Anniversary

April 18, 2011 was a Monday. The Monday of Holy Week, as a matter of fact.

I had spent the weekend preoccupied with a Tenebrae liturgy that was about to go into evening rehearsals. I had a text to revise, music to finalize, and powerpoint slides to complete. I also had a doctor’s appointment that Monday, to which I honestly gave barely a thought.

I was 50 years old then and, as per protocol, earlier in the year had endured a complete physical. My primary caregiver was concerned that my PSA level was slightly elevated. “Not particularly high,” she said reassured me, “but enough so we’d better check it out.”

What a pain in the neck! A subsequent visit to the urologist concluded with a recommendation to have a biopsy, just to be on the safe side, a procedure that in and of itself came with some discomfort and risk.

Sigh.  Back to my doctor. “You should have the procedure,” she said, “if it’s my brother, my dad, I would say have the biopsy.”  Okay, fine.  Swearing to myself that I would never have a complete physical again as long as I lived, I scheduled the biopsy.

At no point during this weeks-long process was I ever particularly concerned. I knew what we were testing for, but cancer was something that happened to other people. The elevated PSA aside, I had just received the proverbial clean bill of health. I felt great. And prostate cancer? Gimme a break.  That’s an old man’s disease.

I waited impatiently in a small, nondescript exam room, like millions of them across the planet. We’ve all seen them, all occupied them. All received good news in them . . . and bad.

“Unfortunately, we found a little bit of cancer, but I think we caught it in time. I’m going to recommend surgery, probably robotic as the least invasive way to do it.” 

And just like that my life changed.

An avalanche of questions: Are you sure the results are accurate? What do we do now? What are the treatment options? How do we tell the kids? Who else should know?

Why had God done this to me?

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together, and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

“Praying,” by Mary Oliver

Later that same week, I participated in the overnight vigil with Our Lord. As I walked into the church at 5 AM on Friday morning, the world felt sullen, dark, and silent. I spent sixty minutes in a small room, candlelit, filled with the fragrance of Easter Lilies. I tried to patch together a few words. I listened for a voice that never came.

When I left an hour later, though, birdsong filled the air. Though I continued to struggle—for years—with my grief and anger, here I heard the voice I was hoping for. As I stood on Hayes Road watching the darkness fade into light, I took the first tiny step toward Oliver’s “doorway / into thanks.”

Whatever I would experience in the time to come (and on that naïve morning I had no clue what lay ahead), I would not go through it by myself.

During the five years since, I have been many things, but I have never been alone. My wife, my children, the incomparable community of Church of the Holy Family, readers of my book, doctors, counselors, and colleagues have helped me learn to live with this “little bit of cancer.” To you all, I am grateful beyond words.

April 18, 2014 was a Friday. Good Friday, as a matter of fact.  Early that afternoon, I finished the first complete draft of I Pray in Poems.  Here is some of what I drafted for that last chapter:

“These poems teach us that spirits soar when we refuse to be nailed back down into our finite existence, our inevitable fears and failings, or by the heaviness, sickness, and disease inherent in our material bodies. Flawed, faulty, and fallen, we have yet the capacity to love, and we cherish hope. Over and over in these poems we see these qualities represented by upward movement, images of daybreak, by new life and rebirth.  Even in our darkest moments of bitterness or despair, our poets remind us that we have reason to rejoice and assure us that miracles are common things. Expect them . . . like Noah.  Go forth.  Seek them out.”

Whatever painful anniversary you might mark, I pray it carries with it also some reminder of joy or blessings.  Some reason to rejoice and to go forth.  Cherish hope.  Seek out your miracles.

Forthcoming . . . .

For the last few weeks, I’ve been editing the page proofs for I pray in poems.  As I complete that task today, I offer this publicity snippet from the publisher’s website:

“I pray in poems is a journey, a spiritual walk from Advent 1 to Easter Week. Along the way, readers make twenty stops, exploring great works of art written by poets ranging from William Shakespeare, John Donne, and George Herbert to Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and Rumi. Waiting at these stops are also St. Paul, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, and the authors of the Gospels. As readers travel with the author through the gloomy twilight of Advent to the starburst of Epiphany, from the silent terror of a stone-cold tomb to the joyful cry of Easter, he also shares moments of personal struggle with anger, fear, and loss in the wake of a difficult diagnosis. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that Dave Worster “enlivens our lives as Christians by helping us see what we otherwise might miss . . . . By slowing us down, we can see through his expositions of these poems that God is in the details.” Ultimately, Worster’s meditations reveal how the words of the poets and the Word of God combine to transcend material suffering and offer hope for the life to come.”

