On one hand he [William Blake] spoke of the "priests in black gowns who were going their rounds binding with briars my joys and desires." And yet on the other hand he detested Voltaire and Rousseau and everybody like them and everything that they stood for, and he abominated all materialistic deism, and all the polite, abstract natural religions of the eighteenth century, the agnosticism of the nineteenth and, in fact, most of the common attitudes of our day.
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red-Sea shore
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright . . .
I was absolutely incapable for reconciling, in my mind, two things that seemed contrary. Blake was a revolutionary, and yet he detested the greatest and most typical revolutionaries of his time, and declared himself opposed without compromise to people who, as I thought, seemed to exemplify some of his own most characteristic ideals.
How incapable I was of understanding anything like the ideals of a William Blake! How could I possibly realize that his rebellion, for all its strange heterodoxies, was fundamentally the rebellion of the saints. It was the rebellion of the lover of the living God, the rebellion of one whose desire of God was so intense and irresistible that it condemned, with all its might, all the hypocrisy and petty sensuality and skepticism and materialism which cold and trivial minds set up as unpassable barriers between God and the souls of men.
Merton envisions William Blake as a quasi-saint--a person so in love with God that he rejected everything that stood between humans and the Almighty. All the things that the greatest thinkers of his time embraced. Sensuality. Skepticism. Materialism. Blake was the poetic equivalent of John the Baptist, calling out in his desert voice, "Prepare ye the way!"
I will say that I have never thought of Blake as a strong a believer in a Supreme Being. My version of Blake was of a man who was trying to create his own mythology, his own God--Urizen, a bearded old man who is the architect of confinement, holding humanity back with conventional laws and wisdom. Blake was great artist. An interesting, possibly unbalanced poet.
Yet, here's Thomas Merton, one of the most influential Christian thinkers and writers of the twentieth century, basically canonizing William Blake. I sort of love it. I've always believed that poets are somehow more in tune with the divine. Aware of the glories of the universe, microscopic to macroscopic. Merton seems to be a validating this belief for me.
I spent this evening in the company of poets, and it brought some light into my soul. It was a reading that kicked off a new project--an anthology of poems and writing prompts from the monthly workshops I've been conducting since I was first selected Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula. Just sitting in that Zoom meeting, listening to the work of all these writers, moved me profoundly. It was a conversation of diverse poetic voices. A night of psalms.
These last few days, I've been posting about the darkness with which I've been struggling. Haven't been sleeping well. I've been focused a lot on places and people in my life where I seem to be failing miserably. It has been a long, tough 15-plus days, where I've thought of throwing in the towel a few times.
However, tonight my poet/prophet friends sort of reminded me of the immanence of grace in the universe, from the tiniest seashell to the redwoods of California. It's everywhere. Including those dark moments that border on despair. I am never without it. All I have to do is open my eyes and look around to find evidence of God in my life.
And for the miracle of this revelation, Saint Marty gives thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment