Christmas Without Father

Greetings friends, I hope this posting finds you and your family well, enjoying a happy and healthy holiday season. I wish you the same throughout the New Year.

I feel like I have nothing to write or say today but here I am. This is meant to be just a prelude to some poetry I will share with you. You have seen a little bit of what Christmas meant to me and my family, and especially to me and my dad. As father and son from and in different worlds, we didn't have much in common but what was there was good. Christamastime was very good. I hope that what you gained from my words about dad it that it is very much worth the efort to try to get to nkow, make peace, bridge teh gads with our loved one, even down to the very last moment.

I experienced a beautiful Christmas Liturgy (Mass) at the Greek Cathedral last night in Manhattan. When they were about to sing Christmas carols I knew which one they would begin with. My gut began to turn and when the choir rang out with "O come all Ye Faithful" the tears began to stream. Good, clear, cleansing tears. Merry Christmas bamba!

My holiday present to you is some poetry. Other than epic poetry: The Divine Comedy, Faust, The Odyssey and the Iliad, poems never made much sense to me. I found some love poems beautiful, but being in love (and losing your beloved) is such a singular thing, a string of unique moments in unique lives, that I never could connect, never could find them more than quaint--even from the pen of the Bard--whoever he-she-they might have been. Maybe thats why we always think that the love poems or letters we write are more beautiful than those of the greatest writers.

But loss is different. The uniqueness of each loss is matched by its universality. All life ends in death; all will die. It is simpler to understand than love. Eventually every child simply understands that death is death. The person we knew is gone forever. It is the end of a relationship in one important earthly sense-- our eyes will NEVER see them again. Yet it is a complete mystery in its spiritual dimension--in that way it is like love: exactly how is it that we are now connected to this person with whom we were so recently connected in such a concrete, earthy way: we saw them, heard them, touched them.? Because we know so little about the afterlife that we hang on every word from someone who might enlighten us. Maybe this fool will attempt something soon. Yes a fool, born on April First. A certified fool--the certificate is in my desk.

This Rilke poems is not about death, but it seem apropos of this moment in my life. I could not enjoy his poems when I first tried to read them, before I turned 40. I think most of the power of poetry is aimed at, and requires the experience of middle age. There's not much about God in my words here. Since my father's death I have gone to his churches for comfort and communion, and I pray--the Jesus prayer, that powerful yet subtle prayer that is vaguely unsettling ot the modern mind because its true meaning and realm is just below the surface of consciousness (even if we are very good people, anger and all the passions seethe below our surface and generate unhealthy, ungodly guilt--which the repetitions of the prayer heals). The Fathers and Mothers of Christianity had a deep appreciation of its words as would, ironically, if they had read it, Jung and especially Freud:

LORD Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

I discovered this year that these words are powerul too:

LORD Jesus Christ, and Mother of God, have mercy

A combination Jesus prayer and Hail Mary. I left out words "a sinner" because technically Mary does not fogive sins, but as the ultimate Mother figure, we need to feel her forgiveness just as we need to experience Jesus as a forgiving Father figure. And the great theologian Alexander Schmeman is surely right to call Mary "an icon of the Holy Spirit", the Comforter.

And I trying to listen to great music because from the great composeers those are pure messages from God. At this very moment God is speaking to me in the language of Bach--The Suite for Cello, BWV 1007. It's a wow--you've heard it in commercials and in movies. Listen to it during a quite moment, with or without a loved one's presence.

As I listen to the Bach, I'm somewhat mellower now so that I can contemplate more difficult things, I think maybe this is one of the moments when we are secretly angry at God. When we lose someone or something important, when we are told we have a serious illness. If we really feel the presence to God in our lives, or as one friend once said to me, "if we believe he really runs the whole show" ( I myself believe that chance and accidents are part of His machinery--because we need it for freedom and God loves surprises too--at some "level") how can we not be angry at God, at least for a time? We should be more aware of those moments: they are unhealthy only when we run away from them and we are strenghthened spiritually when we work them through and transcend them.

Before the Rilke, here is a little bit of poetic writing that Thomas Wolfe placed before the start of his book "Look Homeward Angel", a kind of prequel to "You Can't Go Home Again", both of which are long, beautiful books of what I guess would be called "prose poetry".

a stone, a leaf an unfound door

...a stone a leaf, and unfound door; of a stone,
a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us has not remained forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again


Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn
to in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes--the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing
of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;
remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was
merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
into herself, as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?
"Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that
gathered in the snap of release it can be more than
itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only
saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted
them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,
kneeling and didn't notice at all:
so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure
God's voice--far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind
and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church
in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?
Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,
as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance
of injustice about their death-- which at times
slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit's growth--: could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god
has suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.