Philip Harvey led Carmelite Conversations on Wednesday morning the
4th of March on the poetry of the Carmelite nun Jessica Powers
(1905-1988). The session was essentially a poetry reading, for enjoyment and
edification, of many of her poems. Two brief papers were given, a biography of
the poet and an introduction to aspects of the work. Here is the biography.
We are told that Jessica
Powers’ grandparents came from County Waterford in Ireland in the 19th
century. This seems to have happened after the brunt of the famine, but they
were part of the diaspora that crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and
even as far as Australia. Her grandparents wound up in Wisconsin, one of those
places still being opened up by settlers,
where the family set about farming. A favourite word of Jessica’s is ‘acre’,
she even describes God as a “thousand acres”, which is quite a landscape to
contemplate. Her poems are also conscious of the American Plains nations of the
region.
Wigwams
When the dead white mists
creep up in evening rain,
out of the half-blurred swamp
the ghostly cities rise:
wigwams like gulls’ wings
spread,
hundreds across a plain;
and I look out on them
through my grandmother’s
eyes.
(SP 168)
These formative memories of
tough existence on shared land explain much about the first half of her life,
before she entered the Carmelite Order. They were farming people and had to be
self-reliant. One recurrent sense of Wisconsin that we gain from her words is
its lonesomeness. Evn that bird so often equated with lonesomeness, the
whippoorwill, features regularly in her early poetry.
Jessica herself was born in
1905, the third child of John and Delia Powers. Her elder sister Dorothy died
of tuberculosis when Jessica was about eleven, so we can imagine that much of
her time was spent helping around the place with her parents and two brothers. We
are told that she was educated in Mauston at the “Sister’s School”, a place
unretrievable on Google but which exists in books. We are told that one of her
main early influences was a Dominican nun by the name of Sister Lucille Massart,
who encouraged her to write. So perhaps the school was Dominican, but whatever
the case it is noteworthy that when Jessica was confirmed at St Patrick’s,
Mauston, she adopted the middle name Lucille.
She attended Marquette
University in Milwaukee then enrolled in a school of journalism since the
liberal arts school did not accept women. We need to recall that she lived in
an age where prospects for women were narrow and socially defined. She went to
work as a secretary in Chicago in her late teens, but we are told spent her
free time reading poetry in libraries. (SP 193) It is around this time she
writes the poem ‘Cabaret’.
I shall spend a penny of love,
and a penny of grief,
and a penny for song,
wine that is red, wines that
are purple and white;
I shall find a place in the
dazzling room of life,
and sit on a chair and sip my
wine all night.
Dancers will come like red
and gold leaves blown
over a crystal floor, and I
shall see
many a reveller wander out
alone
through a black door beyond
all revelry.
There will be music come on
little feet
into my soul, and laughter to
be spread
over young wounds, and kisses
honey-sweet,
and shining words to keep me comforted.
And I shall wait till the
Keeper comes to say
that my hour is done, and he
drowns each glaring light
in endless black … and the
dancers go away …
and I stumble out alone into
the night.
(SP 42)
Although we are drawn into a
cabaret, we notice that she remains alone and observant of the world around her
passing by. The poem describes a choice she had, though we know what she would
not have known at the time, that her life would involve sipping “my wine all
night,” only not in a cabaret theatre, but a religious house.
After her mother died in 1925
Jessica lived on the farm for about ten years. She contributed articles to The
Milwaukee Sentinel in a column called ‘The Percolator’. But my surmise is that
when her brothers married, Jessica needed something more than the farm, hence
her eventual shift to Chicago, then New York. A fascinating poem from this
period (1932 to be precise) indicates to us a serious calling, though
particulars go unstated. It is titled enigmatically ‘Michigan Boulevard, Chicago’:
There is a star above this
street for me.
Hither I came of old,
bearing my myrrh and
frankincense and gold.
Hunger and loneliness and
poverty
I brought for their delight
once in my youth upon a snowy
night.
I did not follow to the
inmost place
where the Child lay asleep.
It was too splendid; the
light dripped too deep.
I saw tears upon the Virgin’s
face.
I gave my gifts to her,
and the night ended in a
golden blur.
(SP 82)
You would not know from
reading this poem that Michigan Boulevard is a high end and stylish street of
the city. That is one mystery of the poem, and we also encounter another
feature in her work here, her ability to identify very personally with
scriptural stories and write them out as her own. In this case, Jessica is the
three wise men coming with her gifts to the Christ child. Her three gifts -
“hunger and loneliness and poverty” – she gives first to the mother, being too
overwhelmed to visit the child
For the four years prior to
the United States’ entry into the war in 1941, Jessica lived in New York with
Jessie and Anton Pegis. Anton was an outstanding Catholic theologian and
thinker, the editor of St Thomas Aquinas and many other works of doctrine and
apologetic. It is here that she publishes her first book. She lives in a world
of intellectual and spiritual ferment that meets deep needs, engaged in the
ground breaking cultural life of the city at that time. Yet, around the time of
the outbreak of the war, in similar fashion to Thomas Merton, she chooses to go
into monastic life. She enters the Carmel of the Mother of God in Milwaukee,
and even though maintaining links with her past life and writing poetry, spends
the rest of her life in an enclosed community of sisters. On her clothing day
(April 25th, 1942) she takes the name Sister Miriam of the Holy
Spirit. We meet the mood of the world and the strength of her own decision, in
this short poem written at the time.
