O Gaia:  Nature and the Poetic Intuition by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

“When you can’t go far, you go deep.”

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A friend of mine went back to visit his grandmother’s farm, where he had grown up as a child.  His family had lived in that place since colonial times, but they had all moved away and the grandmother had long since died.  Where was the farm?  Where was the old swimming hole at the rock spring?  “It is probably a wet spot in someone’s basement now,” my friend said with a bitter smile.  “They cut down the pine forest to the last trees and bulldozed right over the spring.  But why?”  He answered his own question: “There was no one left to tell them where to stop.”  Newcomers don’t.  Every place on earth has its ecological problems today.  If we are merely transients, we won’t even be aware of these problems.  We will have no eyes for the grassroots solutions.  Nor will we have the drive and stamina to labor for those solutions, unless we make the personal investment of committing ourselves to a given place.  Staying-power is what counts.           

But there is more to it.  Having roots in a place helps taking root in one’s own depth.  For the span of a lifetime now, my friends Art and Nan Kellam have been living alone on an outer island in Maine.  When a visitor asked if they ever got struck by wanderlust, Art simply said, “When you can’t go far, you go deep.”  That is the direction to which Benedictine monks commit themselves by their vow of Local Stability.  It should make them sink their roots into that inner depth where the great images of myth and poetry come alive.         

Since poetry has so small an audience, the notion has begun to grow up that it is a kind of survival from more primitive times, a form of communication no longer needed by modern people.  The fact is rather that modern people are something like a survival of poetry, which once shaped and interpreted our world through language and the creative imagination.  When poetry withers in us, the greater part of experience and reality wither too; and when this happens, we live in a desolate world of facts, not of truth – a world scarcely worth the trouble of living in.

This perceptive passage by the Australian poet Judith Wright gives us a key to our problem.  Poetry has withered in us.  The environmental abuses we perpetuate all over the world are largely the results of poetry starvation.  It is not only that “poetry takes the violence out of reason,” as J.F. Kennedy put it.  Poetry gives us access to those reasons of the heart which reason cannot fathom.  Only the poet within each of us has eyes for the inherent sacredness of nature.      

John Henry Newman characterized the Benedictine tradition as the poetic thread woven into the history of the great orders in the Church.  Seen through the eyes of this tradition, the problem stated in our topic calls for an educational, rather than a legislative solution.  The answer to our question will have to be evocative, rather than provocative.  How can we make the intuitive knowledge of the sacredness of nature an effective force in the world?  By exposing ourselves to the sacredness of nature through a stable commitment to the place where we live, and by rooting ourselves in the realm of intuitive knowledge through poetry.  The educational implications could be revolutionary.  The effective force released could be momentous.          

When education is at its best, it frees within us our own effective force to become who we truly are.  The biblical prototype for who we humans are is Adam – Adam, formed out of the very soil of the garden in which he lives, and where he gives names to all creatures.  Adam, the Earthling, the Human, is both gardener and poet.  In the history of Benedictine education the image of Adam plays a central role.  I remember entering the great lecture hall at the University of Salzburg, in the shadows of an ancient Benedictine abbey, and there, on a wall-hanging above the rostrum, was the image that gathered up the significance of the whole institution: Adam in the garden, naming the animals.         

Adam in the Garden of Eden bears the likeness of God, whose image he is.  But the Old Adam becomes a warped mirror, as it were.  The New Adam, Jesus Christ, restores in himself the image to its original likeness.  In the Garden of Olives the bloody sweat of Jesus irrigates the earth.  And on Easter morning the risen Christ is at first mistaken for a gardener.  We never cease to be image of God, disfigured though this image may have become.  By the labor of obedience we can return to the one from whom we strayed in lazy disobedience, and the image will regain the splendor of its likeness.  Adam means “human.”  And so, each one of us is meant to be poet and gardener.  The more human we become, the more fully we become image and likeness of God.  But God is both Poet and Gardener.         

To speak of God in these terms may strike us as fanciful.  In fact, the way some people talk could make one think of God as accountant or policeman, rather than as poet or gardener.  Could this be the result of the warped mirror within ourselves?  All around us, nature bears abundant proof that God’s creation springs from the playful work of a gardener.  God does not labor like a farmer.  God plays.  And all of history proves that God likes to spin a good yarn, poetically.  What should give us a clue is the uselessness of it all.  Why do we tend to overlook how useless God’s creation is to God?  Poorly remembered, the story in the Book of Genesis makes us think that God worked hard to achieve a purpose.  But what could that purpose have been?  Was God in need of anything?  The pattern on a goldfinch’s wing should be enough to convince anyone that it was all play.  And the story of creation is told in such a way as to leave no doubt: it was all as effortless for God and as joyful as the whistling of a shepherd boy stretched out on the hillside and looking into the summer sky.         

God plays.  Work always has a purpose.  But there is no purpose to nature and history.  And yet, it all is filled with deep meaning.  Thank God, there is no purpose to the world!  That is why it is truly a world without end.  Work comes to an end when its purpose is accomplished.  Who would go on drawing water, once all the vessels are filled to the brim?  But to play now that this water is wine: that is divine make-believe.  Or to play that whosoever drinks from it will never thirst again; that, sprinkled on you, it can make you whiter than the snow; that you can go down into it, die, and come up more alive than before – those are games you can go on playing, world-without-end.  Play has no purpose, only meaning.  And there is no end to meaning.  Once we open our eyes to this, we won’t be concerned with “discovering the purpose of human life.”  Rather, we will celebrate its meaning.  That will give us joy and strength enough to take care of all those purposes for which we are responsible on the level of work as if they were play.  And this will lead to results that last.

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