Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings
Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608336272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Orbis |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2015 |
| Series: | Modern Spiritual Masters Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 324 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Phyllis Tickle
Essential Spiritual Writings
By Jon M. Sweeney
Orbis Books
Copyright © 2015 Tickle, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62698-137-9
CHAPTER 1
Surprise and Wonder
* * *
The Cranes
Where along their migratory way
these cranes may also stop
I can not say.
The river's a dozen miles from here
but twice, sometimes more,
each year
they drop,
a fleet of sails
on a sea
of grass,
like manna and the quails
come from some other land
to say,
"This way! This way!"
— Selections
* * *
This first section includes excerpts from essays of the 1970s through the early years of the 2000s about the everyday blessings and essential sacredness of life. Included are passages from a trilogy of books, first written and published thirty years ago, devoted to spiritual understandings gleaned from living by the rhythms of the land; these show Tickle in step with the early influential writings of Wendell Berry. As she explains in this chapter, "Religion has always kept earth time. Liturgy only gives sanction to what the heart already knows."
And yet, we don't begin on The Farm in Lucy, but with the more familiar voice of Tickle, well known to her readers over the last decade and a half — writing theologically and philosophically about the importance of remembering who we are, by asking and re-asking the most basic questions, and considering the earliest story of them all.
IN THE BEGINNING, EDEN
One of the genuine pleasures of the writing life, ironically enough, is not writing at all; rather, it is the business of speaking directly and in real time to audiences. For a writer like me who is by area of expertise a professional religionist, those audiences usually are made up of other religionists, most commonly of practicing clergy, their professional support staffs, deeply involved and committed laity, or any combination of these. But sometimes, and blessedly, the audience is an auditorium full of undergraduates, and the occasion an endowed lecture of one sort or another.
At such events, the initial attitude in the meeting hall is almost always exactly what anybody would expect from eighteen- and nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who have been told, firmly and at least three times, that this is a required event and they had better show for it. The truth is, however, that most young adults cannot manage to stay aloof and uninvolved for more than about three minutes, especially when they are assembled in aggregate. After that, curiosity and strong opinions and just plain joie de vivre kick in, and you've got them.
As a result and as any writer will tell you, it's these lectures that are devoutly to be desired; for while one always learns something in any public engagement with any audience, what one learns in the course of engaging a healthy, lively undergraduate audience is, more often than not, opinion-changing and mind-expanding. More to the point, it always and unfailingly gives birth to at least one poignant story or one simple but brilliant insight or one gentle conviction still too new to be tarnished by over-much handling. Sometimes, though very rarely, an endowed lecture will deliver up all three in one fell swoop. I had one of those rare experiences recently.
I was giving a set of endowed lectures at an urban college in the Midwest. In this particular case, the audience, while primarily undergraduates, had a few graduate students and seminarians thrown in, probably just for flavor, more than anything else. But their presence in the lecture hall and their active participation in the question-and-answer sessions after each lecture placed a kind of restraint or false decorum on the collegians whom I had hoped to engage in genuine exchange. While I was delighted to hear from the older students, I nonetheless went into the concluding lecture with less intellectual anticipation and excitement than is usually the case at the end of a series of talks.
When the talk and the question-and-answer session were over, a few students and faculty gathered, as they always do, around the podium to carry the discussion into a more personal and candid wind-down. But one of those who came that last afternoon was quite clearly an undergraduate and, I thought, most probably a freshman. From her self-effacement and decorum of earnest unease, I guessed as well that college had been her first, intimate experience of life in the city.
She had two other students with her, and together they hung back, listening to the discussion and waiting until everyone else had drifted away. The three of them seemed to be very close in affection and also in concern, but my freshman was obviously their leader and spokeswoman. Could they ask me one last question, she wanted to know. I said of course, and almost immediately realized that what she wanted to express was not so much a question as it was the perfect self-articulation I had come here hoping to receive.
What she actually said was, "I want somebody to tell me where I stop." She shrugged her shoulders, and the boy in the group poked her to go on. She tried again. "What I mean is that I don't know any more where I end."
"Am I just inside my skin, sort of interior to it, you know? Or am I just what's on the inside side of my underwear and clothes. Or am I as far out as my aura," because, she added rather apologetically, "there really is an aura around all of us, or so our psych prof says anyway."
"Or am I, like, only just here in amongst us three, because we really do hang together all the time?"
"Or am I out in all of this?" and she gave a kind of feeble but all-encompassing sweep of her hand toward the auditorium behind us. Then she shrugged, almost in defeat, and there was a kind of break in her voice.
"I just want to know where I stop, that's all — where I aren't any more."
I don't know whether it was her earnestness or her slip into colloquialism that most endeared that girl-child to me in that moment; but either way, there was no doubting the sincerity of her desire to be answered. One can say, and accurately so, that what she was asking was basically an existential question. But one must also say, and again accurately, that her existential experience was as valid as it was painful. On the farm — it turned out to be a dairy farm, by the way — she had known where she stopped. She didn't, in other words. That is, on the farm, she simply did not "stop."
