Christian poets: John Donne: Holy Sonnets 14

14

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, 

Labor to 'admit You, but O, 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 I 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.

     Donne begins this poem by making a strange appeal to God -- "Batter my heart". This is a far cry from our most common requests -- calm my heart, mend my heart, or keep my heart. To batter is to break down and destroy; to grind down to oblivion. It means that what the heart treasures most may very well be subjected to severe suffering and loss.

     I think that crafting a poem is very like creating a sculpture. One must carve with language to create not just a picture, but a thing. So, with this first word, "batter," Donne begins to chisel away at his thesis -- God must first work within our hearts to destroy the negative effects of sin before he can begin to work on rebuilding us into the likeness of his son. Philippians 2:13 reminds us that "it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." God is performing a great remodeling project in our hearts, but first he must demolish the old and clear out the space before he can install the new and eternal.

     Donne appeals to Triune God ("three-personed God") to do this work within us. The verbs he chooses in the lines that follow illustrate the Trinity's individual efforts  as well as God's collective work. The Son knocks, the Spirit breathes, the Father shines. God begins to enact his plan to mend the fallen soul. His power then breaks sin's hold as Christ was broken for us, blows away our faults by the wind of the Spirit, and burns away the dross of our lives by the Father's refiner's fire -- all this to make us new. At last, the old is gone, the new has come. (2Cor. 5:17)

     Certainly our own resources are not equal to this task. Reason (correct thinking and the knowledge gained through learning) would seem to be able to affect change, but it cannot. It too is captive to sin and proves weak or unfaithful. Our best laid plans so often go wrong when we do not surrender to the wise and worthwhile plans of God to mold us into Christ likeness.

     Finally, Donne reminds us that the greatest desire of man's heart is to be loved by God: "Yet dearly' I love you and would be loved fain." But sin, whether we realize it or not, acts as a barrier to that love. In fact, we are engaged to it; our broken will has been unwittingly surrendered to a false lover. We must be divorced from sin so that we may be married to Christ. And in this love resides one of the great paradoxes of Christianity -- we are bound to Christ in love, which sets us free to love. We are only made pure by partaking of his true romance. The sculpture (but, in reality, the persons) God has formed us into comprise our new identity as his bride the church, which he has loved, renewed and redeemed "so that he might present the church to himself in splendor..." (Ephesians 5:27, ESV) In light of this glorious goal, may we (with Donne) humbly pray that we may be brought low. 

Christian Poets: John Donne, Holy Sonnets I

I

Thou hast made me,and shall thy work decay?

Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;

I run to death, and death meets me as fast, 

And all my pleasures are like yesterday.

I dare not move my dim eyes any way, 

Despair behind, and death before doth cast

Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste

By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.

Only thou art above, and when towards thee 

By thy leave I can look, I rise again; 

But our old subtle foe so tempteth me

The not one hour myself I can sustain.

Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art, 

And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

     John Donne (1572-1631) is known for his love poems; first, for his poems about his love for women, and second, for his poems about God's love for him. The poem above is from those collected after his death in the volume Divine Poems, and is the first of the 19 Holy Sonnets. These poems address the universal questions of life and death, creation and decay, significance and loss. Eternal life is contrasted against mortal brevity; human pain against the joy that never ends.

     Donne begins by asking a question about mortality: Does what God has made (particularly in the case of humanity) ever truly pass away? It seems as if anything God has formed with his hands should innately have an eternal quality about it, coming as it does from the Father of Lights. Mankind was given the breath of life on the day of his creation, and this breath will never cease to be. In Ecclesiastes, the Teacher reminds us that God has "set eternity in our hearts." Our souls will never die, but our physical bodies are quite another story. We are on a collision course with death.

     But, even so, we have a bigger problem: because of sin, our souls have already died and we cannot, in or by our mortal life affect its repair. Only God, through the power of what St. Augustine called the "first resurrection" can give our souls the life they lost so long ago. As for the body, Paul writes, "What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable." Yet Donne finds, as we all do, that the impact of sin, though forgiven, still lingers, and is subject to Satan's subtle temptations. On our own, he laments, we cannot sustain a holy life for even one small hour.

     Yet here it is that God's great movement of grace, as strong as that cosmic force of magnetism, flows from him into the feebleness of our lives. His grace is strong enough to overthrow evil powers and influences. His grace causes us to cling to him because he has bound himself to us. But in the church today we have co-opted a faded view of this grace. The word is tossed about like a tennis ball, the universal answer to every problem, physical and spiritual. Grace is being worn at the edges and its true meaning and power are fading even in its over familiarity. 

     We must, therefore, heed Donne's lesson -- never make grace into something less than what it is, something spread in a general and whimsical way over the Christian landscape.We must fly on the wings of the Holy Spirit to the place where we may receive and understand the truth of grace for what it truly is -- the power and presence of God that covers all our sin. There, grace never lets us go; it binds us to the heart of God by a power that eradicates our sin and raises both body and soul from death's decay. 

Holy Sonnet I, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry

  

Apologetics 101-1: Does God exist?

     Since this is a blog about Christian apologetics, I have decided to write some posts about basic apologetic questions. Every good apologist needs to be able to respond to these types of questions; yet for people like me who have been steeped in the faith since birth, we rarely stop to consider these types of arguments. We assume, instinctively, certain fundamentals of the faith -- "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all" -- as Paul describes it. So I shall try to reason through some things which I find easier to assume.
     This first question -- does God exist? -- is particularly hard for the "life-long" Christian to address. After all, the knowledge of God has been a fundamental truth upon which our lives have been built. His existence has always been a part of our existence. We not only believe in God, but we have come to know him as well. To lose God, to enter a plane of being where God is absent would be incomprehensible. It's hard to imagine any life or any form of thought that excludes God. This makes it very difficult to address this question, for it is so foreign, so irrelevant to the thinking we have always known. Consequently, former atheists may be the ones to give better arguments for God's existence. They had to seek, and learned much along the way; we can only imagine their journey.
      The first thing that comes to my mind about this question is simply that the question is raised. Why are we asking the question in the first place? We do not (as those of normal temperament) ask if non-existent things exist. There is no reason to pose the question. For example, no one asks if,say, "oblonobos" exist. (Hopefully, this is a word I made up and not a real thing in another language! If it is, just bear with me.) The non-existence of oblonobos prevents us from spending our valuable time wondering if they're real. We ask existence questions about things that have proposed existence.
     Now, we may raise the question of whether or not certain imaginary things exist; for instance, we may inquire as to the existence of fairies. As children we are particularly able to frame such questions, for our imaginations are still pure and much of the realities of the world have yet to be sorted through. In our young imaginations, fairies dance among the flowers and hide in the grass; not to believe in them would rob us of a once in a lifetime wonder.The real question is: do fairies exist in flesh and blood reality? Is their reality of the same substance as mine? Things like fairies have a type of reality that enriches our imaginations, and this is necessary for a full life, but they do not have anything that is really real, no substance that possesses a life of its own.
     It follows, then, that the question of God's existence may be similar -- does God merely exist in the imagination? But right away we are confronted with the fact that the question of God's existence is universal, timeless and life-long. Practically everyone, everywhere and in all stages of life has asked this question. Are we all under some kind of universal illusion, as some philosophies suggest? Or, is there something that universally links us to God -- our very existence, perhaps? Solomon, the Teacher, exhorts us to "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth," implying that the existence of the Creator-God is something that was once known, but is prone to be forgotten, ignored or even lost. We were made by him, but our sin has driven us from his presence. The veil is drawn; we wonder if God was ever there at all.
     Hebrews 11:6 gives us a concise statement of how the question of God's existence is best addressed: "...anyone who comes to [God] must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." First, we must make the effort to "come" to God. One must ask the question and sincerely seek the answer. Jesus said that those who seek will find, and this verse reminds us that an earnest search will be rewarded. Next, one must believe. The knowledge of God comes through faith, not observation. We do not collect the facts about God and see if they add up logically. Furthermore, faith is not a feeling; it is granted by God as "substance" and "evidence" of spiritual realities. (Heb. 11:1, KJV) And finally, the results of this search will be sound and substantial because we will be rewarded with confidence in what we have found, the connection with our Creator-God.  
     But the burden of proof for seeing or finding God does not rest entirely upon us. God had not kept his existence hidden; he has revealed himself or made himself known. The first verses of Hebrews tell us: "In the past God spoke...through the prophets...in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son..." There would be no knowing God without his efforts to make himself known through Scripture and in Jesus Christ. So here we are given instructions for where to direct our search. We must study God's Word and attend to the teachings of the Saviour. (Nature also bears witness to God's existence, if one is willing to acknowledge his handiwork. Heb. 11:3)The Holy Spirit, whose mission is to reveal God's truth, will be faithful to open our eyes to the reality of God.
     Ages ago, the Old Testament saint, Job, responded to God's revelation by exclaiming, "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." He had discovered God in the glory of Creation and the agony of suffering. In both, God's great grace had shone into his life. His response was humble; he saw how he was nothing compared to the infinity of God's greatness, and this knowledge was rewarded with blessings from God. And the results are the same with all who come to seek for God on the pathways of revelation -- we are found, and God forever becomes our everlasting and true friend.

