The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross
Carmelite
Conversations
SOURCES
Wednesday
the 7th of December 2022
Tuesday, 6 December 2022
The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross SOURCES
Friday, 2 December 2022
The Epistles of Sister Wendy Beckett & Robert Ellsberg
A review article written by Philip Harvey, first published this week online at Eureka Street under the title ‘An Unlikely Friendship’
I confess to sceptical feelings in the past about Sister Wendy Beckett. These feelings were not assuaged by people asking is she really a nun, or saying that her habit wasn’t any habit they’d ever seen, and anyway haven’t nuns stopped wearing habits? My own preconceptions found it hard to square a woman who had renounced the world with someone quite ready to share her personal opinions about high art with the world in general. To say the least, a hermit who chooses to be a TV star invites a sense of ambiguity.
This mindless prattle, these superficial impressions, evaporated when I opened her newly published correspondence with the American writer and publisher, Robert Ellsberg. (‘Dearest Sister Wendy : a surprising story of faith and friendship’) It was a surpassing surprise to meet Sister Wendy being very much herself, at once deeply contemplative and endearingly playful, candid then circumspect, super-confident only then to be given over to self-doubt. But the real surprises were on every page. It was hard to keep up with the revelations and ideas that broke open from both sides of the equation.
Robert Ellsberg is famous for having a famous father, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who copied top secret information about the Vietnam War which was published in the New York Times as the Pentagon Papers. Robert assisted him with the copying, being 13 years of age at the time. Thus he inherited his father’s social activism and civil disobedience, an open willingness to address injustice in the outside world.
Yet Robert is equally well-known for his editorship of the Modern Spiritual Masters Series published by Orbis Books, one of today’s pre-eminent and most useful introductory series to writers of the interior life. Together with his original anthologies of saints’ lives, Alban Butler made personal, this series testifies to Robert’s vocation to being that rare bird, a hagiographer. Indeed, after the first shy tentative exchanges in 2016, Robert did not wish to interrupt Wendy’s contemplative existence further in any way, but it’s when the correspondence first comes to life that he sends her a set of the Orbis series as a gift, books that she takes up with typical excitement and her eye for close detail.
Two like-minded people, one immersed in the dangers of the contemporary world, the other dwelling in a caravan as a guest of the Carmelite house at Quidenham in Norfolk (then later at one end of the house when she needs care), meet each other through words and across the Atlantic Ocean. Their forte is writing, their interest is in our relationship with God.
Having an ocean between you immensely increases the need for correspondence. Robert talks about his dreams, many of them foregrounding his emotional life in startling fashion. Once he calls his dreams presents. What’s inside? What is he being given? What are we being given? Sister Wendy doesn’t talk about her dreams, until inspired to do so by Robert, but she responds to Robert’s much as an attentive, sensitive art critic might to an unnoticed detail or hidden meaning. She sometimes calls his dreams visions.
They start drawing each other out. Robert’s anxiety dream of giving a lecture on a subject about which he is completely unfamiliar prompts Wendy to tell a story we would not otherwise have known: her first time giving a spiritual conference as head of her community. The reader senses faintly that such challenges grew later into Sister Wendy’s “strange vocation to talk about art,” that elsewhere she half-jokes about as “the only apostolic work I’ve ever done for the Lord.”
That she became head of a religious community appears to be one of those administrative mistakes that were not good for the community, or for Sister Wendy, who suffered a breakdown in her health. We learn that it was as result of this that she gained a dispensation to leave in 1970, taking up an invitation from Sister Rachel, then prioress of the Carmelite monastery in Norfolk.
Rachel is better known under her penname Ruth Burrows, one of the great English mystical writers of our times. Such a friendship is not a fluke, it is providential. This move helps clarify why Sister Wendy wore a black-and-white habit, that of her teaching order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and not the Carmelite brown.
Inspirational and profound thoughts go back and forth, thoroughly grounded the while by domestics. Sister Wendy, for example, is a cat person. Robert is a dog person. She will have none of his view that cats are “cunning and devious”, replying, “Cats do not have that easy trustfulness and need of humanity that makes the dog so lovable … the dignity of the little cat, its comic curiosity, its easy and unstudied beauty, are God’s gift to us.” She admits to being “wildly enthusiastic about cats”, which she thinks “God’s most beautiful animal (just that little inch more beautiful than the horse.)” This exchange erupts during a discussion about whether Dame Julian of Norwich, who lived in the same county 700 years previous, had a cat. Wendy thinks no; Robert thinks yes: “I take it the allowance of a cat in an anchorhold was to keep down the rodent population.” Let the reader decide.
