Lines from a Not So Ancient Poet

Although public-school curricula has now, fortunately, expanded to include a wider variety of authors, my own generation (as well as that of my parents and grandparents) inevitably had to read a famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Titled "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poem told the story of a sailor who, because of his disregard for God's non-human creatures, was punished by having to carry around his neck the albatross that he killed.  As students, some of us felt that a heavy albatross was being hung around our own necks by our being required to read and maybe memorize part of the 15-page poem written in a now out-of-date style.  Despite the poem's strange plot, the poem did conclude with a sentence I thought was strikingly beautiful:

"He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all."

The phrase "All things both great and small" in that stanza was probably the inspiration for the line "All creatures great and small" in Cecil Frances Alexander's 1848 hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful." That hymn in turn inspired titles for the set of books by the 20th-century writer James Herriot.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I now wish I had been exposed to Coleridge's insights that ranged far beyond that poem.  In more recent years, as I have encountered small quotations from Coleridge's prose in other writers' books, I have come to recognize his philosophical contributions.  Although his personal life had many setbacks, Coleridge stayed on course with his interest in exploring human attentiveness, sensibilities, and imagination, and the role they play in our relationship to Nature. Such as his observation that "To think of a thing is [as] different from to perceive it as 'to walk' is from 'to feel the ground under you.' "

The significance of his philosophical work can be better understood against its historical background.  Coleridge lived from 1772 to 1834.  It was a time in which Western intellectual culture was struggling through transformations resulting from the expansion of modern science. Many scientists were saying that we can only truly know the world if we draw a sharp dividing line between human reason and emotions.  In contrast, Coleridge argued that "Deep thinking is attainable only by men of deep feeling."

northern royal albatross

Besides the metaphor of "an albatross around the neck," Coleridge has left our English discourse with other phrases.  It is also from his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" that we got "Water, water, everywhere... Nor any drop to drink."  (Sometimes rephrased to "... and not a drop to drink.")  And it is from his analyses of the craft of writing that we got our description of readers' "willing suspension of disbelief."  I think it would be nice if Coleridge's legacy to us would also include a kind of thinking that was a deeper feeling and a deeper loving. Not just for other humans, but for all creatures great and small.

~~~

Do you think Coleridge was right in the idea expressed in the verse quoted from  "The Rime" that there is a link between praying and loving?

(The Coleridge quotes re. perceiving and re. deep thinking are from his Notebooks.

His phrase about suspension of disbelief is from his Biographia Literaria, Ch. 14.)

The Painted Morning Sky

"You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.

Get out your rainbow colors

so it will be beautiful."

                                 -- A Nootka morning prayer

I think this prayer could be the universal wish of humankind at morning.  Not specifically that the sky at sunrise be beautifully colored, but that the coming day be a good one (especially if yesterday went terrible).

This Nootka prayer seems to me, however, to be a prayer not merely for good fortune in the new day, but actually for a beautifully colored sunrise.  Several decades ago, when I learned some techniques of photography (before today's digital cameras), I learned how sunrises are usually softer in color, and have more pink and blue light, in contrast with the fiery reds and oranges of sunsets.  The Nootka prayer could thus be heard as a wish for a beautiful pastel-colored sky at dawn.

I would like to catch a bit of that pastel softness and harmony and take it into myself for the day.

There also seems to me to be in the Nootka prayer the suggestion that each new day carries within itself new divine promise.

Frequently when I suggest the idea that God can be known through Nature, the response I get from many people is, "But Nature can be violent!"  (I must admit I do have to bite my tongue a bit and avoid responding, "You think Nature can be violent -- did you watch the TV news last night to see what people have been doing?")

However, just as we learn how to discern the Spirit of God at work in human society, so also might we learn to discern things about God as we observe, contemplate, and learn how to interpret what Christianity often called the "book of Nature."

For example, in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus wants to point to some place where we have experienced the most demanding kind of behavior -- the challenge to"Love your enemies" -- Jesus does not turn to any saintly human beings. Instead, Jesus points to our experience of something inanimate in Nature:  the reliable sun, saying, "your Father in heaven... makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5: 44-45).  That is an example of discerning a deeper reality, God's faithfulness, in the natural rising of the sun.  Similar to the way the Nootka verse seems to rejoice with its prayer offered to God as the sun rises.

The rising of the sun is the most frequent of the reliable cycles of Nature in which we place the cycles of our own lives.

~~~

What can noticing Nature bring to your day?

