All Propers of the Feast

My Saints

A blessed All Saints Day to all of you!

My original intention was to write about the saints who live in me, in my work as a poet and writer, as a farmer, as a musician, and as husband and father. I thought I’d write a short paragraph on each. That kind of thing. Then I started to compile a preliminary list—and soon realized a short paragraph on each would soon make for a slim volume, if not bigger!

My preliminary list included Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, and the Celts—Brendan, Brigid, and Patrick—as well as the Beguines Marguerite Porete and Hadewijch of Magdeburg. But I couldn’t leave out Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne, could I?—not to mention Julian of Norwich or the author of the Cloud of Unknowing (the book that taught me what prayer really is). And I couldn’t leave out Nikolai Berdyaev, the philosopher who didn’t know what fear was. And what about William Blake and Jacob Boehme? I can’t leave those guys out! And Joan of Arc—you can’t omit Joan! Nor could I forget Edith Stein or Pavel Florensky, two thinkers so devoted to the Pillar and Ground of the Truth that they died at the hands of totalitarians for it.

What I realized is that we are surrounded a great richness of spiritual friendship. We are never alone.

So, in the end, I decided to write only about three of them: Thérèse de Lisieux, Robert Herrick, and Eleanor Farjeon.

Therese de Lisieux

Little did I know, that when my eldest daughter was born in 1997 that we had inadvertently named her after St. Therese. My daughter’s full name is Mae Teresa Martin (“Mae” is Irish for “Mary”) and the Little Flower was christened Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin. And then there was that dream.

In October of 1999, the relics of St. Therese were coming to visit the parish of The Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, which is only a couple of miles from where we were living at the time. I really wanted to go, but I was a Waldorf teacher at the time and I have never felt right about taking days off from teaching. Nevertheless, the relics were set to arrive at the church at 5:00 a.m., and I thought maybe I could wake up early and go to venerate the relics before I went to school. With four young children at the time (since expanded to nine), we were ALWAYS TIRED, so getting up at 4:00 was a bit of a challenge. I set the alarm and went to sleep.

The alarm didn’t go off, but I didn’t need an alarm. I had other assistance.

I dreamt that St. Therese came to me. All I remember is her face as she bent over my bed and the words, “Réveillé-toi.” Wake up. I woke up.

I hopped into my Ford Ranger and started making my way to the church. Still a mile away, my heart sunk: every parking space for a mile was already taken—and it was only 4:30! Proceeding down Woodward Avenue, scanning for a spot, I figured I would probably end up turning around and going home. When I made it to the church, I decided to turn down the side street and then turn around—but as I turned, and right in front of the church, there was a parking spot. So I parked, got out of my truck, and walked into the church. Just as I did, the procession, led by the cardinal, bishops, and priests among clouds of incense, ferried the casket holding the relics right in front of me. I was absolutely moved to tears. I didn’t know why. But I did know one thing: for whatever reason, Therese wanted me there. Not long after, I recorded the experience in the third and final section of my poem “Opticks,” later included in my first poetry collection, Meditations in Times of Wonder:

III. Corpus poetarum

Language is a body, hardened corpuscles of light that do nothing we ask of them. Phosphorus and calcium lie in bones: light and stone. Thus language. We dream in tongues unknown to us: koine at the threshold of sleep; Latin hexameters as if chanted to gods. (You have heard them, but only listened when they called your name.) Voices are clumsy, verses fall to corruption. You tumble the same words together in your mouth, over and over again, as if coins of value. Wind the sheet over your face. Close your eyes. It is time to surrender your words. If you are lucky, St Thérèse of Lisieux will come to you: Réveillé-toi, she will whisper. Viens pour entendre mes os. For this is poetry: when saints intrude upon the sleep of the dead, and even bones can sing.

Perhaps five years later, as my family and I attended Mass at the Shrine one Sunday, we decided to linger afterwards and stroll through the display of the church’s history in the narthex. My son Tommy, who was about nine or ten at the time, then called out before a photograph of the arrival of the relics: “Hey, Dad, look! It’s you!” There I was: smack dab in the middle of the frame. A photographer had caught the moment I wandered into the church and the relics proceeded past me. She wanted me to be there.

Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was an Anglican priest and poet who, though a Londoner through and through, served a rural parish at Dean Prior in Devonshire—though the party-pooping Puritans kicked him out of his living for a time during the English Civil Wars (his living was later restored to him by King Charles II).

Herrick’s mammoth poetry collection, Hesperides and Noble Numbers, first published in 1648, is both a celebration of English folk religion—Catholic as well as Anglican, pagan as well as Christian—and, deliciously, gives a giant middle finger to the Parliamentarians—the first losers to outlaw Christmas and who hated all things Anglican, Catholic, folk religious, and pagan. I want this guy for my pastor.