Nature seeks the supernatural

     In his book, The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton makes an interesting comment, almost as an aside: "Nature is always looking for the supernatural." And so it is; therefore, a concise statement such as this is easy to brush over. But, like so much of Chesterton, upon closer examination, this little phrase gives us much to think about and, when comprehended, is able to rock the very foundations of conventional thought about nature and its connection to God. (For most think that nature stands alone, unknowing, and even Christians think that nature stand aside, unneeded.)
     My first thought was admittedly a bit mundane -- "that's how God feeds the animals." Psalm 104 teaches us that God is the almighty caregiver to all of nature; he provides water for plants, plants and water for birds, fish and animals. "These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things." (v. 27,28) Nature is not conscious of God's person, as we are, but it operates under his presence, ever sustained by his rule. Because it was not blinded by sin, nature unrelentingly gazes upon its Creator; yet the veil of our sin often blurs that view.
         Still, the beauty of nature reflects the glory of God through its steady gaze upon him. It points to the Creator and calls to us to look upwards as well. "I lift up my eyes to the hills -- where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth," affirms the Psalmist. The prophet Isaiah tells us that trees do not merely sway in the wind; they "clap their hands." Mountains and hills do not just rise majestically above the landscape; they "burst into song." Nature praises God unknowingly, for all that it is, and all that gives to us is wrapped up in the Creator's work within it. If you take him away, all of nature disappears; it cannot stand alone. Nature reflects God's purposes on a cosmic stage, as the dialogues in the book of Job reveal to us: Elihu says, "[God] brings the clouds to punish men, or to water his earth and show his love. Listen to this, Job; stop and consider God's wonders." (Job 37:13,14) Nature has not only a supernatural view, but a supernatural revelation as well.
        And mankind, God's own, created for fellowship with him, yet fallen into alienation and disobedience, also seeks (sometimes purposefully, often unknowingly) for God. Blaise Pascal wrote, "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled be any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." This hole in our hearts was formed by the destructive forces of sin that distance us from God and fill us with an undefinable despair. We try to fill this void with other things; either created things that we have twisted to fit our dark purposes, or fallen ideas that rise from the dregs of our troubled selves. Even when we see a connection to God in nature, we try to strip that away because we do not want to face God. Like Adam and Eve, we are still hiding in a beautiful, but shabby garden.
      Jesus alone is big enough and holy enough to fill the hole in our hearts. As he, by faith and with grace, enters in, he pushes aside the emptiness within our lifeless souls, and fill us with a glorious re-creation of life. Our nature now has not only sought but been found by the Supernatural. Jesus said, "But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." The gospel account adds that he said this to prophecy his death upon the Cross. A cross is a violation of nature; a tree that once rejoiced in the wind brutally twisted into a tool of destruction; a "cursed" thing as Paul said. But reaching high in hope and stretching wide with love, the Cross expands to fill all that we had lost. "But God forbid that I should glory," Paul declares, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." (Gal. 6:14, KJV) We only regain our vision of God and see his vision for us through the Cross, and in seeing this, we look away from the natural world to see the supernatural.
     But this is not the end of the story. As believers, we know that a great resolution is coming, the redemption of all things, in which "the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality." (1Cor. 15:53) Nature, faded and torn, looks wistfully for that day. An unwritten longing hangs over creation, a desire to be delivered from death and decay, to be formed at last as new in a new heaven and earth. And we, who also now look towards heaven by the gift of grace, may articulate what nature cannot say, "Even so come, Lord Jesus." Make us whole again, give us rest in you as our eyes look to you -- "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits...more than watchmen wait for the morning." (Ps. 130:5,6)    

