Lunchtime Meditation

It seems to me that lately John Donne is more my master than John Wesley. That is, for whatever reason, I find myself now reading Donne where I was always reading Wesley.

John Donne is one of the greatest poets in English. When I was in 7^th grade I had a great English teacher, Mr. Jourdain. He was an old school bodybuilder. That is, he was in his 50s in the early 80s, and was absolutely jacked, and had been for years. It took three of us at once, hanging off his forearm, to even challenge him arm-wrestling. He convinced us that poetry was for men, not for wimps. Especially men like John Donne—intelligent, funny, war-like, crude, kind. Everyone needs a teacher like Mr. Jourdain.

Donne was also a powerful Christian, perhaps the greatest preacher in English. He was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London the last 10 or 11 years of his life.

Some of you know how I am prone to daydream. One day, in a Renaissance literature seminar, I was paying no attention to what was going on. Well, I was paying attention, but not like a normal person. I had only been a Christian for two years, and I still had lots of questions. We were reading Donne’s poem, “Air and Angels.” (It’s tied with his “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” for my favorite.) But for a few days, I had been wondering about circumcision in the Bible. I had lots of questions.

First, why?

How come it’s something for men, and there isn’t something for women?

And then, why?

Isn’t this a little strange—mutilation, and there of all places?

And, of course, why?

Now, I am working on a sermon on Romans 2:28-29, “Circumcision of the Heart,” so I can’t give it all away here. But I can say that reading “Air and Angels,” at a particular moment in class, I suddenly got it: why circumcision. Like I said, I won’t give away the reason, but I can show you the seed.

Donne, like no other poet, mixes the sacred and profane. That is, he quickly moves between the sexual and the holy, in imagery, in parallels, and sometimes in one word. But you don’t feel like he has insulted anyone or anything. Most of his works were never published in his lifetime. He wrote them first for his wife, Anne, and then would occasionally read them for his friends, such as Ben Jonson.

Even in those days, I knew I wanted holiness, “without which no one will see the Lord.” But what is it? Is it a set of rules? Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t cuss, don’t go to R-rated movies? Be kind, visit the sick, take care of the poor, go to church? Sure, but holiness is fire. You can’t come too close to it for very long without being burned down. And that’s what has to happen. It refines and purifies. Can there be any doubt as to how and why so many of the deepest love songs could replace a human name or face with God’s, and still keep their integrity?

But then, holiness is also real. So real that the simplest things in life become sacraments: bread and wine, water. Animals were sacrificed in the Old Testament, and that work of slaughtering was something they did every day, as a mater of course; God came to them in precisely the things they knew about, every day.

So there I was, thunderstruck in the class by a line in the poem where it hit me: God is so real, He won’t shirk away from any part of us. I don’t recall anyone wondering what happened to me, so I guess I kept the intensity of what I was feeling under wraps. This relationship with God that we have through Jesus, this Holiness, it is unutterably real, showing up in strange places, sanctifying things we gloss over or want to put away.

Well, that’s all I can give you now, except for the poem.

AIR AND ANGELS.

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

Because I am feeling generous, here is “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” in case you don’t keep your copy of Donne handy… Peace, Aaron

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.