I am enjoying the conversation immensely, friends.
Here is sonnet #2 from Seven Sonnets through the Dark:
Nocte intempesta
(at dead of night)
“…therefore my spirit fails; my heart is numb within me…” Psalm 143
Had I never known You, this would be despair;
This blinded discalced march a beat apart
Through hollow ashen wind and foreign air,
Bleaching bones, dry-curing brain and heart.
Over fields of shattered glass I tread, I bleed,
Balancing burdens full with shallow breath;
Sorting shards to the small dry cellar of my need
Where I bear the silent shrouding of this death.
But in the hope that I once knew, I persevere
Through dark obliterating all sense of place,
Though barren roots of dread, distrust inhere
Because I can no longer see Your Face.
I trace my map in sand falteringly,
Gathering courage to walk out on the sea.
posted by KathrynTherese at 1:34 PM
6 Comments:
It seems, sometimes, that I've spent too long in that place of longing, but it is almost as if I've agreed to it somewhere along the way, so as to be forced into seeing Him in everyone and in everything. Maybe not so much because one needs the seein', but moreso because others need the lovin'? He asked for our perfection... what else shall one expect, if the Son of God Himself has asked it? His timetable is perfect in grace-building.
But what a beautiful, evocative poem, Lady K. :-) It puts one in mind of Purgatory.
"This blinded discalced march a beat apart"; well, what else could there possibly be to say, and yet there will be five more sonnets. Amazing line, Lady K.
I trudge along beside you through this harsh, dry desert into the darkness, kt, but why the shattered glass? Why the sorting of shards? Tell us about the glass...
You are a careful reader, Gabrielle, to wonder about the glass; you know that poets make every word count, every word meaningful.
The glass is all truth - whether the truth about myself (which would be negative; my sins and failures, my smallness and weakness) or the truth about God (which is, of course, positive) - which seems in this place to be "dis-integrated" or shattered. Every step is painful because reality is not yet integrated for the soul walking in the Dark Night. Every truth is becoming clear (so it is like glass) but the whole picture has not come into focus. Like pieces of an immense and complicated puzzle, they frustrate and irritate.
Still, we are trying to piece them together because of the desire to understand the whole picture, and our desire to know the whole truth. We have a "need" to comprehend, to see the value of all this, and so, the soul "sorts" the pieces and holds them in a safe place. As if keeping them for a time when the light will shine and all will be clear again.
There is a sense here that all this wasteland has purpose, and that at some point the soul will be able to make a leap out of the desert, or be lifted to a new place, and yet it cannot see the way. So the "map" is traced, falteringly, in sand - because we know that the route we chart will not be correct, that it is not worth preserving. We know instinctively that we must wait to be rescued, or wait for a guide or a sign, but we feel that we should be doing something.
The heart is filled with an aching, an emptiness, a longing; and yet a part of us is overflowing with thoughts and feelings that we are not sure we should hold on to or jettison - so we balance these burdens (later we will know with certainty that we need to let go entirely of ourselves, our pasts, our agendas, even our desires for good, in order to be freed to embrace the Nothing that is ALL, but at this point, we are still afraid to let go, and so we have an unnecessary and almost ridiculous burden that we balance within us carefully, lest we lose any of it).
Whew.
There's more, but that's a mouthful for now!
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That is very interesting, kt, the glass representing truth. I was thinking of the fields of shattered glass more in the sense of our woundedness, and perhaps wounds we have caused others, and the sorting of the shards as a way of separating which wounds we were able to give up and which wounds we were still clinging to, because we were not yet fully healed. But I see the "glass", that is, the "truth", in what you are saying about the "whole picture"; thank you for this detailed explanation.
The glass CAN be woundedness, inasmuch as that is part of the truth. There is something consoling about being in touch with Truth, even if it is the truth about our own sinfulness. The point of the glass is that ever facet of truth is painful here, because here at last we are beginning to see things AS THEY ARE. In Truth. And we are not really able to handle it yet. It is painful to us.
And we are still at the point where we think it is up to us to think it all through and figure it out, so we are busy sorting and trying to understand. Later we will let go of our need to understand and we will forget about sorting, because everything will at last be simplified for us. We are dying to our old ways of knowing and thinking and praying ("the silent shrouding of this death") and will at last be reborn... but that's at dawn ;-)
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