A Doorway Into Thanks: Further Reflections on Scripture

By Tim Vivian

Poetry should be transitive, and deal with something other. Thus, a doorway offers transition, liminal space, an invitation, a going across, into possibly numerous somethings other. We can’t assume, however, that the door is always open; if closed, we need to open it. A doorway can confront us: Have we the courage to reach for the handle? Given the horrors of 2020 and 2021, we must open the door both to grieving and thanksgiving. The poems here are midrashim. Midrash is a reflection on scripture. These poems first imagine passages and stories from the Bible and then reimagine them: they build stages, create, and breathe life into characters, and landscape biblical passages with new, often challenging, backgrounds. Many of the poems here have religio-political subtexts. The poems speak of darkness, the things that darken our country and our hearts, but they also speak of the life-giving lights of mystery, wonder, and thanksgiving, the things that give us hope. As writer and poet Louise Erdrich tells us, “This is how our lives complete themselves, / as effortless as weather, circles blaze / in ordinary days, and through our waking selves / they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685620011

Tim Vivian

Tim Vivian is professor emeritus of religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield, and a retired priest of the Episcopal Church. He has published, among many books, The Life of Antony (with Apostolos N. Athanassakis, 2003), The Holy Workshop of Virtue: The Life of Saint John the Little (with Maged S.A. Mikhail, 2010), Becoming Fire: Through the Year with the Desert Fathers and Mothers (2009) and The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (vol. 1, forthcoming, 2021).

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About the Author

Tim Vivian is a professor emeritus of Religious Studies at California State University, Bakersfield, and a retired priest in the Episcopal Church. He has an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopal). A scholar of early Christian monasticism, he has published numerous books including The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (volume 1) and, co-authored, The Life of Antony and The Life of Bishoi. He has previously published two books of poems, Other Voices, Other Rooms and Poems Written in a Time of Plague.

Dedication

To the singer-songwriters

who have inspired, delighted, gladdened,

comforted, and challenged me

these many years.

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Tim Vivian 2023

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Vivian, Tim

A Doorway Into Thanks

ISBN 9781685620004 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781685620011 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903290

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

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Author’s Reflection

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing…

–George Herbert, The Flower¹

Every word is a doorway

to a meeting, one often cancelled,

but that’s when a word is true:

when it insists on the meeting.

–Yannis Ritsos, The Meaning of Simplicity

The title of this book, A Doorway Into Thanks, comes from Mary Oliver’s poem Prayer.² Oliver (1935–2019) was, and in her poems is, a poet of beauty, sight and insight, wonder and thanksgiving, these her ongoing grace and gifts to us.³ While reading some of the poems here, readers may wonder, vis-à-vis Oliver, about the appropriateness for this volume of A Doorway into Thanks. Yet, as Yannis Ritsos tells us, Every word is a doorway / to a meeting, one often cancelled, / but that’s when a word is true: / when it insists on the meeting.⁴ One section, Annus Horribilis (A Year of Horrors), does not seem to offer much in the way of thanksgiving—or hope; another, Each Bone to Our Temple, reflects on a biblical genocide and that genocide’s meaning for us. And yet…it is a thanksgiving to think about our daily matters, be with them, awful as well as beautiful, horrifying as well as beatifying; from a spiritual perspective, it is an even greater thanksgiving to reflect on them, be contemplative about them.

Those who called attention to, and acted on, 2020’s horrors are doing in a very different way what Oliver offers in her poetry: they are paying attention; they are opening hearts, minds, and souls, theirs and others’, even amid chaos, evil, and rubble, to the horrors, yes, but also to the beauties of the day—each person’s and each day’s redeeming. What a mass of contradictions we are! And so is our world, especially the one we have made in our own image and likeness. As Yeats says, a terrible beauty.⁵ Poetry, as with many other venues, allows us to deal with Yeats’ seeming oxymoron; it’s really not oxymoron after all.⁶

In relation with this, George Herbert, whom I quote above, after so many deaths continues to write, relishing versing.⁷ I’ve quoted Herbert for two reasons: now 70, I too now in age bud again and, with this budding, am very aware that Herbert died at 39, a month before his fortieth birthday, thirty years younger than I. And, in a time of plagues, after so many deaths, like Herbert I live and write.⁸ And I am well aware of a flower’s winter, dying, and death. Herbert is most likely writing of the deaths of friends and family. I am writing in the midst of pandemic deaths, social and political death-dealing, and the near-death of American democracy.⁹ And yet, and yet…like Herbert I once more smell the dew and rain and, in COVID-isolation, became part of a backyard garden and its sunsets, insects, clouds, birds, and flowers. And, again like Herbert, I relish versing, both its reading and its writing.