Perspective

     On Sunday, we took a look at one of Chesterton's most well-known stories; "the Lamp Post", from his book, Heretics. In the introduction to The Everlasting Man, we encounter two more tales: "the boy who leaves home to find a giant" and "man meets horse." All of these stories are about perspective and how we see the world, especially how Christians should see the world or, as the Apostle John put it, the cosmos. ("The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." 1John 2:17)
     The main premise of The Everlasting Man is that the world, as well as many who claim to be Christians, do not see the Church correctly, and therefore do not understand it or follow it, because they are viewing it from the wrong perspective. He writes, "The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it." (p. 9) And to illustrate this he tells a little tale about a boy who leaves his family farm on the hillside in search of "something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant." Having traveled far and long, he turns around to catch one last glimpse of home, only to see a gigantic figure carved in the hillside above the farm. The traces of the giant had been with him all the time; he had been to close to them to see it. Chesterton is telling us that, in order to get a firm grip on what Christianity is and what it means, we must every so often step back from it and see it from a perspective that is far removed from it or what it has become. Then we well see the faith with a renewed clarity -- we will dive again into the wonder of all the things we have yet to know, learn and experience.
     To further illustrate this point, Chesterton remarks that perhaps we should look at Christianity from some sort of alien viewpoint, say, that of a "Confucian." He is so sufficiently different from a Christian that his line of thinking on our faith will open up new vistas of understanding for us; he will, quite innocently, help us to see the Cross, "towering over the wrecks of time." Several years ago, when I was teaching a high school Bible class, I had an experience that illustrates this perfectly. In an attempt to get my students to see Jesus as the unique person who he truly is, I showed them clips from the movie Godspell. The music from this work had greatly influenced me as at teenager, when it opened my eyes to the greater world of Christianity beyond my rigid Baptist upbringing. ("All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above -- So praise the Lord, Oh, praise the Lord, for all his love.) But when my students saw it, they laughed, nervously, really, because it was so unlike any  mundane Sunday School story of Jesus they had ever heard. They weren't ready to sing and dance and wear the colorful clothes of what redemption really is and to know the Christ who invites us into his unending joy.
      And herein lies Chesterton's most important point -- most of us are neither too close nor far enough way in our view of Christianity. We "...cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy... [we] live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith." (p. 10,11) Chesterton linked this to the theological controversies of his day, but this intermediate view, this preoccupation with minor persuasions, has dogged the Church from the beginning and follows us still. Everybody seems to have something fixate upon -- music, money, lifestyle choices, social issues, even the fundamental meaning of the fundamentals themselves. But to see the faith in the clear light of the Gospel, we must travel to a far-off point indeed, one that stands outside of this world, somewhere in the neither-land between here and Heaven.
      We should see this as a great, overwhelming vision of hope; a vision not unlike ancient man seeing a horse for the first time -- a great and powerful beast, looming above his head, yet inviting him to sit upon his back and go for a ride. As the cosmos presses in on us with ever-increasing intensity, we must with equal desire, as our Lord instructed us, "...lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." If we are looking towards heaven, or taking the view from heaven, we will see life in the proper perspective. To do so is to repossess the hope of Christianity, the certainty of the Kingdom that comes, a treasure "still as new as it is old." (p. 19)
 
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1993, 2008.  

No perfect families

     Someone has remarked that there are no "perfect" families mentioned  in the Bible. When my husband and I heard this, we immediately tried to come up with evidence to the contrary. Jesus' family must have been ideal -- after all, Jesus himself was a most illustrious member of it, and he is the most perfect person who ever lived! But, upon close examination of the text, we learn that his family lived in the backwaters of Israel (Nazareth), his mom and dad mistakenly took off for home and left him in the temple, and his brothers and sisters thought he was crazy and tried to do an intervention to keep him from spouting all that nonsense about God being his real father!
     We also thought of Noah and Mrs. Noah -- they stuck together through difficult and improbable circumstances, and Mrs. Noah heroically put up with her husband's boat-building hobby for all those years, and in the middle of the desert, for heaven's sake... And I thought of Isaiah and his wife (referred to as "the prophetess") who agreed to the crazy names he came up with for their sons -- "Shear-Jashub" and "Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz." (They don't get any better in English: "a remnant will return," and "quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil.")
     The Bible stories are littered with tales of imperfect, less than ideal families. We read about incest, polygamy, arguing, murder (in the very first family!), adultery, wayward children, sickness and sorrow. It seems that every family takes up a cross of some kind; the greatest being in the family of our Lord, for as the elderly sage Simon prophesied to Mary: "a sword will pierce through your own soul also." At the foot of the cross, newly adopted into the disciple John's household, she felt the sword of separation from her firstborn son, who was, at the same time, in the dark agony of separation from God, his Father.
     But, like so many things in the Bible, the point of the stories of imperfect families is not their brokenness, but their restoration, not their sin, but their salvation, not their failures, but their redemption. For Adam and Eve, it is baby Seth, the beginning of a long unbroken line to Christ, for Noah and his family, a second chance at life in this world, for Abraham and Sarah, a child so long-awaited, loved and unexpected that his birth resounds with joyful laughter. In every story, something comes along to wipe away the sorrow, even if it is only the promise of eternal life to come. Even in the story of Jesus's earthly family this rings true -- our last picture of them is found in Acts chapter 1-- "Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers" are gathered with his followers in the upper room, waiting for the Holy Spirit, who, as Jesus said, "will abide with you forever."
     Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from the Biblical families is that the child of Bethlehem, when born in our hearts, is the one who brings peace and hope into our chaotic lives. When we become a member of his family, we are born into an eternal oneness with him and partake in the blessed position of sonship with him. "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God!" -- John writes with joyful pride. He will never abandon us, or make an unwise decision about our lives, or think of anything else as being of greater importance than his relationship with us. As children of God, we have truly found a forever home.
      And during those dark times, when we look at our own families and despair, for many and complex reasons, we must bear in mind that "there is one God and Father of us all" who "works in all things for our good." He is, in his own and perfect way, working in each life, in each family, with an eternal purpose in mind, for a time when we will all be related and living in true relationship. There is no better description of Heaven than "home," because it illustrates to the fullest degree how God will take the broken, disconnected things of this life and make them perfectly whole. Until then the greatest work of love we can do for our families is to be redemptive in our relationships; to take the things that go wrong and, by the power of God's love and grace, turn them into something touched by goodness, set free to love and be loved.