Robert had worked with the radical prophetic activist Dorothy Day and after her death in 1980, not insignificantly in this context, edited her letters. She is formative in Robert’s life, one of the powerful presences in this book, and one model of holiness for its authors. Sister Wendy gets very excited about news of a new biography by Day’s granddaughter, Kate Hennessy. “Would that every saint had a granddaughter or a sister or a parent spilling the beans about them. Then people would realize how holiness is meant to be deeply human, non-perfectionist, part of a world in which people have to scrub floors and sweep drives and make foolish mistakes, irritate their best friends quite unwittingly, and be a nuisance generally. So, well done, Kate.”
Their opinions on another well-known American, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, however differ to the degree that Robert notes it was the closest they ever got to an argument. As someone who lives the monastic rule, Wendy is “grieved that Merton never seems contrite about his extraordinary breaches of the rule and his very flexible interpretation of the vows”; even as she recognises he is a “wonderful man”. Robert defends Merton, arguing that “he was a man with one foot in a style of monastic life that had been stable for centuries, but with the other foot he was exploring a new paradigm for religious life.” Wendy is distressed by this idea, saying there will “always be a need for the pure Benedictine/Cistercian monastic severity – like the Carmelites here” at Quidenham. Elsewhere she states that he needed philosophy and literature “because the great engine of his brain demanded activity,” while she prefers “a willingness to live quietly in the peace that His truth brings us.” Space cannot do justice to the shades of difference and new angles that they both bring to Merton, Sister Wendy concluding after reading a volume of his “highly entertaining” essays that “I find it difficult to see them as other than free-wheeling expressions of his inability to be silent.” They both agree that Merton was not a saint and even though sainthood is one of their shared abiding interests, what is a saint? This book ranges sensitively and informatively over every kind of definition of this perennial subject.
The art of letter-writing is not dead, as anyone knows who writes letters. It has transformed into blogging, websites, social media conversations, and the epistolary art (sometimes) of the email. As Robert says to Wendy on the 4th of April, 2017: “A short message – but what a joy it is to wake up to a letter from you in the morning.” Email saves on time and postage. It saved Robert trying to read Sister Wendy’s reputedly indecipherable handwriting and introduces a third character in this book, Wendy’s laptop typist, someone who plays secretary and reality check to her more outlandish thoughts. This is Sister Lesley Lockwood OCD, a cat person, who says in her Foreword, “Sister Wendy rarely, and then very reluctantly, spoke of herself. But, as Robert noticed, there was an air of urgency, of providential purpose, surrounding the entire exchange. Sister Wendy sensed she was in the last months or perhaps year or two of her life … I understand now that an autobiography by Sister Wendy could only happen in an easy reciprocal to and fro with someone whose heart and intellect she could dance with.”
This is a correspondence of finely tuned complementarity. When Robert writes “I realise that my writing to you is a form of prayer,” it is a lead to the shared need they have to speak honestly and openly about the past, both its joys and sorrows, and the changing present. Daily events affect the course of the dialogue, for Robert the 2016 presidential election outcome is cause for angst, for Wendy a fall signals her increasing frailty, yet the prayerful source of the dialogue is constant and the interest wells up accordingly.
The
variety and depth of these letters defies summary. I will simply conclude with some
thoughts from Sister Wendy on writing about a life of meaning, words that
display the balance and understanding at work in this wonderful book. “I worry
that in writing so much about extraordinary figures it can make people feel
that they could never be like that, any more than they could paint like
Cezanne. Reading the Gospels is helpful, because it is clear we are not called
to be prodigies or geniuses, whether in the spiritual life or any other realm.
Just to be merciful and forgiving: such ordinary virtues! With opportunities at
hand every day to exercise them.”
Tuesday, 15 November 2022
An Introduction to Constantine Cavafy SUSAN SOUTHALL
On Wednesday the16th of November, Susan Southall gave a presentation to Spiritual Reading Group on the poet Constantine Cavafy. Here is Susan’s opening paper.
Cavafy
Paper
Constantinos Petrou Cavafy
was born in 1863 in Alexandria, into a family of merchants, the last of seven
brothers. His father’s death when he was seven brought about a sharp fall from
wealth and prestige in the Greek community in Muslim Egypt, to a penurious
youth between England and Paris; he returned in 1877 to Alexandria at the age
of 14. Although he lived in Constantinople from 1882 to 1885, the rest of his
life was spent in Alexandria, the city that became a theme of his poetry.