As far as the eye could see and as far as the imagination could reach, she was; for she and the earth by whose rules she lived were part and parcel of one another. She rose in accord with her father's cows who rose in accord with the demands of their milk making. She tended animals in accord with the seasons of both the earth and of their bodies which were part of it; and the ebb and flow of both of those determined the ebb and flow of her own. She knew herself to be no more than a cog in a magnificent machine, but she knew the machine was immense and total and that, by function and connection, she was totally vulnerable, ultimately powerless and because of those things totally borderless. She was, in effect, the quintessential expression of a rural understanding of earth.
I, too, am rural. Or like my young inquisitor, I once lived rural and still think rural. The farm we worked and ate off of for years was beef, not dairy, and family-size small, not working-size large. And though my husband and I still live on a considerable portion of that same land, we no longer make any pretense of farming it. Our barn molders away in the hot west Tennessee sun, each passing season taking a bit more of its paint or its siding or, of recent years, its tin roofing. No cows have grazed our fields in over a decade, and only bush-hogging keeps our pastures open now. The kitchen garden still feeds us well in the summers, but I no longer make any pretense of preserving and canning or freezing back against the winter's short supplies. Without children to feed and without children to teach, it seems pointless. They learned while they were with us and while they ate the product of their own hands. Like us, they still think rural, even though some of our seven no longer live that way.
What, then, would I or mine say now about the business — the habits and mind-sets and emotions — of thinking rural? First and always, when faced with that question, I interrupt to say that, in America especially, one must never use the expression "thinking rural" casually or without annotation. For a people whose immediate forebears were almost all farm-bound in lifestyle and income, and for a nation whose land mass is huge and mostly farmed or kept fallow, twenty-first century Americans have an almost paradoxical tendency to romanticize rurality. And once something is romanticized, it is effectually relegated to the precious and away from the operative and informing.
There is nothing romantic or even particularly ennobling about getting welts all over one's hands from picking okra and corn, or bruises from being jostled by hungry cows, or stiff bones from shoveling manure. What there is, however, is that subtle but pervasive sense of citizenship in the world as it is. What there is is the borderlessness of my freshman, her humanizing acceptance of vulnerability, and her assumption of oneness in substance and rhythm with the immediate environment, immediate being defined for her as a certain, unimpeded vastness that she could walk freely upon.
The shock for the rural thinker turned city dweller is in discovering that the city lives, not on the Earth, but above it by several layers of mechanical and technological remove. The urban dweller (who quickly becomes an urban thinker), uses the treasures of the Earth not to perpetuate and preserve it, but to serve and facilitate the life of the city. The rural thinker stands small in a grandeur he or she must accommodate to constantly. The urban thinker stands on a stage he or she has cut to size and then, standing there, dares to write the play.
Neither side of that divide in thinking and perceiving is inherently superior to, or worse than, the other. There is nothing quaint or impractical or regressive about rural values any more than there is anything malevolent or noxious or destructive about urbanization per se. In point of fact, condemning postmodern urban life is in many ways just another, albeit more negative, form of romanticization, and just as deplorable.
Likewise, there is not anything fundamentally deleterious to a human being about having to make the existential shifts required in moving from rural to urban living. What is wrong is our current inability or outright unwillingness to balance, meld, and employ simultaneously both ways of seeing the Earth and addressing the environment. Embedded in the earnestness of our current concerns is a kind of partisan entrenchment on both sides. Each hesitates to make a place at the table for much discussion of the differences which accrue between addressing conservation and ecology with intent to govern them and addressing them with intent to be as one with them. But for me, as a practicing Christian as well as a professional religionist, environmental arguments based on common sense or enlightened self-interest will always be, at best, secondary or tertiary ones.
When I say I am a practicing Christian, what I am saying, among other things, is that like a large part of the Earth's population — the larger part, in fact — I am what technically is called an Abrahamic, or, put another way, a member of the Abrahamic faiths. That is, Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike all claim a common spiritual forebear in Abraham. As such, we hold in common the part of Torah which is the story of human experience from the creation itself to Abraham's call to sacrifice his son to God. In that foundational bit of shared religious heritage, the dominant stories for us are the opening and closing ones — the Creation and the aborted Sacrifice. In both stories, a great gift is given to humanity and an order to be reverenced is established. It is the ordering of the Torah creation story, however, which every observant Abrahamic, whether farmer, suburbanite, or industrialist, is called to honor first when he or she speaks about environmental issues.
For Abrahamics, the great gift in Eden was that of receiving soul, of our birthing as creatures formed in the image of God. But there was a prior gift which enabled the great gift. There was Eden. Only after God's forming of a context for the soul's well-being, were we formed.
Both the rural and the urban dweller recognize, albeit in different ways, that creation is a tool, a gift to be enjoyed, and a means to be employed; but for the observant Jew or Christian or Muslim, the Earth exists neither to be deified nor to be consumed. Rather, it exists now, as it has from the beginning, as teacher, limitation, and purposed circumstance. It is a nursery of sorts, an incubator, in which each of us may first uncurl, then stretch, and finally rise up into the business of growing holy before God. Whatever we plot to do with and to the Earth is always to be measured by what pursuing such an action will do to human souls and their progress toward living fully into the image of God. And I would submit that, in the final analysis, such a gauge is the only sustainable one, simply because it alone is a benison upon all God's peoples, whether they be Abrahamic or not.
