Zen Poems for Lent

A few weeks ago I went used bookstoring with Rich and the kids. Tucked away on a poetry shelf haphazardly stuffed between Ogden Nash and T. S. Eliot I found a book called Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill.¹

In this poetic tradition, poems are a kind of a last rite; a Zen master writes a death poem, or a series of death poems, when he knows he is about to die. The striking thing about them, though, is that they all express an overwhelming sense of peace. For example,

Lifting hands, I climb the South Star,
Then turn to lean against the North.
Step beyond the sky, look--
Where is there another like myself? (22)

is an expression of wonder, freedom, and joy from a 9th-century Chinese master. There’s nothing morbid or sentimental here.

The sartori, or enlightenment, poems are also fascinating and edifying. These poems are written to express a Truth hit upon in a single moment of contact with the Divine. This contact allows the student to see God all around him, even in the most mundane of objects and circumstances.

How can I tell what I've seen?
Fall, stand–it's clear at once.
Wearing my cowl backwards, I
Trample the old path. And the new. (50)

There I was, hunched over office desk,
Mind an unruffled pool.
A thunderbolt! My middle eye
Shot wide, revealing–my ordinary self. (14)

Obviously, the Zen understanding of the Divine is very different from the Christian understanding of God, but even so I find the spirituality of these poems compelling because of their quest for peace and their understanding of an omni-present Divine.

I’m going to show my heretical tendencies again, but I happen to believe that God is rather more mature than your average middle-schooler; when Jesus says “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks fines, and to the one who knocks it will be opened,” he doesn’t imply, “assuming that you come from the right continent and intellectual tradition.”² “Everyone” means everyone. So when genuine, devout men seek God (even from outside Judeo-Hellenist cultures), he answers them; their findings and experiences have value for all devout people.

For me, these poems exude peace, something I desperately need. The peace in them comes from a radical acceptance of the uncertainty and transience of life as not just unavoidable, but a part of its beauty. They also remind me of an understanding of God’s immediacy that I had as a child, but now—and I deeply regret this—only comes in fits and fleeting moments. I’ve loved reading these poems because they help me to remember, and in remembering to reclaim, what it is like to be blown away by God’s presence in the beauty and audacity of a blade of grass.

Footnotes:

¹ Lucein Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto trans. with Tiagan Takayama. Grove Press, New York 1973. I’ll use parenthetical references for page numbers throughout the post.

² Matthew 7:7-8, ESV

Lent

I read a fascinating blog post about Lent this morning (linkey linkey here). The author suggests that we should think about Lent as a time of focusing on what we need achieve virtue, which she defines as “the mean between two extremes” after Thomas Aquinas. She is mostly concerned with women who are self-destructive with their need to give things up—but her basic point is widely applicable.

Quote of the day

From Ship of fools:

This is a part of a piece on the King James Only movement (which is something of a straw man since King James Only Protestantism is a fringe group par excellence), but it still sums up the process of knowing God beautifully. I’ve removed the straw burning in order to highlight the useful observation.

Sane Christianity is above all a relationship with God and with other people. Being a relationship, it develops and changes, it grows and falters, it’s provisional and organic, its alive and elusive…

Unfortunately, the Bible, however mellifluously translated, can’t answer questions, clarify earlier statements, arbitrate disagreements or deal with new developments. If we’re not going to let popes and councils do these jobs, then we have to do them for ourselves. The fear of these rough edges and tricky patches … is in fact something that all of us know – how daunting it is to have responsibility for how we deal with the big questions of life.