Whispers of Death

I was inspired tonight to make this poetic dialogue (read: mashup) between Whitman and Frost, about Death:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

(Whispers of Heavenly Death)

Whose woods these are I think I know.

Whispers of heavenly death, murmur’d I hear;   

Labial gossip of night—sibilant chorals;  

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here 

Footsteps gently ascending—mystical breezes, wafted soft and low;  

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

Ripples of unseen rivers—tides of a current, flowing, forever flowing;  
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?) 

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

I see, just see, skyward, great cloud-masses;  
Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing;  
With, at times, a half-dimm’d, sadden’d, far-off star,  
Appearing and disappearing.  

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

(Some parturition, rather—some solemn, immortal birth:  
On the frontiers, to eyes impenetrable,  

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

Some Soul is passing over.)

And miles to go before I sleep.

Between worlds

And he said to himself

in a sunken morning moon

between two pines,

between lost gold and lingering green:

I believe I will count up my worlds.

-from, "Between Worlds," by Carl Sandburg


Transitional times in our lives -- sunken morning moons -- what can we make of them?

As times of loss and leaving, they have the potential to bring deep pain, as well as new growth. They are also times in which we can take stock of what we do have, and ask ourselves if that is enough.

I'm reminded of a song at the Passover seder called "Dayeinu," a holiday event every Spring marking the exodus from Egypt. Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, means "crossing over." The purpose of the song is to affirm that had the transition of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom been harder with fewer blessings, it would have been enough.

The truth is that wandering for 40 years in the desert was often "not enough" for those wanting to reach the Promised Land. The subtext to the song is that "Dayeinu" is an ideal rather than a reality.

In ancient Egypt and Palestine, liminal places like doorways were considered spiritually powerful -- and were often inscribed with magical spells in order to protect the person walking through them. That might be the origin of the tradition of hanging the mezuzah, which is a parchment with verses from the book of Deuteronomy encased in a decorative covering and nailed to the doorposts of Jewish homes, synagogues and other buildings. For observant Jews, it is common to touch a mezuzah when walking into a house and then kiss the fingers that touched it as a way of increasing one's awareness of God's love.

Mezuzah at the Google office in Tel Aviv

A ritual verbal counting takes place on each of the 49 days between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot (the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai). Symbolically it is a time for self-reflection as well as semi-mourning to remember the plague that killed the students of Rabbi Akiva. As a transitional time in the calendar leading up to the monumental event of the giving of the Torah, it has an air of solemnity.

There may be an ancient anxiety in the tradition of counting the omer. It is as if to say... OK, we will count, but can we really count on anything?

Not confined to Judaism, in-between times like solstices, births and deaths are heavy with ritual and prayer in religious traditions because they are reminders of our vulnerability and that, as the Buddha said, "Everything is impermanent."  

Zen Buddhist masters try to get their students to become aware that there is nothing in this existence that one can rely on -- not even language, meaning or sanity. In such a context, with everything stripped away, what is enough?

Walt Whitman had an answer:

"That you are here." 

That may not satisfy a Zen Buddhist master, but I'll take it... for now. :)

God is on the journey, too.

I am lately interested in the confluence of architecture and religion (see earlier post). I want to explore how architecture can be used symbolically in constructing visual images of the journey to faith, or awakening. In this post, I will focus on the imagery of the castle in the mystical writings of St. Theresa of Avila.

St. Theresa of Avila, one of the pre-eminent religious figures of the 16th century, whose religious reforms forever altered the Christian monastic world, symbolized the soul and its journey to faith as a castle, with seven mansion-sized rooms. In the seventh room dwells the loving God. Her most famous work, The Interior Castle (1577), was intended to bring Christians closer to ultimate communion with God, and as St. Theresa described it, in His secret chamber. She writes,

"Let us imagine, as I said, that there are many rooms in this castle, of which some are above, some below, others at the side; in the centre, in the very midst of them all, is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse."

Her metaphor of the castle was arguably borrowed from Islamic and Jewish mystics writing in Spain during the "Convivencia" period a couple of centuries earlier -- when Islamic, Jewish and Christian artists informed culture and people lived in relative stability and conviviality. Here's a picture of a Moorish castle on the Costa del Sol in Southern Spain:

As a metaphor for both the soul and its journey, a stationary castle seems a little awkward, clunky even -- St. Theresa addresses this directly:

"Now let us return to our beautiful and charming castle and discover how to enter it. This appears incongruous: if this castle is the soul, clearly no one can have to enter it, for it is the person himself: one might as well tell some one to go into a room he is already in! There are, however, very different ways of being in this castle; many souls live in the courtyard of the building where the sentinels stand, neither caring to enter farther, nor to know who dwells in that most delightful place, what is in it and what rooms it contains."

The architecture of the castle, while accessible to any lover of God who enters its doors, makes only a private union possible. Unlike a cathedral with expansive nave to comfort and hold a mass of devotees, the castle walls and interior labyrinth of rooms make the process of seeking God a lonely one, and finding Him the most intimate experience ever. This intimacy is echoed in the words of 8th century female Sufi Islamic mystic poet Rabia al Basri,

"With my Beloved I alone have been,
When secrets tenderer than evening airs"

The Ineffable in His intimate dwelling place--an interior room of the castle of the soul--unlike the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, is accessible to those who have the courage to walk inside. It takes effort, though, to find him.

The elusive nature of God, for Saint Theresa, creates a delightful suffering for the soul on its journey. This "delicious pain," as she describes, causes her to be ever more fervent in finding that ultimate, lasting intimacy.  But it is there -- if not to be experienced in this lifetime, then in the eternal life.

From His castle, the human soul, God beckons as a lover to the one who journeys. According to St. Theresa, God isn't stationary in that castle, but also on His own journey. She writes, "The feeling remains that God is on the journey too." This reminds me of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself",

"Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."

I am sure that I would have hated to live in one of St. Theresa's reformed convents, having to go shoeless and perform strict austerities in order to meet her demands for getting closer to God. There is something, though, about her passion for seeking the love of the divine that is attractive to me. And, I love her for her willingness to walk through those castle doors.