“Listen to the Silence”

Grammatically speaking, it would seem to be a contradiction, an oxymoron.  How can you listen to silence if "silence" means the absence of sound?  And yet it was the first thing my wife said to me when we got out of the car upon arriving at Big Bend National Park in Texas.  Few other tourists had arrived yet for the coming weekend, and we were many miles from any city.  "Listen to the silence," she said.

And I knew exactly what she meant because I "heard" it myself.  I heard how quiet it was. The absence of even any distant noise from cars on any highways was what made it so striking.  The irony was that because there was nothing to hear, we were listening more attentively.

In our increasingly technological (and increasingly urbanized) lives, silence is counter-cultural, almost radically so.  We have so many forms of electronic entertainment and communication that we are almost constantly receiving or sending sounds or messages.  To be silent and to listen to silence is rare.

The more important question, however, is not why our silence is rare, but instead, why is it so important?  And why might Nature be a key to obtaining it?

Part of the answer is that silence is a door into attentiveness.  If a friend is talking to me, I can better attend to what they are expressing if I listen silently, rather than looking for an opening to inject the busy thoughts of my own mind.  In parallel with that principle, the 20th-century spiritual director Evelyn Underhill taught that to be prayerful, a person had to be attentive.  Silence and attentiveness can lead to prayerfulness.

Many objects in the natural world emit no sound.  Thus, to truly attend to them -- to "listen" to them in silence -- can be a good way of becoming meditative.  This is one of the gifts of Nature.

We might expect to find in Mother Teresa's writings only thoughts about her ministry to the poor in India, but she knew the secret of this connection between silence and Nature.  She wrote:

"See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, 

how they move in silence.  We need silence 

to be able to touch souls."

There is also a link between inner silence and appreciating beauty.  The symmetries, colors, and harmonies in Nature that we experience as beauty can be a window into the Divine.  However, as Henry David Thoreau reminds us:

"You cannot perceive beauty
but with a serene mind."

~~~

Is there some way you have of coming to a greater inner serenity?  What is that way?

(The Mother Teresa quote is from A Gift for God
by Mother Teresa, © 1975, p. 69.
The Thoreau quote is from

 his Journal X, Vol. 16, Nov. 18, 1857.)

Darkness

waning moon

I did not myself notice a possible meaning in the way the prayer was worded.  So, at first I thought the Iroquois prayer was a simple prayer of gratitude, perhaps used at bedtime to relieve anxiety about the night ahead:

"Great Spirit who puts us to sleep in darkness,

We thank thee for the silences of darkness."

I had even liked saying the prayer, finding that it helped bring upon me a grateful spirit, so as to overcome worried thoughts about the day ending or the day to come.

But one day my wife made a comment that made me see in the prayer a possible added dimension.  She said, "It implies that the night has more than one silence."  Indeed, the wording was plural:  "silences of darkness."  I had taken the plural to refer merely to the many nighttimes we experience, one following the other, periods of darkness separated by each day.  But could the prayer's idea be that each night has more than one silence?

The image of a series of silences brought back to me the first night my wife and I camped in a state park in east Texas.  Taking longer than usual to get to sleep because of the unfamiliar feel of the air mattress on the uneven ground, my ears were particularly sensitive to the unfamiliar sounds of Nature around me.  As I tried to drop off, my mind was brought back to keen attention with each click or scrape or seeming moan I heard.  What was it?  Was I safe?  And after I did at last fall asleep, my rest was interrupted time and again by the silence being interrupted by sound (including the local raccoon's making the rounds of the park's trash cans).  Oh, how I would have enjoyed having the night be a single long, uninterrupted silence.

What trust a person would have to have to choose to live in total darkness!  If we imagine not being able to see anything (as many of the legally blind cannot), it should be no surprise that one of the Bible's most powerful symbols for ignorance is darkness.  And the very word "Buddha" is a title meaning "en-lightened one."

Earth's regular darkness

That night camping, however, reminds me that Nature's world is not dead even when people are, as we say, dead to the world.  For many creatures, the night is the time to truly live!  Not just that raccoon, but also bats, moths, and countless other creatures.  The biologist Francisco J. Ayala has described evolution as being "opportunistic." Life on earth began with bacteria that evolved sensitivity to light, followed by plants that required light for photosynthesis.  However, the alternate world of nocturnal life opportunistically evolved the ability to take advantage of darkness.

Darkness is thus essential to this planet's biodiversity.  Moreover, this planet itself would have burned to a crisp on one side long ago if it did not rotate frequently, thus bringing nights of cooling darkness.  We should not be in the dark about the importance of darkness to this Earth.

~~~

How do you use your nights?