GETTING READY, PART ONE

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

                            ~Emily Dickinson[i]

Getting ready is, for me at least, just about the hardest part of this art of being with others in a Godly Play way. And so, getting ready is one aspect of the art for which I go to the poets for instruction. They are used to waiting—for the Muse, or the words, to come.  Like the prophets they pay attention. They anticipate that something is about to happen, that the circle of meaning is about to open. They fish for revelation in any stream of thought or experience that comes to hand.  They must be patient, and I suppose to some extent foolhardy. Or maybe I ought to say faithful. But the main thing is they leave behind their poems, little altars of remembrance.

This time of year we are getting ready. (Some of us are still trying to get ready even though we've already begun!) So, the first thing that's needful, as we've often been reminded, is to check ourselves first.

Am I ready? Ready for what? is my usual first, petulant, internal response.

Ready to enter? To come close to a mystery? To a roomful of mysteries? Ready to play the Ultimate Game? For itself? And if we ask children to leave their distracting little amusements at the threshold with the doorperson, what is it that we ask ourselves to leave behind as we pass through?

Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education, aka The Blue Book, came to me 16 years ago this fall, when I was very blue—a collapsed mess, in fact. It came with an invitation to join the children of the Sunday School rather than sit in with the sleek, glamorous and accomplished adults of the tony suburban Seattle parish to which my wife and I had come with our young daughter. My intention had been to put 3,000 miles between myself and the painful realization that I lacked the necessary clues for how to succeed as a professional artist in idyllic but isolated northern Vermont. Instead I was surrounded by the kinds of people I perceived I might have become had I taken another path after graduating college than that of apprenticing myself to an eccentric, contrarian, classical realist painter in New York City.

At first, I will confess, I agreed to be with children to escape being with adults--those adults, at any rate. But as I read through Jerome's book I found myself caught out: my motives of avoidance were being laid bare. Would it be possible for me to become the kind of adult that children really needed? What reconciled me to the work came in the closing paragraph:

Godly Play and the theology of childhood are especially relevant for our time because many adults are now discovering that they are grounded in a false self.  They sense that there is another and truer self they have covered over by always being what others wanted them to be.  The inner child awaiting discovery is full of energy, creative, spontaneous, and deeply centered. The theology of childhood is about children and adults discovering that child. Godly play is a way to keep open the opportunity for the true self to emerge in childhood and the possibility that adults may return to where they began and begin to grow again.[ii]

The unarticulated intimation of these words, working in me, was that I was being offered a way to set down two perceived burdens, responsibility for self and responsibility for children, my own daughter among them, and to instead enter into a hitherto undisclosed relationship of mutual blessing. This promised to be an easier yoke indeed.

I really am trying to get back to the Emily Dickinson poem above. I can't quite make the claim that I am slyly following her injunction to "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—" bewilderment more often "in Circuit lies." At any rate, what this little poem does for me is to remind me to leave, not my adulthood exactly, but my adult self-consciousness, my big person advantage, my professional self-importance, my grown-up wisdom, my pride, my at times desperate thirst to be a Somebody! at the threshold.

Playful, childlike, deceptively simple: much of Dickinson's work reminds me of the discipline of haiku, of paring a deep Aha! or Aah! or Haha! moment down to just 17 syllables. Sally Thomas shared with us in Colorado Springs how she had taken on a haiku discipline as a response to her own contemplative prayer practice, reducing the fruits of a meditation to that same limited pattern of phonemes. (Forgive me, Sally, if I misrepresent; better yet, correct me.) At times, Dickinson's dashes serve for me as symbols of elision, the dismissing of all the words that were unnecessary, leaving a necessary silence in between. We are challenged by her work to take on the same discipline, as storytellers but also as adult guides who must learn how to leave all the unnecessary selves at the door.

A longer way into this insight comes for me in one of the Taoist parables in Thomas Merton's transliterations of The Way of Chuang Tzu.[iii]  It is called "The Fasting of the Heart," and is too long for me to type out in its entirety here. A disciple, his master's favorite, who believes himself "ready" to go out and change the world, comes to Confucius for a blessing. Instead, Confucius thoroughly dismantles all his strategies for improving others in short order, until the abashed disciple must confess, "Well, that is the best I have to offer. Will you, Master, tell me what you suggest?" Confucius counsels fasting. "Do you know what I mean by fasting? It is not easy. But easy ways do not come from God." Again, the disciple goes off on a tangent, recounting self-righteously his impoverished childhood and its privations.  But, Confucius says, this is not the fasting of the heart.

I'll pick up the actual text at this point in the story, because it's available online. The emphasis is mine:

"Tell me," said Yen Hui, "what is fasting of the heart?"

Confucius replied. "The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing, but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; hearing with the spirit, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupation. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom."

"I see," said Yen Hui. "What was standing in my way was my own self-awareness. If I can begin this fasting of the heart, self-awareness will vanish. Then I will be free from limitation and preoccupation! Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," said Confucius, "that's it! If you can do this, you will be able to go among men in their world without upsetting them. You will not enter into conflict with their ideal image of themselves. If they will listen, sing them a song. If not, keep silent. Don't try to break down their door. Don't try out new medicines on them. Just be there among them, because there is nothing else for you to be but one of them. Then you may have success!

It is easy to stand still and leave no trace, but it is hard to walk without touching the ground. If you follow human methods, you can get away with deception. In the way of Tao, no deception is possible.