When I was working on my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word, I wanted to write about Herrick, who had always intrigued me though I’d never had time for a deep dive into his work and the scholarship on him. It was one of the most enjoyable scholarly experiences of my life, characterized as it was by many instances of laughing out loud at his jokes and feeling a deep sense of gratitude to a man who celebrated the goodness of this life we have been given with gusto and, as he says, “a cleanly-Wantonnesse” in “The Argument to His Book”:

I Sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers, 
Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers. 
I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes, 
Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes. 
I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse 
By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse. 
I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece 
Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-gris. 
I sing of Time’s trans-shifting; and I write 
How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White. 
I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing 
The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King. 
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) 
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

I have found my parish.

Relatively recently (about a year ago), while I was working on Mythologies of the Wild of God, I wanted to write a poem in honor of my long-dead pastor. His Poetical Works is on a shelf right next to my desk, so I pulled it out and opened the book at random with the idea that I would follow the rhyme scheme and structure of the first poem I pointed to. I don’t even remember what poem it was, but I composed my homage and felt the mirthful spirit of my poetic lare moving through me:

THE PRIEST AND LORD OF ALL GOOD THINGS

The priest and lord of all good things,
Of ambergris and linnet’s wings,
Gives to the time the lie,
Says “Live before you die;
To find the way to grace,
Find a love to embrace;
Lift a glass, sing a song,
Then your life will be long.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.

“Sing marriages and carriages
(Two things the devil disparages);
And, of all good things best,
Babes nursing at the breast;
And kisses on the cheek,
Without which we grow weak.
So burn your candle bright;
Set all the world alight.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.

“Think more on heaven, less on hell
And then you’ll do things very well.
The living and the dead
All in the dance are led,
The powers to beguile
With laughing all the while.
Then joy in all good Things
The Lord and Master brings.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.”

What I discovered was that this is really a song. I mean, come on, it just sings right off the page without any effort. I know it’s early, but I might need a glass of mead.

Eleanor Farjeon

I love Eleanor Farjeon so much it hurts.

Farjeon—though I prefer to call her “Nellie,” the diminutive by which her friends and family knew her—was born in 1881 to a family of English Jewish bohemians (the kind who celebrated Christmas). Though she wrote the lyrics that became the Cat Stevens hit “Morning Has Broken” in 1931 as well as the Anglican Advent carol “People Look East,” not to mention the children’s book Ten Saints in 1936, she did not formally become a Christian until 1951, at the ripe old age of seventy (calling herself “a very old baby”) when she was received into the Catholic Church. As with Herrick, writing about Farjeon for my book Sophia in Exile was one of my favorite scholarly projects. What really shocked me at the time was that almost nothing has been written about her from a scholarly perspective, even though she is one of the most prolific poets and writers of (ostensibly) “children’s literature” of the 20^th century. An outrage! In fact, I am pretty sure that I am the only one scholar over the past fifty years who has done so to any significant degree. And that’s a shame, for I would hold her work up to anyone’s, including Tolkien and Lewis. She is more than their peer.

In my recent online course on Christian Romanticism, I included Nellie’s slim little volume Trees (1914). I think it was most pleasant surprise to all the participants, almost none of whom knew anything about Nellie prior to the course. Here’s an excerpt from Sophia in Exile discussing Trees and Nellie’s life-affirming Christian intuition:

“Her story is one of an encounter with Chronos, god of time, with ‘the Hoofed One.’ Chronos is deadly serious, rational. Not so his interlocutor:

‘Have you then found a bigger star than mine?’ cried the Old One in alarm. ‘With many moons and brighter hoops of fire? What were you doing while we were raking the firmament?’

‘Dancing, Old Bones, dancing.’

‘And where?’

‘On earth, with man my brother.’

“Chronos is scandalized that the Hoofed One doesn’t hold himself more aloof from those who should worship him. He warns that man will despise him. ‘O Chronos!’ exclaims the Friend of Man, ‘how he will love me. Though he forget my name, and names no star for me, how he will love me.’ Farjeon’s God is the God children know, the One who speaks to them through the Creation. As she writes, ‘For since the divine Pagan dares to exist in harmony with the eternal spirit, trees, which are the temples of Pan, are also prophets of God. He laid his secret within all his creations as they passed through his hands.’ Farjeon’s god is a dancing god.”

Thus concludeth the sermon.

So who are your saints? Let me know in the comments.

Also: I recently dropped a short talk, “Reclaiming Beauty, Fecundity, the Feminine,” which you might like, on my YouTube channel.

Like the first morning.