His working life was spent
in a clerical position at the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria,
(administered by the British until 1923); his poetry was unpublished, although
from 1891 to 1904 he produced it on broadsheets he distributed to his friends.
From 1903 he became better known as a literary figure in Greece, although
little understood. Not until the 1920s was he appreciated for his particular
style; he died in 1933.
The city of Alexandria was
founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and named for him. It was the site of
his tomb in antiquity where it was seen by several Roman Emperors. Alexandria
suffered many disasters, both military and natural, including an earthquake in
the 4th c. CE that destroyed the famous lighthouse Pharos. Following
the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 CE Alexander’s tomb became lost.
Cavafy is an urban poet. His city is envisaged
as a metaphor, both personal and historical, creating “a self-contained
mythical world that serves to represent both his special view of Greek history
and his image of the perennial human predicament.”[i] He
shares this use of city and country metaphors with contemporaneous poets such
as Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Joyce. His
work provides “a poetic evocation of Alexandria in both its contemporary and
ancient manifestations,” reaching on to other Hellenistic cities such as
Antioch and Beirut and to the empire of Byzantium, and so enabling ‘his tragic
sense of life’ to be projected across eighteen centuries of Greek history and
eventually in his last works to be expressed in universal terms.[ii]
The
Diaspora
Although Cavafy is known as
the poet of the city Alexandria, his attention spans across the Greek diaspora,
whose centre is not Athens but Constantinople. He himself lived in London,
Paris, Liverpool and Constantinople and he spoke three languages. Nearing the
time of his death he refused an invitation to stay with a friend in Athens,
where he had undergone surgery for cancer of the larynx, saying: “Mohammed Aly
Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh
is my second. How can I leave them?”[iii] He returned to Alexandria and died in the
Greek Hospital there. He will treat the Greekness of the diaspora following the
fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a matter of language. It could be added that
the current diaspora is heavily represented in Australia, with Melbourne being
known as the third Greek city of the world, after Athens and Thessaloniki.
The
Language
Among the Greeks to have
migrated to Australia was Manoly Lascaris, a descendent of the Lascaris
emperors of Byzantium and the life partner of Patrick White, whom he met in
Alexandria during the Second World War. Mr. Lascaris expressed the devotion of
Greeks to the Greek language in this way: “What survives is language and Greek
words give me strength. It is like going to church! For all of us immigrants,
our native language is the only church in which we can venerate the absent
deity.”[iv]
Cavafy refers to this soul of the Greek language which is inaccessible to
foreigners in several poems. In “Of the Sixth or Seventh Century” (i.e., before
Arabic has become the standard speech) he says, in Alexandria “she speaks our
language still. Throughout the Greek world it’s destined to fade away… (but we)
have once more borne the sound of Greek speech back to her soil.”[v]The
Samian, now beside the river Ganges (reminding us that Alexander’s conquests
extended as far as Afghanistan and India), reflects on his death with
satisfaction: “There among compatriots I shall be. And forever after I shall
speak Greek.” [vi]
The hegemony of Greek
speech and Hellenic culture is taken for granted in the face of repeated
disasters overtaking the Greek civilization centered upon Constantinople. (Also
called Roman, as the inheritor of the Roman Empire, but never Latin.) The great
wave of displacement called the Catastrophe of Smyrna (now Izmir) occurred in
September 1922, 100 years ago. The Turks did not accept the First World War
provisions of the victorious allies and in the ensuing conflict more than one
million Greeks became refugees in Greece and overseas, while the Christian city
of Smyrna was burned to the ground. When the artist Ai Weiwei interviewed some
of the participants in the present Mediterranean refugee crisis, one Greek
coast guard said:
“Personally, I believe that
one of the reasons our island had to carry this great burden is because it’s a
big island with a population of almost 100,000. The people of the island, our
grandfathers and grandmothers, were themselves refugees in 1922, so we know
what it means to be a refugee. We feel their pain, and we feel empathy for
these people who are now refugees.” (500,000 refugees passed through Lesvos in
2015 alone).[vii]
Cavafy, in 1922, seems to
be writing about events in ancient Commagene, a location now part of modern
Turkey, important to Cavafy as a nominally Greek culture beleaguered by larger,
non-Greek powers: the Romans at the beginning of its history, and the Arabs at
the end.”[viii]
In “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene” (1923) he says: “The life he lived
was just, and wise, and gallant. The life he lived, still more, was that finest
thing, Hellenic — mankind holds no quality more precious: among the gods alone
does anything surpass it.”[ix]
Here ‘Hellenic’ refers to ‘a person of broad Greek culture… in outlook,
culture, and taste; a state of mind rather than a nationality.”[x]
The
City
Eliot referred to the
‘mythical method’ as “the manipulation of ‘a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity’ through what Joyce called ‘two-planed writing.”