Reflecting on George Herbert’s poetry, John Drury makes a striking point: poetry, he says, should be transitive, and deal with something other.¹⁰ Transitive derives from Latin transeo/transire.¹¹

Thus, a doorway offers transition, liminal space, an invitation, a going across, into possibly numerous somethings other. We can’t assume, however, that the door is always open; if closed, we need to open it. A doorway can confront us: Have we the courage to reach for the handle? Beyond doorway can lie thanksgiving. Thanksgiving in Greek is eucharistía, English Eucharist. Holy Communion is available, but we need to get off our butts, leave the pew or chair, get into the aisle, and move forward, forward to communion, in both its strictest and most magnanimous meanings, then out the narthex doors to serve others.

Given the horrors of 2020 and into early fall 2021, we—and I’m speaking of and to myself first—must open the door to thanksgiving. My presumption is that it won’t open easily for many of us, not because the door is impaired, but because we are. For someone my age, the cartoon strip Shoe with humor visualizes my situation perfectly: Prof. Cosmo Fishhawk, a main character, wearing elbow-patched tweed, gets out of his big comfortable chair and goes into the adjoining room. Once there, he asks the (rhetorical) question: Hmm. I remember the lyrics to all the Beatles songs. But I can’t remember why I just walked into the den.¹² Despite our often forgetting, a doorway provides the liminal space, the liminal moment, to transition into recollection—and, with discernment, recollection’s gatherings, whether far or near past, or events recent and again present, though already changing. In Greek, truth is, at its linguistic root, not forgetting. We usually think of liminality, perhaps, as a moving ahead, forward, as in an engagement to marry, but the limen, the doorstep, can also bring us back, and interior. Both offer transformation.

A Doorway into Thanks has five sections, five liminalities, two mentioned above. The first, Broken Knowledge: Towards an Ars Poetica, offers thoughts on language, its strengths and duties, and its limitations, our limitations.¹³ Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) puts it well: As beauteous shapes, we know not why, / Command and guide the eye.¹⁴ With a character in As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner tells it straight: "words dont [sic] ever fit even what they are trying to say at. This theme indwells much of this volume, but especially the last section, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. I see this not as loss but as possibility. We are, or should be, citizens of what we do not know. Before these poems come three sections: 2020: Annus Horribilis Mirabilisque, A Wild of Nothing, Save of Joy, and Each Bone to Our Temple: Joshua."

As I began this Author’s Reflection in late December of 2020, Christmastide, many columnists, preachers, and others were reaching out to remind us of the marvels and miracles among, and within, us. As E. J. Dionne, one of my favorite columnists in The Washington Post, concluded a column: So when I offer birthday wishes to Jesus, my hope will be that all, believers and nonbelievers alike, might discover the light they seek—and may we remember that finding our way out of the darkness is easier when we know we’re not alone.¹⁵

Dionne connects hope with birth and birth to hope, as many poems in this collection do. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy observe that Rainer Maria Rilke does the same: "The Book of Pilgrimage reflects Rilke’s acute awareness of humanity’s unfolding fate as well as his more personal preoccupations. Images of pregnancy enter the religious discourse. God is described as a womb, and more frequently as the new life growing inside the poet."¹⁶ And, in his hopefulness, Dionne acknowledges that darkness that, we always need to remember, is part of our darkness—or is our darkness.¹⁷ As I now revise for publication it’s almost fall of 2021; a near-forever war has ended in Afghanistan but, almost entirely because of ignorance, lies, anger, and outrage, COVID stalks our streets and ICUs like a monster from a ’50s horror movie, metaphor for atom bomb destruction. That atom, transfigured, still cavorts among us.

Thus the section Annus Horribilis Mirabilisque (A Horrible and Extraordinary Year). Latin Annus, Year. Horribilis: terrible, fearful, dreadful, horrible. Mirabilis: to be wondered at, wonderful, marvelous, extraordinary, admirable, strange, singular.¹⁸ Joined by que, and, a joining that is an enjoining. A year both horribilis and mirabilis, with each word’s sundry meanings and, together, an attempt to reflect on our manifold sunderings, national and personal, and the marvels and wonders that can yet bring a person to herself, her true self, divinized.¹⁹

Many of the poems in Horribilis have religio-political subtexts.²⁰ My understanding is that if a person is of faith and votes, that is politics-and-religion; in the United States there is a separation, at least theoretically, between politics and religion at the governmental level, but not the personal. One reader of this volume in manuscript shared concerns that the political references, especially the many footnotes, might quickly date the volume. As I thought about this, Jennifer Rubin’s daily articles in early January 2021 in The Washington Post reminded me that, yes, the political specifics will fade, but the underlying and overarching issues, the marrow within the bone, will not.²¹ So I’ve retained the notes.²² After I made