Poetry as a guide for advent...

A post from an old friend and colleague on Face Book included this quote that spoke volumes to me: "If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago, it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous. And so as a historian, I write poetry. I'm profoundly committed to art as the answer. Indeed, I don't put science really as the way I get to any of my answers; it's just helpful. It's poetry that I look to. It's the clatter of recognition. Everybody has different ways, but I attest that poetry works pretty well."

The author is poet and historian, Jeniffer Michael Hecht, (check her out at: http://www. poetryfoundation.org/bio/jennifer-michael-hecht), who has honed her gift into a tender celebration of human complexity.  With an ear tuned pitch perfect to our ordinary sorrows and celebrations, Hecht is simultaneously playful and profound.  One poem, "Love Explained," puts it like this: 

Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s
contractions are five minutes apart.
Doctor says, Is this her first child?
guy says, No, it’s her husband.
I promise to try to remember who
I am. Wife gets up on one elbow,

says, I wanted to get married.
It seemed a fulfillment of some

several things, a thing to be done.
Even the diamond ring was some

thing like a quest, a thing they
set you out to get and how insane

the quest is; how you have to turn
it every way before you can even

think to seek it; this metaphysical
refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d

have guessed? She sighs, I like
the predictability of two, I like

my pleasures fully expected,
when the expectation of them

grows patterned in its steady
surprise. I’ve got my sweet

and tumble pat. Here on earth,
I like to count upon a thing

like that. Thus explained
the woman in contractions

to her lover holding on
the telephone for the doctor

to recover from this strange
conversational turn. You say

you’re whom? It is a pleasure
to meet you. She rolls her
eyes, but he’d once asked her
Am I your first lover? and she’d
said, Could be. Your face looks
familiar.

It’s the same type of
generative error. The grammar
of the spoken word will flip, let alone

the written, until something new is
in us, and in our conversation.

This patience - this commitment to honoring contradictions - this willingness to look beyond the obvious in part of what Fr. Richard Rohr calls "living in the present." He writes: "Non-dual thinking is a way of seeing that refuses to eliminate the negative, the problematic, the threatening parts of everything."

Non-dual thinking does not divide the field of the naked now, but receives it all. This demands some degree of real detachment from the self. The non-dual/contemplative mind holds truth humbly, knowing that if it is true, it is its own best argument. Non-polarity thinking (if you prefer that phrase) teaches you how to hold creative tensions, how to live with paradox and contradictions, how not to run from mystery, and therefore how to practice what all religions teach as necessary: compassion, mercy, loving kindness, patience, forgiveness, and humility. You cannot really be present to the naked now except with some degree of non-dualistic seeing and thinking. Otherwise, you just write commentaries on everything, for or against.

As I pray about the emerging political chaos in Egypt, the paradox of political and spiritual authority (see the NY Times column by David Brooks (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/ opinion/brooks-why-we-love-politics.html), the challenges to peace in Palestine and Israel and the reality of life-threatening inequality in my own nation, it is essential for me to hold all of this together as parts of the whole.  Rohr goes on to suggest that those who follow Jesus - not worship him but follow him - enter into a way of living that changes our minds and hearts.  The way of Jesus invites us to be connected to the living and the dead - the Father and the Son by the Spirit - all at the same time.  And in this, we practice embracing the totality rather than merely "writing commentaries on everything" and taking one side or another.

The dualistic mind gives us sanity and safety, and that is good enough. But to address our religious and social problems in any creative or finally helpful way, we also need something more, something bigger, and something much better. We need “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), or a non-dual seeing of every moment, where both the obvious and the still-mysterious can exist side by side.

Such is part of my Advent commitment - to be a contemplative - who takes a "long, loving look at the real" and lets it nourish and change me.