— written for The Sierra Club and published by them in Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation, edited by Lyndsay Moseley and the staff of Sierra Club Books, 2008.
* * *
Tickle often writes philosophically, and these ruminations are frequently poetic, with a deep sense of wonder. On these occasions, she seems to write not only to instruct, but to move and inspire. Here are two examples.
THE SACRED IS OUR TRUE HOME
The sacred is a structural given in our being, very much indeed like one's cardiovascular system or the sun that for so many human eons has served as symbol to the sacred. Like those things, the sacred can be perceived but never embraced, for it and they are as fundamentally and inextricably woven into life as its perfume is into a flower or its meaning is into a word. Yet just as we know ourselves to have moved into and through the perfume of the sweet spring daffodils or to have named and passed on an articulated idea, so too we know when we have "moved" into the sacred, for the sacred is most frequently referenced by us as geography.
It is the words and metaphors of place with which we discuss the sacred and by means of which we see ourselves as able to engage it; although at the very moment in which we speak of that "otherness" as another world, we know in ourselves the hollowness of such a naming, for the sacred is "place" as no Earth place is. Like the womb that we cannot remember, the sacred is itself. Its placeness is its aliveness, and all our words are thereby frustrated. Weary of too much trying, we finally fall back upon natural geography and talk, half angrily at times, about paths and journeys and quests, about states of being and realms, the City of God, Paradise and the garden of beginning, the wonderland on the side of the mirror, the land of Narnia, and Tolkein's mountain. The list is endless. But it is all geography, all the vocabulary and symbolic reductions of geography, and all of the reductions as perfectly accurate as they are inadequate; yet we can do no better.
So the sacred then is, for us in our limitations, a world apart, a living place in the body of living that is both the containing and the contained. It is a garden, well tended and dew cleansed. Or it is the cleared and sun-warmed piazza of an alabaster palace. Or it is a fecund, calm jungle with bowered paths and still pools; or the secrecy of a favored copse filled with the half-light of cool, moist greens and the dark crevices of shadow. But always — whatever the image of the heart's moment — always the sacred is a place of strange community where what communes lacks body but exists and is perceived as personed, the whole sweetness of its communion being as nondiscursive as music and as understandable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Phyllis Tickle by Jon M. Sweeney. Copyright © 2015 Tickle, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Orbis Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Sources viii
Acknowledgments x
Phyllis Tickle's Life and Work: A Chronological Overview xi
Introduction: Rare Tickle xv
1 Surprise and Wonder 1
The Cranes (poem) 1
In the Beginning, Eden 2
The Sacred Is Our True Home 8
Admission to the Sacred Presupposes Reverence 10
The Day of Slaughter 12
To My Pear Trees 21
For Wade (poem) 23
Name This Child 24
Human Life Cannot End 27
2 Stories and Sins 28
An Easter Apology to My Guineas (poem) 28
Pagans and Patriarchs 29
The Story of Two Johns [Fiction] 31
The Sign of the Eagle 35
Patron Saints and a Story of Grief 40
The Wake (poem) 43
A Ditty (poem) 43
My Childhood Gods 44
Religion Is My Passion 46
Dusky, Brooding Days of Early Lent 49
Final Sanity 50
Afternoon Social, Lucy Methodist Church (poem) 53
Lucy at Dusk (poem) 53
Commencement Address, Samford University-December 15, 2001 54
Six Essentials for Passing on the Faith 62
Bible Stories Your Mother Never Told You 65
Something It Is in Us That Sins 68
3 Prayer-Fixed -Hour and Otherwise 71
Lent (poem) 71
Praying in Closets 72
When Answers Wither the Elegance of a Mystery 74
My Part 79
A Brief History of Fixed-Hour Prayer 81 How Beautiful upon the Mountains 89
4 The Great Emergence 94
The Fundamentalist (poem) 94
For the Love of Theology 94
Today's Church in America 96
We Live in a Rupturous, Configuring Time 108
Liturgy and Cultural Engagement 110
Looking for the Real Jesus 120
Enter Pentecostalism 122
Leaving Grandma in the Rearview Mirror 125
Hyphenated Emergents (A Homily) 127
Once upon a Time There Was a House 131
A Prayer 134
5 The Old, Old Story 137
Religion 101-102 (poem) 137
The Sacred Is 138
Why Atheism Cannot Replace Religion 139
I Wish I'd Known 139
On Just Such a Morning 141
What Jesus' Sayings Really Mean 143
Rendering in Our Times 144
A Study on the Lord's Prayer 150
Speaking in God's Language 151
The Nakedness of Easter 156
The Rugged Grandeur of Jesus 157
The Necropolis at Our House 158
What Makes a Sacred Story "Sacred"? 161