And here’s a sneak preview of the poems in the book and how they are organized:

Introduction: “Sonnet 15” by William Shakespeare
Reading Poetry: “Advent” by Rae Armantrout
Advent 1: “The Collar” by George Herbert
Advent 2: “Sonnet 29” by William Shakespeare
The Rose Candle: “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims
Advent 4: “Making the House Ready for the Lord” by Mary Oliver
Christmas Eve: “The Oxen” by Thomas Hardy
Christmas: “Bezhetsk” by Anna Akhmatova
Epiphany 1: “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot
Epiphany 2: “Such Singing in the Wild Branches” by Mary Oliver
Ash Wednesday: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lent 1: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Lent 2: “Holy Sonnet 14” by John Donne
Lent 3: “A prayer that will be answered” by Anna Kamienska
Palm Sunday: “The Donkey” by G. K. Chesterton
Maundy Thursday: “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Good Friday: “The Scattered Congregation” by Tomas Transtromer
Easter: “Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond” by Mary Oliver
Easter Week: “These spiritual windowshoppers” by Rumi
and “I would love to kiss you” also by Rumi

Please feel free to share any of this information with your friends who love poetry, but also (maybe especially) with those who think they don’t!

Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29 and Temporary Amnesia

The following is an excerpt from an early draft of I pray in poems: Meditations on Poetry and Faith:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,                 line 4
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;                   line 8
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;   line 12
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

“Most sonnets written in the western tradition focus on a single subject in its myriad configurations: love. Often, the speaker (or persona) addresses or describes the beloved one, and the sonnet portrays or reveals something about their relationship. Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29 shows us the transformative power of love. Early in the poem, the persona dwells upon that which she thinks she lacks in her life, but then she remembers that she is in love (and is loved in return), and this recollection restores her sense of well-being.

During his lifetime, Anglicanism represented the official Church of England, but Shakespeare left behind no journals or other direct evidence to suggest what his personal religious beliefs may have been.  Even if he did hold personal religious views, few of his sonnets feature overtly religious, never mind Christian, themes or images.  So why Sonnet #29 for Advent?

Conventionally, we would interpret the person referred to in line 10 of the sonnet (“Haply I think on thee”) as . . . well, a person, the love object of the persona who, in this case, loves the persona right back (not always the case, alas).  But what if we read line 10 as a reference to God?  Nothing in the poem requires this interpretation, but nothing explicitly forbids it, either.  For me, a context of hymns and heaven creates a space within which this interpretation does not violate the sonnet and actually transforms it in meaningful ways.  For instance, in this context the word “disgrace” in line 1 suggests a state of “dis-grace,” out of relationship with God, a spiritual alienation that creates a different understanding of the “deaf heaven” referenced just a couple of lines later.

The sonnet is a prayer, a cry to a heaven the persona thinks deaf to her bootless cries for relief from loneliness and despair. As we move into the second quatrain, note how the persona seems firmly mired in a sense of her existence as oriented horizontally. We can easily imagine her sullenly peering about on all sides, feeling surrounded by others whom she perceives as better looking or more popular or smarter, and wishing she were more like them. Her jealousy desires that person’s good health, this person’s beauty, that man’s circle of friends, and this woman’s artistic abilities.

. . . A hint of the epiphany to come lies in line 8: “With what I most enjoy contented least.” The line concludes the speaker’s litany of dis-possession while it simultaneously, albeit very subtly, indicates that the persona does indeed have something in her life that is usually a source of joy. The next line further foreshadows a person poised for a change of heart: “In these thoughts myself almost despising” indicates that she hasn’t gone quite far enough in her self-loathing to be beyond redemption, a redemption she recalls as her veil of self-pity and ingratitude finally falls away.

The most dramatic moment of the poem occurs in line 11, as the persona remembers her beloved, and then her state of mind, like a lark, soars upward through the sky in order to sing hymns of gratitude before the gates of heaven. The movement or orientation of the poem shifts startlingly in this line from sullen horizontal glares to exultant vertical flight. Note that line 11 is the only line not end-stopped (it does not conclude with a comma, period, or semi-colon. This lack of terminal punctuation is called enjambment.).  Her joy so overwhelms the persona that she cannot contain herself within the structure of expression.  Her emotion must overflow freely, like a cup running over.

. . . One of the key words in the sonnet is “remembered” in line 13, “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings.” The absolutely key point here: Love has not gone anywhere.   It has been there for the asking all along, the persona has just lost sight of it as she stumbled about in her fog of self-pity. If I were to state a concise theme for the sonnet, “transformative love” presents an obvious choice, but one could also do much worse than “temporary amnesia.”

How easily we might condescend to the persona of the poem: what a dolt!  How can she forget a love that so thoroughly transforms her state of mind later in the sonnet?  But we also might try to see ourselves in her. I know I do.  As I have struggled with my health-related issues in recent years, I have sometimes looked upon myself and cursed my fate.  I have perceived others as “more rich in hope,” and I have wished myself more like them.  And then, perchance, I look up at some pictures I’ve hung on the wall of my office.  My wedding day.  My two children. A recent trip to San Francisco.

And so I remember. Remember how blessed I am, how loved I am by my family, friends, and God.  We all occasionally dwell upon the perceived injustices of our lives. We harbor jealousies and discontents that imprison us in the same place where the persona finds herself at the beginning of this sonnet.  So we need our weekly reminder, echoed in line 13, of a love that directs us to dwell instead in the hope and promise of Advent: “Do this for the remembrance of me.” Amidst December’s rampant materialism, do not let temporary amnesia take hold.  Remember what we wait for.”

 

I pray in poems: Meditations on Poetry and Faith

Good morning and Happy Advent!  I write this morning to announce that the title of my forthcoming book has been slightly modified to:

I pray in poems: Meditations on Poetry and Faith.

I love this new title, and I’m getting really excited as the production process had begun to pick up steam!

In the meantime, several folks have asked me to share some background on how I generated the idea for the book, and so I offer the following excerpt from the first draft of the Foreword: 

“In Fall 2013, some good folks at my parish, the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, invited me to give a couple of talks about poetry with themes appropriate for Advent. So I chose some poems, wrote up discussion topics for each, and distributed all the material to the participants in advance. We gathered on the appointed Sundays, and near the end of the conversation about each poem, I threw in a relevant Bible verse.  This strategy invariably precipitated additional layered discussion about the poem’s beauty and meaning.

These sessions were quite wonderful, a combination of brief “professorial” remarks, lively layperson insight, and spiritual meditation.  We filled our classroom to overflowing each time, and several kind participants expressed the hope that I would soon lead another series.  A year later I was asked to do so during Lent.  If anything, the Lenten sessions attracted even more people. Given the strength of the response in my own parish, I wondered if a wider audience might exist for a collection that consisted of meditations or reflections upon poetry and scripture placed side-by-side.  I pray in poems is the answer to that question.

The details above explain some of the choices I’ve made in the book; for instance, I’ve organized the poems according to the liturgical seasons of the year because of the idea’s origin in an Advent (and Lenten) discussion series. I have also included a set of discussion questions for each poem. I encourage brave church leadership to organize gatherings perhaps along the lines I describe above . . . . I hope, among other things, that this book will serve as a sort of “out of the box” resource for Christian Formation programmers. You have everything here you need to put together seasonal poetry offerings!  Yeah!

. . . to aid those folks who might be less familiar with some of the terminology of literary analysis, I’ve pulled together a list of poetic terms and placed it near the end of the book. I’ve kept it short, including only terms I felt necessary for understanding and appreciating the poems in this volume.  Finally, I include an early chapter sharing some tips for reading poetry.  Again, I’ve endeavored to keep it brief and accessible . . . .

Yet I also hope that I pray in poems will become more than just a set of resource materials. Much study, prayer, and conversation have gone into each meditation. A teacher and student of poetry, I know that some of the observations I’ve made are original and unique, products of the unusual approach I’ve adopted of exploring each poem through a spiritual lens, even those works that seem resolutely secular. To explore the theme of resurrection through the chiasmic structure of Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond or to interpret Those Winter Sundays as a poem about foot-washing is to enter new interpretive territory, so I hope that all readers and lovers of poetry will find something to excite and inspire in the three or four pages of analytical reflection I’ve written for each work . . . .”

If you have any more questions about the book, I’d be happy to answer them. Leave a reply here on the website or contact me directly at dwworster@aol.com.

Next: some Advent poetry!