From stately speeches to virgins, just leave it to me. Well, now, about those ten virgins and those full and empty lamps...hmmm. Oh, yeah, away from Freud and back to where I was headed. The parable of the ten virgins: I just take it for granted that anything located around Matthew 25 is going to be hard to understand. Becca says the parable is hard because the bridegroom clearly was running late (um, hum) and the women who'd waited out in the night so long just went to get some oil and then he slammed the door and then just dissed them: "I don't know you." Those are hard words, especially since they'd likely say, "Hey, don't you remember in 7th grade math how you copied your homework from me thirteen times?" or some such thing.

I think the parable is strange anyway, and I was glad to find someone else who feels it's a little noticeable that these are virgins and they're waiting for the bridegroom, it seems, as much as for any feast. I always thought in my younger days that it might be like a tale of an Arabian seraglio and what in fact might happen is that the bridegroom would choose one of them for his second wife. She of course would be the one that he loved, not that one he had to marry for political purposes. Oh, there I am, back to Freud after all, or to fantasy.

Well, what of those wise virgins? Are they being selfish not to share the oil? Seems to me they justify themselves pretty well: " if we give it to you, we'll all end up left out in the dark." They're saving the only lives they can save, perhaps.

Does this mean they have no compassion, that they never give up what they want for others? Does it mean they make every judgment in life according to what pleases them? I don't think it does. Yet It correlates with the way I read "The Journey" (see previous entry). There are simply some times in our lives that are so important, so crucial to not denying who we are, that we can't leave ourselves behind in order to try to save others. This is especially true when the effort is likely futile and the others may well pull us under with them. These are the "I have to" and the "I can't" times of our lives.

Once a counselor advised me to make two lists: one of all the reasons I should stay in a relationship and one of all the reasons I should leave. The "stay" list was really long; it included all the people who would be hurt or disappointed, including the other person in the relationship, as well as many other factors that were well worth thinking about. The "go" list was much shorter. I don't think I had the knowledge or insight at that point to even imagine what I might not become or what parts of myself I might lose if I stayed. But it had one entry that made all the difference. I didn't even have to wait for my counselor's agreement to know that it did. It was one line: "I can't stay." Somehow, in saying that I meant, "All that I am will shrivel and die if I do."

I'd never say we should make these decisions lightly or without much prayer and thought. But I think that only we can judge, sometimes, when it is essential that we say, "No, lest there should not be enough for us and you."

Becca says that the oil in the virgins' lamp is hope. I like that. Holding on to hope is a way of affirming both God and self. There is something to the idea that we have to believe the door will open for us, or could open for us, or that we deserve its opening--somehow this is linked to being ready to come in for the wedding. No life-song will ever be sung unless we believe that God wants us to have life in richness and abundance, that each of us is meant to sing without shame her own life-song.




posted by Sandy at 6:43 PM

The Journey, by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles,
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the one thing you could do-
determined to save
the one life you could save.

Those who say that Oliver writes pablum poetry need to read this poem. I tested my own recent response to it during a retreat with a group of good friends. First, I simply handed the volume of collected poetry to one of the women, one whom I knew read Oliver and liked her work. As I expected, she turned immediately to "When Death Comes" and read the poem to the group. "Ummmm," a chorus of murmurs, a collection of smiles.

Then I took the book back and read "The Journey" with any commentary. A change came through the room before I had finished. Body language showed interest, distress. And a lively conversation followed. As I suspected, one of the group found the poem immoral, selfish, lacking in compassion. "But what about the others who need us?" she cried. Others said, "But listen to the poem. These are the voices of bad advice. " Or "these are people who want you to mend their lives. They can't depend on anyone else to do that."

It is a hard poem (much like Becca says the parable of the ten virgins is a "hard parable"). It's disturbing and it hits hard in the places where we try to define our duties to self against those to others. But I've lived long enough to think it is right; it is, in fact, more honest than "When Death Comes"-more indicative of and provocative of the real and particular life. Why? Because it doesn't roll off our souls in sentiments anyone would say "ummm" about with a happy sigh, letting the words substitute for doing what is necessary to be more than a visitor in the world.

Anyone, I believe, having chosen to live an individually right life-song will disappoint some people, will likely hurt some people. This is when the rubber meets the road, as the commercial used to say. It is when many of us can feel justified about turning back, about remaining a visitor. It hits right at the guilt and the god-complex so many of us carry and name as righteousness, as if we believe we really are the only one who can save others. How late it usually is, too, when most of us begin to hear our own voices amid the clamor of those who seek to define us.

I suspect that no one who has not felt the truth of the final two lines of this poem ("determined to save/the one life you could save"), that no one who has not lived the consequences of them can sing the kind of death-song that Tecumseh describes.

Next time: some linking with the parable of the Virgins

posted by Sandy at 2:28 PM

Okay, this wasn't brilliant the first time I wrote it and won't be this time. And I think it will take two days' entries. But I've been thinking about Tecumseh's twice-mentioned advice that each person should prepare a death song. At times in the past, I've allowed my students to try writing their own epitaphs, but somehow that seldom works, not because it ends up as self-praise but because the writing remains abstract and anonymous. I have a feeling the "death song" idea might work better, especially because it is really a call for a life song, for not waiting until time has run out to live the life that each of us really wants to live.

I found the same message in two of Mary Oliver's poems. I love them both; for quite a while I've felt that the first a beautiful expression of what I want my life to be. If you don't know these poems, simply reading them is worth your while.


When Death Comes

When Death comes
Like the hungry bear in autumn;
When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

To buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
When death comes
Like the measles-pox;

When death comes
Like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
As a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
And I look upon time as no more than an idea,
And I consider eternity as another possibility,

And I think of each life as a flower, as common
As a field daisy, and as singular,

And each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
Tending, as all music does, toward silence,

And each body a lion of courage, and something
Precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
If I have made of my life anything particular, and real.
I don't to find myself sighing and frightened,
Or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.



I love the images in this poem, especially those of the bride and bridegroom. I also like the way stanza four (not wanting to miss the discoveries of death) reminds me of Browning's "Prospice." The next-to-last stanza could be Tecumseh, paraphrased. And I'm especially impressed with the way the ending contrasts "visitation" with making of life something "particular, and real."

I think there's something here more than what immediately meets the ear. For me, it says two things (I'd like to hear what it says to you): first, that these desires must be realized to count as anything beyond pretty language, and, second, that the ways they are made particular imply essentially that my death song cannot be the same as yours, or yours as mine.

In the particulars, I tell my students, there lies the individuality. Originality is not something that needs to be striven for, or added on; it is something to be uncovered and claimed, an act of courage in itself.

Visitation: looking on, lack of ownership. More than that: walking the safe paths, the laid-out ones through the parks someone else has designed for our admiration. Marking no new ground, leaving no scars, the blazings of trails that may lead nowhere. Except ultimately to who we are, even by learning who we're not, to naming ourselves. In my death song, I want to take the name my parents gave me, gleaming, star-shaped, and add to it as much as possible of what I've discovered that I need to be, a constellation waiting for that name.

A wonderful poem. Yet I'll try to explain tomorrow why another of Oliver's poems seems to reach me these days in a different way from this one, why I feel it may be closer to the bone, closer to what it may take to write my death song. And, once again, as happens so often, so uncannily, these thoughts link to the homily Becca offered at St. A's today.


posted by Sandy at 7:35 PM