To borrow language from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, could you give a transient account of your “sacred history?”
I used to be raised as a Baptist, albeit a Baptist of what we’d call a very brittle sort. I suppose the saving grace of those years was that my parents wore our community’s fundamentalism relatively frivolously. My father liked saying that a Christian should seek to “be winsome, in an effort to win some.” In any case, I never felt as besieged as some others appeared to feel; in reality, the profound love of God that I learned in that community kept me feeling deliciously free, unafraid, and welcoming.
In college, because of the instance of my older brother, Steve, I first began reading what we call “the fathers of the early church,” and it was of their witness that I recognized that so most of the resistances I had felt toward what I heard in our Baptist church were based on historically sound intuitions. In those years, I had thought that I used to be the heretic, however it turned out I used to be mistaken. It would take me a few years of reading in that early tradition to eventually find my technique to Orthodoxy in 1998. When I did, I felt that I used to be coming home.
You use the words nous and noetic ceaselessly in your poetry and nonfiction writing. Can you explain how and why you employ these words?
Early on in my slow journey to the fullness of the religion that one finds in Orthodoxy, I noted a spread of unsatisfactory dichotomies I had nearly inherited because of this, largely, of the church’s split between East and West. Certain of those dichotomies result from unlucky translation, and the alternative, in most translations, of rendering nous as “mind” is maybe one of the unlucky.
While the word has evolved somewhat over the millennia, most of our early church tradition understands it as being greater than mind, or reason, or thought; it is healthier apprehended, because the late Bishop Kallistos Ware has characterised it, because the “intellective aptitude of the guts.” In other words, it’s the meeting place of intellect and felt knowledge, the meeting place of mind and heart.
Orthodoxy has taught me that the human person is best figured as a fancy animal, one with a soul—a spirit—and bearing noetic relationship to the one God. And since our God is characterised within the interpersonal terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we also bear noetic relationship to other human individuals. In fact, you possibly can say that our very personhood will depend on these relationships.
We are not—contrary to what I had gathered within the church of my childhood—bodiless intellects. We will not be aspiring to transcend our bodies. We will not be angels, nor are we fixing to turn out to be angels. We are, nevertheless, fixing to turn out to be like God; made in his image, we’re called to grow into his likeness—never eclipsing his limitless and inexhaustible holiness, but by our adoption and identification with Jesus, becoming just like the God who called us into being.
Can you explain “Isaak the Least,” a reputation to whom you attribute many epigraphs and poems throughout your collections?
My journey to the Eastern church involved some three many years of reading within the writings of the early church. I had come to embrace much of what I read in those texts, but after I got here upon The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaak the Syrian, my heart finally got here home. Those homilies led me down the ultimate stretch of road to a spot where I recognized in writing most of the countless intuitions I had glimpsed along the best way. When I used to be formally brought into the Greek Orthodox Church, I used to be brought in as Isaak, with Saint Isaak of Syria being—as we are saying—my “namesaint.” The character of Isaak the Least became a fictive speaker in much of my work since then.
Iconography features heavily in your work, none greater than Our Lady of the Sign in Lacunae. Could you talk a bit in regards to the role of iconography within the Orthodox faith and on this current collection?
The icon is itself something of a theological assertion. Icons of Christ, particularly, are understood to be a confession that Christ was each God and a completely human one who could possibly be depicted within the icon. I’ve often bristled a bit on the commonplace description of icons as “windows into heaven.” That notion seems to emphasise a distance and otherworldliness of God and his saints. The profound activity of an icon is, fairly, an insistence of Christ’s presence here with us, in addition to the insistence that the saints—so great a cloud of witnesses (Heb. 12:1)—are also here with us. The illusions of time and distance are mitigated by our being within the midst of those historical moments and people historical individuals we cherish.
As for the stunning icon on the duvet of Lacunae, it’s a well-recognized one which graces the dome over the altar spaces in most of our churches. In Greek, it’s identified as Πλατυτέρα των Ουρανών, or the “more spacious than the heavens” icon, and it speaks to the undeniable fact that the uncontainable God was nonetheless held inside Mary’s human womb. This gesture speaks to the guts of what I mean after I speak of the poetic operation of language; I’ve often characterised that operation as the presence and activity of inexhaustible, indeterminate enormity apprehended inside a discreet space. My sense of that essential quality of poetry is what led me to repair upon this notion of lacunae—openings or spaces that suggest greater than they seem to contain.
