For Those Who Have Recourse to Thee
26 July, 2010It seems not so very long ago I sat under oak tree and full moon, half-inclined to offer my prayers to that silver disk, while inside she gathered her implements to do the same.
How many tides have washed since then, how many horns, and halves, and wholes and hollows?
Yet ever she rises,
ever she walks the East
in streaming silver.
Spotless Mirror
Stella Maris
Lovely, fevered season, season of peaches and cool watermelon, tomatoes and fresh corn, of fire-flies and cricket songs. Time, too, of humidity drowning temple-throbbing drowsy rising from the ground in waves and waves on helpless shores, ever dreamy twining vine magnolia shade
Ever she rises,
ever she walks the East
in streaming silver.
Spotless Mirror
Stella Maris
You ask me did I see her. Did I? Did I waking and asleep ever since bright eyes and the purse of her lips hands folded tenderly to pray I saw and saw. I see
Ever she rises,
ever she walks the East
in streaming silver.
Spotless Mirror
Stella Maris
A fumbling heart in slumber and when it comes will take some reckoning that swelling force a steady course for those who have recourse to thee.
This Curious Pilgrimage
15 July, 2010O Lord, you have made us for yourself
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
—St. Augustine
Years ago, driving home to Atlanta from a Theta Xi retreat, a brother and I saw a simple sign on the side of the road: "Shrine." Feeling a spirit of adventure, we turned onto the winding road. I cannot remember where we were coming from, or how we came to be there, but I will never forget what we found at the end of that mountain road.
The Shrine of the Virgin of the Poor in New Hope, Tennessee, is a copy of a Marian Shrine in Banneaux, Belgium, where Our Lady appeared to a young girl named Mariette Beco in 1933. Built by Father Basil Mattingly and his Benedictine brothers, it sits in a lovely clearing atop a small mountain not far from Chattanooga. The Sun was low when we arrived, but the mosaic of Our Lady and little Mariette seemed to glow with some inner light of its own. And when we stepped into the chapel, we were awestruck by what we saw. Portrayed simply, honestly, our Lord in his Passion, St. John in heartbreak, our Lady somehow serene in sorrow as the sword pierces her heart at the foot of the Cross.
So perhaps it was appropriate that, as we discovered the Rosary walk around the shrine, the Sorrowful Mysteries were the only ones my brother could remember. Just a year before this, maybe less, the thought of praying a Hail Mary would have put me off entirely, but on this day, in this sacred place, my heart was open, and the prayers rose from my heart, easy as breathing.. Walking through the shadows around the hilltop, I felt we were following our Savior along the way to Calvary, standing with John and Mary as he offered himself up for us. I left the Shrine that night with much to think about, and maybe something in my heart had changed forever.
Later that week, my friend brought me a mission Rosary from the Georgia Tech Catholic Center, and I began to learn the prayers and the mysteries, to see the events of the Gospel stretch out before me in a new and living way, a way that moved me deeply, a way that gripped my heart and did not let go. I don't suppose one must be a Catholic to pray the Rosary, but I know now that when I took up the beads in earnest, my Presbyterian days were numbered.
Now, if I first became interested in Knox and Calvin because I was dating a Presbyterian girl, so be it—but I was no less sincere for a' that. Oddly enough, however, it was a Presbyterian minister who really set my thinking towards Rome in the first place, when he told me that the Church being run by Bishops "makes the most sense...if it weren't for human weakness." I thought long and often on that little throwaway line, eventually coming to wonder just why Jesus would found a Church a certain way, and then leave it to crumble under its own weakness, as if he were off dealing with more pressing matters. In the end, if Christ hasn't the grace to keep his Church together, then there is no hope for poor, broken Andy Coan, I assure you.
Now that I look back on it all, though, this curious pilgrimage of mine pretty much began by accident, or rather serendipity. I think I was eight when, standing at an Invitation in a little "church in the wild wood", I was admonished by my mother for cutting up with a friend—only that's not the way it seemed to me. With a stern look, she pointed her finger towards the front, intending to return my attention to the preacher, while I thought sure she telling me the time for Baptism had come. She pointed, and in fear I shook my head. Shocked, she pointed again, and again I refused! A third time she insisted, and finally, sheepishly, I said "I'll go, if you go with me." If she was more shocked then, she didn't show it, but led me down the aisle to profess my childlike faith and come to the waters of Baptism. Just so at that holy shrine, some 15 years later, my Mother was waiting for me, so patiently leading me to her son, Jesus.
And if I've stumbled on the way since then, and I have made an Art of it, my heart is glad that the Way awaits our returning, that our Mother is faithful still to lead us on, Ad Iesum per Mariam.
***
For Erin and James, whose journey, too, has only just begun.
Discover Erin's Blog, The Contemplative Calendar.
Echoes, Echoes...
6 June, 2010Re-Reading an old favourite is a dangerous thing. Sometimes you find it lacking, neglected, needing a good bucking up in orthodox Samaritan fashion. That's what I've done with this one. And I think I've improved it. And ol' Thomas Lux would be proud that I even cut out an 'echo' or two.
MAGNOLIA BLUES
Magnolia (a word you must caress
As you speak it, working around
The sounds like a clumsy first kiss)
Musky in the drowsy humidity,
And my boot-heels scuff the road again.
Finally the inferno is subsiding
And, wrapped in the rising heat,
His brown hands knuckled white,
An old man prays for rain.
A dog's bark echoes, echoes through
The hush of breezeless leaves:
Tonight the whole earth holds its breath.
The taut double-yellow line sags around
And out of sight, asphalt hot through
Holes in the bottoms of
my boots
Forgotten on the floor:
Empty bottles, smoke curling dreamy
Like her lazy, wicked smile.
Slow like the heat of dancing,
The windowfan
droning crickets,
And the western fire is dying so
Quietly. Down in the willow-darkness,
The branch barely
whispering
To wake me, her leg outside
The cool sheets, curled over me
Like a letter from some ancient
Alphabet, read in a
sun-warm kiss on
Parched lips: plumjuice running down
My stubbled chin. The Scorpion, heart pulsing,
swims in the lazy sway of Milky Way
And I walk, so alone, into Summer night
And her awkward magnolia embrace.