LOVE AND DEATH

January 2, 2000

Westron wind, when wilt thou blow?

The small rain down can rain.

Christ, that my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

Well, here we are, if not exactly in the new millenium, at least in the first year beginning with 2000. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel much different. Oh, on one level I suppose the year 2000 seemed impossibly far away, especially when I was a child. Let’s see, I would be, how old? But now that it’s actually here, it doesn’t seem so strange after all. And better than the alternative.

One thing about which I’m pretty certain. Human nature is not going to change overnight, just because another millennial milestone has been reached. Not much has changed at all since the anonymous author of the medieval lyric with which I opened my sermon this morning put his or her poignant lines down on whatever writing surface was available in that time.

The great themes of poetry and life do not change. Nor do the great themes of religion, which are really one and the same. The great Rabbi Hillel, echoing Jesus, once said that the essence of all the law and the prophets was "love to God and neighbor": all else, he said, was "commentary."

In a recent presentation of poetry before the Women’s Alliance of this church, I came across a definition of poetry by the late contemporary American poet James Dickey which has stuck with me since. "The great themes of poetry," wrote Dickey, "are the inevitability of death and the possibility of love." But aren’t these also, I thought, the great themes of religion, and of life itself?

My old professor of English literature at the University of Maine, Carroll Terrell, once made the statement in a poetry class that "all great literature is religious." I’ve never forgotten it, and as most of you know by now, literature, and poetry in particular, is one of my greatest sources for religious inspiration. (And, by the way, I consider the Bible to be one of the world’s greatest works of literature.)

Love and death, as I see it, are really the only themes. And like Hillel, I might ask, isn’t all else commentary? For what is hate, if not a perversion of love? And what is the love of life, if not a response to the foreknowledge of our own demise? What is art, if not the attempt to come to terms with this reality of love and death? What is evil, if not the perversion of life? What is beauty, if not our response to what we love, and our knowledge of its impermanence? And as my colleague Forrester Church has written with truth, what is religion, if not our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die?

The problem, you see, is that I cannot separate my religion from the facts of life. Religion, like literature, is a response to those two great realities of life, which James Dickey has so accurately described: the inevitability of death and the possibility of love. All great literature is religious, and so is all of life.

The poet who wrote "Western Wind" around the turn of the last millenium knew this well. In literature, the west--direction of the setting sun--is a common metaphor for death. Westron wind, when wilt thou blow? thus becomes the question upon all our lips. As Jesus is said to have noted, none of us knows the day or hour. Across nearly a millenium we well understand the desolation of which the poet speaks in the simple phrase, The small rain down can rain. Those words really say it all, don’t they? We imagine ourselves drenched to the skin and bone cold,--nothing worse!

And then the pleading, almost prayer: Christ, that my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again. To me that poem just about says it all. There have been a million poems since, but those quintessential themes of love and death are there in this little anonymous lyric. The poem captures in its few words what it feels like to be alive, to know the possibility of love, and to face the reality of one’s own death.

The Victorian English poet Christina Rossetti captures it, too, in her "Song":

When I am dead my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet:

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise or set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

And what more poignant recognition of those two great realities of life than the death of a beloved child? The Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson knew it first hand, and wrote of it in his poem "On My First Son":

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:

Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O could I lose all father now! for why

Will man lament the state he should envy,

To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,

And, if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such

As what he loves may never like too much.

And yet, the poets have found humor in our situation, too, and in the threat of death the best reason for love. Carpe diem! is the call, "live for today," for tomorrow, some inevitable tomorrow, you must die. Andrew Marvell, Jonson’s younger contemporary, said it best in a poem "To His Coy Mistress":

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Gange’s side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

The Latin poet Horace, over two millennia ago, said much the same, though in a more world-weary tone, in his reassuring ode to his merchant friend Thaliarchus:

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.

See how the laboring overladen trees

Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.

Bring in the wood and light the fire and open

The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars.

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,

Forget tomorrow. Leave it to the gods.

Once the gods have decided, the winds at sea

Will quiet down, and the sea will quiet down,

And these cypresses and old ash trees will shake

In the storm no longer. Take everything as it comes.

Put down in your books as profit every new day

That Fortune allows you to have. While you’re still young,

And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing andthere’s music,

There are young people out in the city squares together

As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

The late Jane Kenyon also knew that we must live and love in the moment, for someday it will be "Otherwise":

I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

And so, too, shall it be for us, one day. The millenia come and they go, but we are left with our uncomfortable paradoxes. We can know the possibility of love, but one day all that we love will perish. We shall die, but in the meantime we can live, and laugh, and love. All the poets have said as much, and all the sages and prophets the world has ever known have agreed.

So let this be our New Year’s wish: to take our lives in hand, and live them well, on this day and in the days to come. This day is what we have, and only we can make the possiblity of love a reality in our lives. My friend Philip Booth says it well, and so I end with his words.

Given this day, none

better, I stretch to

let trees revive me;

I allow the dead

recall themselves;

I behold nothing,

forgive God; I tell

myself to change

be native: I bare

myself, sleep moved

by stars, take dreams

toward morning; I want

with trees to affect

the day: to lend joy,

accept pain, give

without question;

as trees, beyond doubt,

face prevailing light,

I let love wake me:

I extend myself to

every reflection, as

I have to, to feel for

the planet: nowhere

better, with nothing

to lose, than here

to give thanks

life takes place.

Amen

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock