch, just say:
“I’m burned.”

Four Sonnets To The Holy Ghost

1.
Some say they’ve seen you, seen a maybe ghost,
a shred of stranded autumn fog at dusk
among autistic trees, inert, at most
so mildly touching, and never being touched.
Some say they’re heard you, say you hum and brood
like pigeons wait out rains beneath the eaves
rehearsing unimportant coos, till shooed
by bb guns or brooms or squads of blowing leaves.
So sad that you are sought among the runes,
the humours, intuitions, moods, and maybes.
Yes, you are still — like rapt Cistercian tunes
and yes, you are small — like Boticelli’s babies.
Not nudges at night, nor questions in the brain
like tremors in the bed from a distant train.

2.
Dear mother and doting bee, from clover to clover
now hover, now settle, now check and dab and spoon
and check and spoon again, feed over and over
blossoms deep as throats and wide as noon.
Apothecary bee, replete with potions,
sort, apportion, calculate the yield,
assign to each their term within equations
calibrating beauties of each field.
But how each grateful flower brings to ground
your math. We worship thee, we trust and cling
(how heavy is a life?) , we soon impound,
enshrine, and clamber on your tender wing.
Your concrete love is your honeybee plight:
your now more full, more impossible flight.

3.
The Baptist sees you wing from past the sun,
from off the waters where the world had been
but now where worlds lie drowned, where none
but floating dead are all you’ve seen of men
while searching for a solid dock for God –
but now, regale the Father’s ark with news!
Like daring buds on Aaron’s dying rod,
a flash of green in brown and boring views
of sea, a living knoll where you can rest
with trees whose twigs bow up to greet your kiss
then twine to form a voluntary nest:
it’s Jesus, dry oasis in this wet abyss!
So stop, and sip the dew, and nibble dates,
then fly a newborn sprig to Him Who Waits.

4.
Apostles heard you rumble like the gospel caged:
a thrum like fourfold beasts in martial ranks
or Jordan bound a mile upstream, enraged,
and thrashing to and fro against her banks.
Apostles felt you set their hair on fire,
flash down provincial brainstems to their lungs
then up again as sermons sweet like lyre
but urgent as a seraph scrubbing tongues.

Beatitudes

Blessed are the poor who work hard to avoid
the riches which pursue the frugal.

Blessed are those who are silent
while knowing the precise words to get their way.

Blessed are those who, while languishing in God’s desert,
refuse to cross one dune to find their own oasis

Will You Be Planting Dahlias?

Yes, you are in my bones,
as matrix for the matrix of my marrow
and my cells are busy building on your scaffold
there where bloods are born.

On certain autumn midnights I would ride
my dreams against your sleep.
You localized my life, assured yourself that I was fine,
then turned upon your side.

But now you stir my dreams.
At dawn I hear the mother robins wake and search.
I turn and turn again but matrix of my marrow
has become a womb too deep.

Say, are you planting dahlias
by the walk this spring, again?
And is there room that I could nudge your side ,
that I could hold your moistened glove?

By the walk this spring, again?

Low Church Credo

He is nothing you can see or feel,
He is nothing you can paint on a board,
He is nothing to be broken or poured,
He is nothing our mistakes can kill.

That There Are Multiple Darknesses

Man is called into existence by the word of God,  so God’s first impingement on his cognition has describable shape.   For some individuals, later, there is contact with God the Spirit, and through this process the man moves from one epistemological universe to another, since each Trinitarian person, being a person, exudes a unique epistemological universe.   These are not the uniqunesses of inferior to a superior; this is not the climbing of a mystical stair, since there is no heirarchy in the Trinity.    It is the movement from knowing to being known.

The Spirit’s characteristic is to not be known, but to make Another known.   So, He does not exist in a form calibrated to be known.   Because His function is to make Another known, His default activity is to know.   He searches the heart of the individual.

Being known entails the cognition of no form or concept because the soul is now object rather than knowing subject. Thus, the closeness of the Spirit is perceived at first, as darkness — not the moral darkness of the absence of light, but the perceptual darkness of the absence of form.   To be known is a darkness, easily mistaken for something bad.

The Spirit knows us (He searches the inner deeps). The knowing of us must necessarily be without concept or feeling or form, for we are the object and not the subject. The knowing organ must necessarily be bigger than the known object (Comprehension is a means of circumscription.”)In Word there is verification, because there are delineations and boundaries. Indeed, to delineate is the function of the word. But in the Spirit there is no verification because the subject, the soul, is either within the boundaries or the Spirit has no boundaries (I’m not sure which, because it is dark). He blows where He will.

The ability to analyze presupposes distance from the object. Union makes analysis, makes verification, impossible. In order to analyze one must step back and get distance. So, the verification of the Spirit is in the Word, and not in the Spirit by direct perception. But this does not mean the Spirit cannot initiate His own verification, and in fact He does: He witnesses to us we are sons of God. But this verification which the Spirit initiates by the witness is very different and is known by a different knowing organ — a passive organ — than the verification in the Word, which is active and conceptual.

There are, then, multiple darknesses and most souls set themselves back years and years by not understanding this. The darkness from lack of form is the primordial darkness and is not evil. It is not to be hated. This is the root of the Dark Night of the Soul written about in Western mystical literature.

Moral darkness, or outer darkness, is the abode of sin and negligence and hell. It is to be hated. It is simply the night of having wandered far away from the Light at the center of the turning universe.

There are many other minor hours or days in what the soul percieves as darkness; these are just the natural ups and downs of our emotional life. Their extreme is what we call clinical depression. This is not — NOT — the Dark Night. (One of the silliest reductionisms in modern religious writing is to equate the Dark Night of the Soul with these natural blue periods. These modern writers on the “spiritual” life shouldn’t even be allowed to read John of the Cross, since they trivialize everything they touch.)

So, as I say, there are multiple darknesses. .