But rather than deal with the parallel in individual poems, Cavafy tended to create
two poems contrasting the ancient and the contemporary city and distributed
them at the same time.[xi]
The contemporary city is experienced, often in memory, as the “Sensual City”
where erotic encounters with young men have inspired the poet to see a kind of
‘purity’ in the grimy surroundings of the brothel quarter, the Quartier
Attarine, where shamed and shabby figures are transformed into ‘beauty and
vitality’ in those ‘shaped for and dedicated to the Hellenic kind of pleasure.”[xii]
Cavafy lived in rented rooms on the outskirts of this quarter for 26 years at
the end of his life, once explaining “Where could I live better…Below, the
brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And
there is the hospital where we die.”[xiii] The contemporary, or modern city, is a
creation of the imagination, “a city of remembered sensations.”[xiv] But the memories, in poems written from 1904
onwards, are not only of ‘fleshly delight and joy’ but inevitably also of
frustration and loss, ‘the unmetamorphosed, transient, and partial world of the
poet’s actual city.’[xv]
“Let me submit to Art” he says in a poem from 1921, “Art knows how to shape
forms of Beauty, almost imperceptibly completing life, blending impressions,
blending day by day.”[xvi]
This contemporary city is
infused and enfolded with Hellenic antiquity, particularly Late Antiquity
(approximately 200-400 C E), the fault line between Christianity and the
ancient religion Peter Brown names as ‘classical paganism’.[xvii]
For example, the Emperor Julian, called the Apostate, (331 to 363 AD; ruled
361-363) who tried to return the state worship to the antique gods, fascinates
Cavafy. Julian, born in Constantinople, a nephew of Constantine the Great,
became Emperor at the age of 30 after a military career and a series of family
murders. Although raised as a Christian, he converted to Neoplatonism
(Plotinus) and was a devotee of Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun). This period
of time was the point of transition between a system of heavenly patronage and
a more secular, in antique terms, approach to divine power through men of
power.[xviii]
So Cavafy does deal with spirituality, but it is spirituality as it fluctuates
across the entire panorama of Greek history.
Cavafy referred to himself
“not as a poet only”, but a “poet-historian”, a stance that “allowed him to see
history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye” which brings
about “the great and moving unity of the poet’s lifelong project.”[xix]
Poems
read during the session:
The God Abandons Antony
But Wise Men Apprehend What is Imminent
Ithaca
In the Church
The Steps
Song of Ionia
Waiting for the Barbarians
Voices
[i] Edmund
Keeley, Cafavy’s Alexandria (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 6.
[ii] Keeley, Cafavy’s Alexandria, 12.
[iii] Daniel
Mendelsohn, Collected Poems/ C.P. Cavafy, translated with introduction and
commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn (New York: Knopf, 2010) xxv.
[iv] Vrasidas Karides, Recollections of Mr. Manoly Lascaris (Blackheath:
Brandle & Schlesinger, 2008) 24-25.
[v] Daniel
Mendelsohn, The Unfinished Poems/ C.P. Cavafy, the first English
translation, with introduction and commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn (New
York: Knopf, 2009) 30.
[vi]“Epitaph (1893)” Collected Poems/ C.P. Cavafy,272.
[vii] Ai Wei Wei,
Human Flow: Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 59.
[viii] Mendelsohn, Collected Poems / C.P. Cavafy, 426.
[ix] Ibid. p.
117
[x] Ibid.434.
[xi] Keeley, Cavafy’s
Alexandria, 46-47.
[xii] Ibid. 51
[xiii]Ibid, 53
[xiv] Ibid, 53
[xv] Ibid, 58-59
[xvi] “I’ve
brought to Art (1921)”. Keeley, 59.
[xvii] Peter
Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 7.
[xviii] Ibid. p.
12.
[xix] Mendelsohn,
Collected Poems/ C. P. Cavafy, xix.