Between the warrior and the monk (iii): poetry and sacrament

May 25th, 2012 by Charles Cameron

On Maundy Thursday, in the Liturgy of the Catholic Church, when the Mass of the day is ended, the priest takes a towel and girds himself with it; he takes a basin in his hands, and kneeling in front of those who have been chosen, he washes their feet and wipes them, kissing them also one by one. So he takes, momentarily, the place of his Master. The centuries are swept away, the Upper Room in the stillness of the night is all around him: “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have knelt in the sanctuary of our lovely church in Rosettenville and washed the feet of African students, stooping to kiss them. In this also I have known the meaning of identification. The difficulty is to carry the truth out into Johannesberg, into South Africa, into the world.

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Posted in africa, Charles Cameron, christianity, justice, monasticism, poetry, sacrament, Uncategorized | 9 comments

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  1. ken cowan:

    May 25th, 2012 at 8:04 pm

    Ahh, I understand a little more, now. Thank you, friend, for the revelation.

  2. larrydunbar:

    May 25th, 2012 at 11:18 pm

    I really enjoyed the poem by Hopkins. I am glad you translated it, but when I was looking just at the words they seemed like one of those pictures that if you stare at it long enough a picture of a zebra or shark or something else appears. Maybe I have just been reading too much, but very interesting none the less. 

    *
    I am one of those persons who is able to easily read a sheet of paper where every word is miss-spelled except the first and last letters of each words are correct. Perhaps I am just looking at something that, while not miss-spelled, it isn’t configured normally. Still very strange to me.

    *
    Speaking of strange, at a time when things are strange for Catholics and Mormons, perhaps this is a timely set of postings. Thanks for sharing.  

  3. Charles Cameron:

    May 26th, 2012 at 12:28 am

    Thanks, Larry:
    .
    You’re right in my view, Hopkins’ meaning “isn’t configured normally” – I think of the meaning he wants to get across as like a garment in words — he’s walked out wearing it in sunshine and rain, it now holds the fragrances of wildflowers and cornfields, and maybe the odd thorn from a rose, too — and in writing it out as poetry he has indeed “reconfigured” it to squeeze out of it the maximum of musical and emotive power, all those scents and fragrances and burrs of memory and thorns of love and grief, twisting it ever tighter until it is far shorter and thicker than it began, like a garment twisted between his hands…
    .
    The final message is essentially in a kind of code, to be decoded, unpacked as meaning — but still carrying the intensity, the evocative power, of those scents and thorns…
    .
    I don’t know if those words of mine will help, but I’d say to you, look closely, see how he has tightened his words to create his music — king, catch, dragon, draw, fishers, fire, flies, flame in the first line alone, then tumbled, rim, roundy, ring, string, well, tells, bell’s, hung, swung, tongue, fling … and we’re still in the first four lines… — and then he slams into a straightforward telling of his theme in the fifth — 
    .
    Each mortal thing does one thing and the same…
    .
    He’s playing with us, he wants us to see kingfishers flash by, dragonflies, to hear bells — all the while telling us that as mortals, we “selve” — we too, like the dragonflies, the bells, “do” who we “are”:
    .
    Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
     
     

  4. Marcus Ranum Ranum:

    May 26th, 2012 at 4:23 am

    It’s hard to square the rosy view of catholicism in Africa with the fact that the RCC is doing everything in its power (including lying about their effectiveness) to deny the AIDS-ridden continent with condoms. I realize that as a human organization, the church is inevitably going to be a mix of good and bad – but such a disgusting mix! I wonder that anyone with a working brain can associate themselves with it; it has utterly betrayed the principles Fr Trevor invested his life in upholding. What’s sad is that great men can still be great without that shabby umbrella, but they can’t realize that the goodness comes from themselves and not from some mystical dimension.

  5. Charles Cameron:

    May 26th, 2012 at 6:11 am

    Hi Marcus:
    .
    FWIW, Trevor was an Anglican (equivalent of US Episcopalian) monk, not RC.  But I don’t think that’s the point.  
    .
    The point as I see it is that he didn’t depend on any “umbrella” whether secular, religious, of the left or right, for his insight. He was actually reproved by the then Archbishop of Canterbury for “meddling in politics”.  What you call the “mystical dimension” was inside him, and it pushed him to push the limits of the world’s “umbrellas”.  Including the Christianity of his day.
    .
    That’s how it works. 

  6. Lexington Green:

    May 28th, 2012 at 7:55 pm

    I got the Kindle version of Nought for your Comfort.  It is on my phone now.  Not sure when I will get to it, though.

  7. Charles Cameron:

    May 28th, 2012 at 10:46 pm

    I’m glad, Lex — all things in due time.
    .
    Someone I follow on Twitter just posted a quote from Desmond Tutu that I wanted to bring here to tie Leah Farrall’s posts about not dehumanizing one’s enemy in with my two posts about Fr Trevor.  Asked what the word ubuntu means, Tutu replied:

    That we are interconnected. That when we dehumanize someone, whether you like it or not, in that process you are dehumanized. A person is a person through other persons. If we want to enhance our personhood, one of the best ways of doing it is enhancing the personhood of the other.

    When I went to check the quote for accuracy, though, I found Tutu describing his first meeting with Fr. Trevor — not by name, but in terms of his impact:

    Some mentors don’t even intend to or realize they have influenced others.
    .
    “Some things are caught not taught,” says the Archbishop, recalling when, as a nine-year-old boy, he saw a white priest tip his hat to Tutu’s domestic worker mother, a rare showing of respect in a country so racially divided. “Coming out of a situation where you are told, and this was official policy of a country, that you are inferior, it was important to have elders as role models—people who you didn’t know at the time were influencing you.”

    That’s Fr. Trevor through and through: influencing people almost unknowingly. And I suspect that’s “unknowingly” in the sense of the great Cloud of Unknowing.

  8. J. Scott Shipman:

    May 29th, 2012 at 12:55 am

    Good points, Charles. The much lauded book, Grand Strategies by Charles Hill makes the following point that reinforces the concepts you describe above:
    .

    “One of history’s great rhetorical events took place in 1550 in Valadolid, Spain; the debate between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda on whether American Indians were natural slaves of the Spanish. Las Cassa prevailed. His view based on Francisco de Vitoria’s treatise “On the Indies” and ratified by the University of Salamanca, determined that Native Americans had souls and were fellow humans, and that conquest of the New World was unjustified on its merits. The Conquistadors, as Las Casas portrayed them, were no better than cannibals. “I love the University of Salamanca,” said Johnson with great emotion to Boswell, “for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that it was not lawful.”

     [emphasis added]

  9. Charles Cameron:

    June 4th, 2012 at 8:49 pm

    Great quote, Scott.  I should have thanked you before. Thanks plus.