1
| 2
|
3 |
4
Next>
The
popular wisdom is that the words “[holiness]” and
“realism” don’t go together. Holy people, like
poets, are dreamy and sentimental. Never get places on time….
Holy people are not of this world. [They are not real about life].
Their mind is always on higher things, including perhaps the old
pie in the sky. ...
My
goal today is to overturn [these] false notions of holiness, for
I believe that it surfaces in human beings precisely when we are
being most realistic, most grounded, most down to earth. Holiness
is never fussy or sentimental. Neither is a good poem; it’s
ultimate realism. My evidence for this belief is that holiness
endures, persistent as a weed through the depredations of all
the ages, throughout all the terrors that we human beings can
inflict on each other and have inflicted over our history on this
earth. Holiness prevails, and poetry. Religion and poetry are
among the most ancient of human activities, predating even agriculture.
And battered as they are today by secular indifference or co-optation
… by legalism, fundamentalism, or terrorism, by right-thinking
ideologies, [or] tyrants; religion and poetry are with us still,
still witnessing to hope at the dawn of the 21st century. Both
holiness and poetry [may seem] anachronistic, … [but they
are] peculiar forces with a life of their own in the face of the
dog-eat-dog world we know too well, and as necessary as breath,
giving us the hope that evil does not have the last word. …
[Another]
point about holy realism is that it is grounded in the present,
in the real world, and especially not in our heads. We have in
our society so many temptations to live in our heads. We’re
constantly invited to live our lives through the carefully packaged
lives of celebrities, even people who are famous only for performing
some infamously stupid or vulgar act. We might imagine ourselves
in the glossy magazine ads. Our lives would be centered on a purse
or a pair of sandals. We see a dress in a store window lit as
if it were an object of devotion in a church. Holy realism rejects
these false images of the world and human life, and it reminds
us of who we really are. …
I
believe that we need poets … and we need religion to keep
bringing us to our senses. I recently read a fine book by Garrett
Keiser entitled The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes
Deadly Sin, in which he suggests that the recent phenomenon
of road rage in America is a good example of anger that results
from our living in our heads, from our exaggerated subjectivity.
Like many forms of quick trigger anger, road rage is ultimately,
as Keiser says, “a loss of reality. Both the perceived offense
and the response to it are completely out of proportion.”
It’s ultimate narcissism, just one example in our culture
where we could all use a good dose of humility and to sort of
adopt what I think of as the ultimate Benedictine attitude, to
say, “Well, who am I? I'm a mere mortal, like the person
who just cut me off in traffic.” …
Holy
realism asserts that life does matter, how we live it matters.
It’s not willing to accept … that the endless daily
drudgery is all there is to life. Holy realism takes a stand for
awe and wonder and beauty even in the midst of ordinary daily
activities. That is asceticism to me, I think. In a prose piece,
[poet] Kate Daniels … writes of a burgeoning poem that she
was forced to set aside, in a typical day of teaching, and couldn’t
get back to [that] night because her children and her husband
were coming home and had to be fed. “Like me,” she
wrote, “they are tired and over stimulated. The events of
the day are clamoring inside them. The good events want to be
shouted out, the bad see the inside or are precipitously acted
out in ferocious sibling wars. We have all come home to each other
to be healed and hailed, to be soothed as a victim, chastised
if a perpetrator, and morally realigned. But we are so tired and
we lash out in irritation, frustration, anger.” That sounds
very familiar to me. In the midst of chaos in her kitchen, the
children doing homework are littering the floor with paper scraps,
the dog overturning the garbage pail, Kate Daniels takes a stand.
“Try as I may, and I do, I have a hard time browning the
ground turkey I'm planning to mix with canned spaghetti sauce
for the glory of God. I try to find the poetry that exists even
here. I know that God is here but in the chaos and the noise,
I can’t seem to find Him.”
Now
this is a woman who can find God in the midst of changing a diaper,
so we know she’s morally realigned and very strong. But
now in that kitchen she feels bereft of any consolation. And I
connect with that very much. I don’t have children, but
I have been a caregiver for my husband for about three or four
years. And so I really do understand that you sense that God is
there but you really can’t find God. ... But even the fact
that Kate Daniels or I am aware of the absence of God is a form
of holy realism. We can have faith and hope that there is something
better than the ordinary pains and frustrations of life. Holy
realism is grounded defiantly in the daily chores of life. …
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next>
