Break, Blow, Burn
I raised my children with carrots only, no sticks. It’s not that I was so patient, kind, and lofty. I simply could not physically – or, a bit less successfully, emotionally – hurt someone. I was also a devotee of Dr. Spock’s assertion that hitting a child teaches the child that when you’re angry, hit. Fortunately, I had mild mannered children, and so I got away with this philosophy. My children also grew up eating far too many cookies! My husband, who did not discipline physically but used loud voice reprimands and a look that somehow worked in a way I could never understand, said I always got to be the good guy (I would have said “gal”) and he the bad. Yep. Another perk.
When life grew more serious and dangerous though, my supportive, loving approach did not always work with others or myself. When I needed a certain amount of toughness, assertiveness, forcefulness, boldness, even anger, to deal with outrageous injustices or threats to peace and well-being, I found those qualities difficult to access and even harder to use even when I saw they were the ones critically needed to effect positive change.
I had always thought the feminine and then the more forceful feminist, and now multi-gendered, approach to inequality, the ‘ism’s, exclusion, debasement, and erasure was best, and, full disclosure, for the most part I still do. But (It’s so hard to write these next words): Sometimes I want the Old Testament God back.
I don’t like viewing “God” as gendered or anthropomorphic but, instead, as more all-encompassing and all-pervading, both immanent and transcendent, and so much more. Yet in times of crisis, I want an angry, authoritarian, commanding, damning He/She/They to pronounce degradation of the environment, the torture of animals – including the human variety – the slow, if any, responses to famine, war, poverty, homelessness, oppression, on and on, as Evil. In my most overwrought moments, I want them seen as sins, sins needing atonement, sins requiring we, all of us, make amends.
When I think like this, I want this as the “Holy Sonnet” for our day:
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Metaphysical poet, John Donne, wrote this in the 17th Century and, in my opinion, it speaks as much for us today. As the poem shows, though, our striving for good, for holiness if you will, in ourselves, in our world, and in our Church, is complicated.
I’ve mentioned some of our own “sins” that need redressing, perhaps in an Old Testament way, but what about those of our own Church hierarchy, oppressing and suppressing based on gender, withholding blessings and sacraments and the grace they bestow, submerging or perpetuating violations of children and others, denying calls, failing to speak out against injustice? We’ve been taking the gentle redresses the poem mentions, of knocking, shining, and seeking to mend. But now, to get them to rise, don’t we actually need to” batter their hearts” as well as our own? Don’t we need to use our force to “break, blow, burn,” to make all of us new? Don’t we need to call out for reason to govern rather than weakness or fear or ignorance? Don’t we want to divorce all of us from whatever enemy and enmity corrupts and harms and imprisons? If the world and the Church and us need to be saved, don’t we all need to be actually ravished by GodLove?
Ah, but there it is: “ravish”. The poet chose a word with such a complex and multifaceted meaning. Preceded as it is by the word “chaste”, we immediately think of “ravish” as rape, goodness and love infused through force, Old Testament style. But to “ravish” can also mean to overcome and fill with joy and intense delight. And the poet does want to be “enthralled”. Isn’t that calling forth joy and delight as another avenue to achieve the Church and world we want? Can I breathe and be me again?
As I said, though, it’s complicated. In the poet’s day, to “enthrall” meant to hold in bondage or slavery. Ironically, only if it is God rather than sin imprisoning him, is he truly free. Only if it is God forcing him down and infusing him with grace, can he become truly holy. We’re back to an Old Testament kind of God and an Old Testament kind of Church that so often thinks and acts this way. But we know too well that the use of power and indignation and threat – that in frustration I sometimes want when their opposites seem agonizingly slow in effecting change – in the end will not work.
In fact, as John Donne so magnificently pointed out, we can never live in such black and white simplicity or certainty. No extreme answer suffices in itself; it’s the wrenching, unending, painful search for awareness and guidance and unity in difference and difference in unity that is the holy quest we are on.
And that is both enthralling and freeing.