Essence and Existence

     Question 3 of Summa Theologica concerns "the simplicity of God." When we consider this question we are initially tempted to say (as we are of the Summa itself), "There's nothing simple about it!" That's because the medieval use of "simple" is different from today's usage. We think of simple as easy to grasp or understand, uncomplicated. They were thinking of oneness, or something that is a unity in itself. So, the question can be posed in terms of: "How is God one?" or, "How should we think about the oneness of God?"
     He starts out by telling us that we cannot so much as know what or who God is, as we can think of it in terms of what he is not. He addresses the questions of whether God has a body, or if God is made up of matter and form together. The answer to both is no -- God is not corporal, and he is not matter, for he created it. He has a unique form, his essence; he is God and he is godly.
     The question I am looking at here is (paraphrased): Are "essence" and "existence" the same thing in Who God is? Earlier, St. Thomas Aquinas has told us that God's essence and existence are the same thing, and we know this by his effects. For example, God is good to us (effect) because God is (existence) good (essence). Now he wants of dive deeper into why essence and existence are the same for God. I don't know if I've got all my ducks lined up in a row here; just think of it has mental gymnastics, and I probably won't get a 10. But these things are challenging to think about, and we all need to be challenged!
      An objection of his to this is: God exists, but that is separate from what he is. Today, we are prone to separate the fact that God exists from his characteristics. We think more in terms of  "God loves" than "God is love". God's very existence is viewed as just another of his traits. But that does not impress upon us the oneness of God. Although it is hard for us to do, we must think of God in greater terms than just what he does or what he is like. As God said to Isaiah, "I am the Lord, that is my name." (Isa.42:8) In response to this objection he gives a quote from St. Hilary, who opposed the Arian heresy in the 300's. "In God existence is not an accidental (non-substantial) quality, but subsisting truth." St. Thomas adds, "Therefore what subsists in God is his existence." St. Thomas then gives us 3 "proofs" for this concept.
     1. In the case of things or people, existence is different from essence because it is either caused by an outside agent or it is an element of one's overall make-up. (The existence of heat is caused by fire; laughter is a part of humanness, he explains.) But, God is the First Cause of all existence outside of himself -- he is uncaused -- he simply is.
      2. Existence makes things real, or, to use St. Thomas' word, "actual." Things are said to be real because they exist. Essence (the qualities of a thing) are part of its reality. If something that has essence is real, it must exist. (Apolo, my dog exists because he is a real dog. His doggyness is part of his reality. Apolo's doggyness is real (proven by his smell!), so he must exist!) In the world of things and people, existence can be real in a particular way (actual) or subject to change (potential). (Apolo is a certain age today, but he will get older.) But God, because his existence is (as in his name I AM), does not change; his reality is always constant.
     3. Something (X) that is not something else (Y) may participate in (share in, be involved in) the something else (X in Y). But the existences are separate. A frog is in the water and it is wet, but the frog exists separate from the water. Also, the essences of a frog and water are different. But the water has an effect on the frog; it makes him wet. But God does not participate in anything else. He is singular, he is one, he is the beginning and the end, he is all in all.
     So, God is God Who exists. Simple, but incomprehensible...