I’m recalling that odd passage in Colossians, where Paul avers that he rejoices in his sufferings for the sake of the church, saying that in his flesh he’s filling up “what continues to be lacking” within the suffering of Christ (1:24). That is an unlucky translation, provided that we’re detest to assume that anything is lacking in anything Christ performs. My own translation wouldn’t be what’s lacking, but what’s yet to be done—which is, I dare say, the offering of our willing participation on this suffering.
Your poetry covers the subject of distraction and getting away from it. How is a Christian imagined to cope with the distractions of life?
I suppose the perfect answer is to hope without ceasing. One must develop a continuing sense of God’s nearness, an awareness of his being all the time with us, which assists our moving through all manner of distractions, whether or not they arise from cruel or ignorant people, natural or unnatural tragedies, our sufferings, or our own sin. So far as I do know, the perfect path for developing that sense is the Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” For over two millennia, many believers have trusted that practice to assist maintain this clarifying sense of God with us.
The Orthodox liturgy can be profoundly helpful on this regard. The practice of living through the complete church yr, assisted by a sequence of services, also makes our faith not only a grip of propositions, but a developing sense of who we’re and whose we’re.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, makes a connection between the art of poetry and the art of living. Do you see a connection between these two endeavors?
I feel that our primary art should be the shaping of ourselves. I also think that any endeavor that we are able to rightly call a vocation is best understood as a method to higher apprehending who we’re and what we’re called to turn out to be. So, yes, for those called to the art of poetry, that calling is utterly connected to the art of living, of living well and in a way that enhances our own spiritual journeys, whilst it enhances the journeys of others.
Success within the art of poetry and within the art of living will depend on a deeper development of the art of prayer. Early on, I tended to withstand the associations of poetry with prayer, but, in my dotage, I even have given up that resistance. So long as we understand that prayer is less about petition than it’s about communion, and as long as we understand that poetry is less about expression than it’s about pressing language for illumination, then we are able to glimpse how each can serve the opposite.
Could you explain the concept of apophatic theology, or a humility before mystery in Scripture? What is the worth and sweetness on this theological approach?
Theology is available in two flavors—the cataphatic and the apophatic. Both approaches are witnessed throughout the church, each now and historically. The cataphatic approach—which, broadly speaking, is more comfortable making definite statements about God and his nature—is maybe the more familiar within the West. And the apophatic—fair to say—holds primacy within the East.
The best dangers of a cataphatic approach could be seen every time a pastor or theologian presumes to elucidate away the mysteries manifested within the Scriptures, every time a glib paraphrase threatens to eclipse an inexhaustible text. The Eastern church privileges a more Hebraic, more rabbinical approach to theological commentary, offering a provisional sense of what a passage might offer. This modest gesture within the face of mystery strikes me as a far preferable disposition in comparison with the arrogance of a pastor’s offering his own interpretation and saying of it, This is what God says.
What do you mean by saying that “there’s One True Church, variously apprehended”?
I’m reminded of a trick query that I heard some time back. The query was “How many churches do you could have on this town?” The only correct answer was “One.”
If the church is known to be the body of Christ, then it should be self-evident that all of its members—despite their differences—are members of that one body.
So, yes, whatever the familiar divisions—and the profoundly regrettable term denominations—the body of Christ is unalterably one. I also think that almost all historical divisions could be read as sequential diminishments of the religion.
I’m also reminded of what my first priest, Father George Paulson, said to me after I met him to say that I desired to “convert” to Orthodoxy. He said, “Convert? What are you now? Muslim? Hindu?” He encouraged me to grasp my becoming Orthodox as my “embracing the fullness of the religion” and never as a “conversion.”
So, yes, we’re all—prefer it or not—members of 1 body, one church; we’re simply perceiving that body variously, to various degrees of fullness.
Is there anything you desire to to say, either about this collection of poetry or your work typically?
Only that I don’t see any of my successive poetry collections as latest departures or as manifesting novel approaches. I feel of every as a developmental step within the direction I’ve hoped to be moving from the primary. The poems are my way of examining my heart and mind, my way of coming to terms, if only provisional terms, with what I glimpse within the midst of that examination.
I proceed to be concerned with becoming, with our collective becoming, knowing that none of us will ever stop becoming. The God into whose likeness we’re moving is an inexhaustible God, and our journey into partaking of God’s holiness is an limitless journey.
