One
I have been thinking lately about what it means to
be religious. Particularly, does being a religious
person require a religious temperament? Let's say it
does. How does one come to possess such a temperament?
Or, is one possessed by it?
Moreover, is a religious temperament
a gift of God's grace, as those of us who hang around
Presbyterian churches might tend to argue—if
we wanted to argue about this at all? Or, is it, as
some others have suggested, in our natures, and in
the natures of some and not of others? In short, it's
in our genes that we are religious. Or, it's not; and
we're not. (For more on this, see the conversation
at Theologic
Al's: July
9 and July
11.
Two
Ernest Dowson's name is not one
you are likely to know, if you haven't done graduate
work in English and had to learn at least his most
famous poem, Non
sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae in case
it came up in a qualifying exam — the title,
which comes from Horace, is translated "I am not
now what I was under the rule of the good Cynara" — or
unless you're such a student of Blake Edwards' films
that you know The Days of Wine and Roses comes
from another Dowson poem with a Latin title, Vitae
summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam ("Life's
short span forbids we encourage enduring hope"):
They are not long, the weeping
and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion
in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of
wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges
for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
The 1962 movie, more of you will remember, was about
alcoholism about which Dowson knew at least as much as
either of the main characters.
Three
In addition to being a drunkard, Dowson was a Roman
Catholic, and he wrote a number of quite good religious
poems, the best and probably most-anthologized of which
actually has an English title, "Nuns of the Perpetual
Adoration." It's worth talking about here, not
only because in it the image of fading roses returns,
but because it gives one version of what it means to
have a religious temperament. The poem begins
Calm, sad, secure; behind high
convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp,
these watch and pray
And it is one with them when
evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of
day.
It is all one, because they pay no attention to time,
as the world understands time. In fact, they pay no
attention to the world at all, because it is "wild
and passionate," and they have "put away
desire." They have put away vanity. They have
put away danger. So, they are, the last verse repeats, "Calm,
sad, secure"
. . . . with faces worn and
mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea!
for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But, there, beside
the altar, there, is rest.
Four
I went chasing after Dowson,
as Ecclesiastes goes chasing after the wind, in part
because, when I emailed Janet Hilley, saying I had
no idea what I was going to write for this issue, she
emailed back, "I
hear you are a wonderful poet…. if you don't have
anything else in mind how about [a] poem or two?" I
am not "a wonderful poet," so that didn't
sound like such a great idea. At the same time, I am human
and thought right away of a poem I'd written some time
ago, also, or so I'd thought, about "religious temperament." It's
called, "Winter, Late."
The men and beasts of the zodiac
order our births and our deaths,
dance in a ring around
our years.
We toast one friend grown older.
Sing
from the bottom of our glasses,
song after song to
his thin piano.
Louder and louder.
The moon
halts, stops
her ears,
and a neighbor sends
a policeman.
We send
him back
with an invitation to join us.
We
say to the policeman,
You come, too.
Come out of the cold.
Bring
wine, more voices.
It doesn't do to explain a poem,
at least not too far; but this one clearly takes a
different view from that of Dowson's nuns. It is set
in the world of wine and laughter, of song and dance,
of a party. It is indeed, an invitation to the irate
neighbor and the policeman — and the
reader — to
join the festivities, which I imagined as a (very)
modest version of the great heavenly banquet that will
invite people from north and south and east and west
to sit, and eat and drink and sing, at God's
table, maybe even to dance around it.
If that's what it means to be religious. Though maybe
it's not.
Rick Dietrich is the Pastor of First Presbyterian
Church, Stranton, VA.
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