‘The Little Nation’
Having no gift of strategy or
arms,
no secret weapon and no
walled defense,
I shall become a citizen of
love,
that little nation with the
blood-stained sod
where even the slain have
power, the only country
that sends forth an
ambassador to God.
Renouncing self and crying
out to evil
to end its wars, I seek a
land that liesa
all unprotected like a
sleeping child;
nor is my journey reckless
and unwise.
Who doubts that love has an
effective weapon
may meet with a surprise.
(SP 39)
While we may see the little
nation as made up of those who place love as first priority, it is also
possible to think of the world of Carmel into which she now goes as the little
nation.
Here is a vignette retold by
Bishop Robert Morneau, a friend, supporter, and then later editor of her work.
‘While living in New York in
the late 1930’s, before her entrance into the Carmelite community in 1941,
Jessica Powers was having a discussion with an editor when the conversation
turned theological. What was the greatest attribute in God, truth or beauty? As
Jessica Powers narrates the story, she held out for beauty as the deepest
revelation of God, whereas the editor sided with truth. The dialogue went on
for over two hours with no discernible victory.
‘Years later, in relating
this “argument,” Jessica Powers laughed and said: “We were both wrong. God’s
greatest attribute is mercy. In the end, that’s all we have and should desire.”
‘To know Jessica Powers is to
know someone who lived a God-centered life. Her response to a contemplative
calling gave outer expression to an interior summons. For forty-seven years she
lived in the cloister, journeying with her sisters (and the larger Church) in a
life of prayer, penance and witness. This Godward existence governed her heart.
She knew the Center; she also knew the periphery of struggle and darkness. Her
trust in a God of mercy and truth and beauty sustained her all her life.”
(RW 9)
In those forty-seven years
Sister Miriam was prioress of the community three times. This tells us a lot
about her abilities as a leader and administrator, indicating that she
possessed considerable interpersonal skills and a dedication to the vows of the
Order. There may be papers in the Marquette University Archives that shed light
on her roles within community, but for now we have only the poetry. We are
told, for example, that she was responsible for the oversight of the shift of
the Carmel from Milwaukee to Pewaukee, Wisconsin in 1958. We are not told what
happened inside Carmel all of this time, yet something of her work as prioress
comes through in her self-identification in the poem ‘Abraham’.
I love Abraham, that old
weather-beaten
unwavering nomad; when God
called to him,
no tender hand wedged time
into his stay.
His faith erupted him into a
way
far-off and strange. How many
miles are there
from Ur to Haran? Where does
Canaan lie,
or slow mysterious Egypt sit
and wait?
How could he think his
ancient thigh would bear
nations, or how consent that
Isaac die,
with never an outcry nor an
anguished prayer?
I think, alas, how I
manipulate
dates and decisions, pull
apart the dark,
dally with doubts here and
with counsel there,
take out old maps and stare.
Was there a call at all, my
fears remark.
I cry out: Abraham, old nomad
you,
are you my father? Come to me
in pity.
Mine is a far and lonely
journey, too.
(SP 66)
Yet through all of this time
she steadfastly produced poetry, amongst all the other kinds of writings
expected of her in Carmel. I count six books of poetry published in her
lifetime, all by small presses or in-house. Like Thomas Merton, monastic life
did not halt her creative processes and her constant questions. A poem entitled
‘Yes’, written four years before her death from a stroke in 1988, epitomises
for me both the acceptance of suffering and the openness to mercy and joy that
animates so much of her work:
Yes to one is often no to another
here walks my grief and here has often been
my peak of anguish yes is the one need
of my whole life but time and time again
law forces no up through my heart and lips
spiked leaden ball rending as it arises
leaving its blood and
pain yes is the soft
unfolding of petals delicate with surprises
curve and caress and billowing delight
out to the one or many I would guess
heaven for me will be an infinite
flowering of one species a measureless sheer
beatitude of yes
(SP 137)
Sources
Morneau, Robert F. A retreat
with Jessica Powers : loving a passionate God. St. Anthony Messenger Press,
1995 (RW)
Powers, Jessica. Selected
poetry of Jessica Powers, edited by Regina Siegfried and Robert F. Morneau.
Sheed & Ward, 1989 (SP)
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