David Riddell wrote:
>It has been my observation from recent
>comments to this Poetry site
>that contempt for God seems to be
>a prerequisite for those who deem
>themselves experts in this field.
>
>
I really ought to stay out of this. Alison kind of suggested we let go
of this, I think. But.
I've expressed a couple of views here in the recent past that have made
me (at least offline) about as popular as a pack of cigarettes in a lung
cancer hospice. One of the lessons I took away from the experience was
when to talk and when to shut up. Not for fear off offending people:
just because I am hardly a 100% believer in anything except that
so-called Power Greater Than Myself and I have neither the right nor
obligation to hit people over the head with privately held and sometimes
tortuous convictions unless I can write them at least as well as John
Donne and George Herbert. Alas, I stopped channeling Herbert after
Ph.D. exams but it was fun while it lasted.
I find that Being everywhere. I do not believe in revealed truths
emanating from any one place: the Bible (either Scripture), Koran, Big
Book of AA, various sutras (even the Kama), the writings of Rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik, Rumi, Rilke, Jane Kenyon, or Mary Oliver. Maybe there are
people who find THE Truth in any one of these volumes. Other people
find pieces of Truth in all of them. In the meantime the Being is out
with me and the dog when we're walking in the evening. The Being is in
the eyes of my aging cat. The Being is in the eyes of my grown
children. Sometimes the Being is even here, among the scoffers,
sinners, moneylenders in the Temple, and tax-collectors...so you seem to
think we are.
>Humilty....Look it up in your Dictionaries.
>
>
Sarcasm will get you nowhere in this place. Dismiss it.
>...or whether
>each one of us has been predestined
>to either Eternity with God or Eternity
>without God.......for this I am anti-
>intellectual?
>
>
Okay, you are popping a variant of Pascal's Wager on us. The point is?
>Of course,if you are more interested
>in reading literature that endeavours
>to discredit Biblical Truth,then
>read as much as you like.As I said,
>I am not an Apologetic.
>
>
Yes you are. I used to know a Jesuit priest in New York to whom I
addressed the following question: "When you pray, do you ever wonder if
someone is listening?" He replied "About once a day." If you like
blasphemous poetry, consider Robert Browning's "Bishop Bloughram's
Apology":
"You call for faith:
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,
If faith o'ercomes doubt."
I am missing something here in your dismissive comment about literature
that discredits Biblical truth. Name six. You seemed to have banished
the idea of doubt, of questioning, of a personal search. It's all in
the Bible? A great deal about faith is there, but not about everything
else. Other people have spoken and written wisdom, other people have
been--to use what I suspect is a shared terminology--divinely inspired.
Will you dismiss Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno" because it's not
Holy Scripture but the writings of a madman? Will you dismiss Eliot's
religious verse because the guy was apparently a lousy husband? Or
Auden because he was a homosexual? I can stop right there because I
have never ever met a writer, especially a poet, who did not--implicitly
or explicitly--acknowledge something greater than themselves, someone
who gave them the gift, who nurtured the gift, and who allowed them the
occasional fear that one day the gift could be taken back (watch, now
they're going to come running:-). Therefore (he said, clearing his
throat), any poetry I read is implicitly an acknowledgment of some
aspect of the Divine, and by that I do not mean a female impersonator
from Baltimore who acted in John Waters movies. Any poem I write, good
or bad, is given to me--not by transcription a la those urban legends
about Georgie Yeats and automatic writing, but to work with and at until
I get something that may be satisfying to me or hopeless. The labor
itself is the joy and the gift.
I'm so glad I stayed out of this.....
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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