You know that one can fly with wings: you have not yet learned about flying without wings. You are familiar with the wisdom of those who know, but you have not yet learned the wisdom of those who know not.

Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light it becomes an influence by which others are secretly transformed."[iv]

In other words...Trust the process? Or, get out of the way?

Again, back to Dickinson's poem. But this time to another, earlier, version. (There are often two versions[v], and the one at the top of this post is the later, revised one.) Here's the earlier draft, one that features more of her trademark punctuation, the dash:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—Too?

Then there's a pair of us?

Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one's name—the livelong June—

To an admiring  Bog![vi]

There are, for me, some startling differences in this version. The capitalizations, the dashes, the question marks, the change of vocabulary together strike a different mood.  Nobody, like the Tao in Merton's words, "is a name that indicates without defining." The public Somebody is one who has forgotten, again in Merton's words, "the meaning of sincerity," which is to "guard against display." There is more tentativeness here, in the pausing of the dashes, in the punctuated questioning. Almost a fragility in the forging of a connection. The choice of "advertise," commuted later to banishment, speaks to me of the dangers of celebrity. One thinks of Dickinson's self-banishment, her increasing reclusiveness, and that, of the almost 1,800 poems attributed to her, she allowed only a few to be published during her lifetime, and those anonymously. She approaches the title of Poet with great ambivalence in some of her verse, and goes so far as to say, in one of her briefest lyrics:

To see the Summer Sky

Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—

True Poems flee—[vii]

This advertising can take the form in the work we share of having to prove somehow to parents and other adults that what is happening in the Godly Play hour needs somehow to be validated by tangible evidence—the right kind of picture produced during the work time, the right kind of meaning or theological principle learned and parroted back. How can we get ready for the unnoticed to pass between us in the circle, the more real for its not being conducive to display? Here, as often elsewhere in her work, I find Emily Dickinson to be a devotee and master of this game of hide-and-seek with the Elusive Presence, revealing little flashes of i-thou encounter in the midst of a dreary I-It world.

The substitution of "June" for "day" adds greater poignancy to the image of the frog. Years ago, a naturalist led me to a real woodland bog in Vermont. We walked out onto the verge of dense floating sphagnum, dotted with pitcher plants, a clearing in the wood. It was absolutely still, except for a slight gurgling at our feet. And so, at first, my feeling for the Somebody Frog was pity at the loneliness of croaking one's name into the admiring, because speechless, void. But finding recently this earlier version of the poem, I realized that my bog memory came from late summer, early fall, when all the woodland voices had been silenced. The mad land rush, the cacophony of territoriality and courtship, is the province of June alone, and this realization has added a layer of competitive urgency and an alarming brevity to the lust for Fame. From Somebody! Frog to Poor Deluded Embattled Somebody Frog! Mon semblable, mon frère.

Getting ready. To come into the circle and seek the wisdom of those who know not.  To be one with, because, finally, there is nothing else but that to become. To be complicit in this game of hide-and-seek for the deus absconditus atque praesens.  To wait and watch for the True Poems as they pass, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. To step aside from one's Somebodyness, and to extend that same grace to the others in the circle. That is, to shed one's own projections upon the others in the circle, the ones who did thus and so yesterday or last week or last year. To allow all in the circle the privilege of being Nobody, indicated without being defined. Whether meeting children or trainees in a Godly Play circle, or my adolescent students on a dark and rainy Northwestern Monday morning, or my wife and daughter at the breakfast table, I need to remember that every day Grace permits us to begin again.

So many words to introduce so few. Maybe Sally should be doing this. You'd probably get something much pithier than the only haiku I can squeeze out of all this pulp in the timeframe I've given myself:

Getting ready is—

Not becoming the Wise One—

But being one with—

I'd like to return to Dickinson later. Harold Bloom, quoted in Michael Dirda's review in the Washington Post of Vendler's book, called her "the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries." Her work can turn everything upside down and inside out with a surprising economy of words. One contemporary Massachusetts poet who shares this gift is Franz Wright, and I hope to share some of his words in a later post as well.

So, I wonder what you wonder, about this poem, about this post, about getting ready?

Until next week, God willing.

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[i] Cited here: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/nobody.html  At the bottom of this webpage are a list of other Dickinson poems online, as well as an overview of her life and work. For those interested in going deeper, literary critic Helen Vendler has a new book out: Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010. At times, Vendler characterizes poems as "blasphemous;" elsewhere she suggests that Dickinson is "the unbeliever commenting on the deluded faithful." Please don't be put off! I wonder, timorously and completely without scholarly credentials, whether her poems could also be viewed as reactions against the rigid theologies of her Puritan upbringing and milieu. Wonder can make a bigger meal of doubt than of certainty. Often I hear her voice and meaning echoed in the poems of another Massachusetts poet, Mary Oliver, who is another psalmist of the elusive God of power and mystery encountered in Nature.

2 Berryman, Jerome. Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991. p. 158.

3 Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Boston: Shambala, 1992. p. 70. I will surely come back to this little book in the future, as there is much in it to help us get ready.

[iv] http://chippit.tripod.com/fasting.html

[v] See Michael Dirda's review in The Washington Post of Helen Vendler's book, cited above, which references the two principal editions of Dickinson's poems, the earlier reproducing her earlier drafts, the more recent giving the revised versions, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/08/AR2010090806543.html

[vi] Taken from my Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition, Dickinson: Poems. New York: Knopf, 1993. p. 127.

[vii] Ibid. p. 19.