by Thomas Lynch
At the end, all of his prayers have been reduced to thanks. All of the answers have become you’re welcome.
MIRACLES
Our tribe did not read the Bible. We got it in doses, daily or weekly, from a priest bound by the lectionary to give us bits and pieces in Collects, Epistles, Gospels and Graduals, which, along with Confiteor and Kyrie, formed the front-loaded, word-rich portion of the Tridentine Mass. These were followed by sacred table work and common feed, to wit laving and consecration, communion, thanksgiving and benediction. On Sundays, it’d all be seasoned with some lackluster homiletics—linked haphazardly to the scriptures on the day. These liturgies were labor-intensive, heavy on metaphor and stagecraft, holy theater. Possibly this is why few priests put much time into preaching, preferring, as the writing workshops say, “to show rather than to tell.”
Still, we knew the stories: Eden and the apple, the murderous brother, the prodigal son, floods and leviathans, mangers and magi, scribes and Pharisees and repentant thieves. I remember my excitement, the first time I heard about the woman washing the savior’s feet with her tears and wiping them with her long hair and anointing them with perfume. My father, a local undertaker, was especially fond of Joseph of Arimathea and his sidekick, Nicodemus, who’d bargained with Pilate for the corpse of Christ and tended to the burial of same, in Joseph’s own tomb, newly hewn from rock, “in keeping with the customs of the Jews.” My father claimed this “a corporal work of mercy.” This he’d been told by the parish priest, who furthermore gave him what my father called “a standing dispensation,” from attendance at Mass whenever he was called, as he fairly often was, to tend to the dead and the bereaved on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation.
The biblical narratives were told and retold through our formative years at school, by nuns who had done their little bit of editing and elaboration, the better to fit the predicaments of our station. And though we had a Bible at home—an old counter-Reformation, Douay-Rheims translation from the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome’s fourth-century text—we never read the thing. It was a holy knickknack, like the statue of the Blessed Mother, the picture of the Sacred Heart, the tabletop manger scene that came out for Christmas, the crucifixes over each of our bedroom doors, the holy water font at the front door—all designed to suit our daily devotional lives. We prayed the family rosary in May and October, kept the fasts and abstinences of Lent and Advent along with whatever novena was in fashion and most likely to inure to our spiritual betterments. We abstained from meat on Friday, confessed our sins on Saturdays, kept holy the Sabbath, such as we knew it, and basked in the assurance that ours was the one true faith. Ours was a Holy, Roman, Irish-American, postwar-baby-booming, suburban family—sacramental, liturgical, replete with none-too-subtle guilt and shaming, the big magic of transubstantiation, binding and loosing, the true presence, cardinal sins, contrary virtues, states of grace and the hope for salvation. Litanies and chaplets stood in for scriptures and hermeneutics. That was a thing the “other crowd” did, God-help-them, bound to their idolatries about the Good Book, lost, we reckoned, in the error of their ways.
I memorized, through the weekly instructions of Fr. Thomas Kenny, the responses to the priests’ incantations at Mass, attracted as I was to the stately cadences of Latin and the mystery of a secret language. I took up my service as an altar boy at age seven, sharing duties for the 6:20 A.M. Mass with my brothers, Dan and Pat, a year older and younger, respectively, three weeks out of every four, at our parish church, St. Columban’s. Then we’d hustle off to Holy Name School across town where the day’s tutelage began with a students’ Mass at 8:15 read by the saintly, white-maned Monsignor Paddock, beneath a huge mosaic on the general theme, the good sisters told us, of the Eucharist.
Old Melchizedek was on one side and Abraham and Isaac on the other, prefiguring the Risen Christ on his cross occupying the mosaic space between them—each a different version of priesthood, sacrifice and Eucharist. This was the image I stared at all through the mornings of my boyhood, never knowing the chapters or verses I might have read for a more fulsome understanding of it all, how Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son prefigured the death of Jesus on the cross; how the bloody business of worship and communion became the loaf and cup of the Last Supper and the priesthood of Melchizedek became the holy orders of churchmen down through the centuries. Priesthood is something I understood in the cassocked and collared, biretta-topped celibates, the parish priests and curates, Jesuits and Franciscans in their habits who’d heard the voice of God—their vocation—and answered the call.
By twenty I was happily apostate, having come into my disbelief some few years after puberty, when a fellow pilgrim showed me all that she could on the exquisite mysteries of life. If the nuns had been wrong about sex, and they surely had been, it followed, I reasoned, they were wrong on other things.
“Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?” Jesus asks the naysaying elders in Capernaum, in Mark’s telling of the healing of a paralytic. They are trying to catch his blaspheming out, in the way we are always conniving against our spiritual betters.
I’d been named for a dead priest—my father’s late Uncle Tom—and for the famously skeptical apostle, whose finger and dubiety still hover over the wounds of Christ, waiting, in the words of that great evangelist and voodoo economist, Ronald Reagan, to “trust but verify.” True to which code, I questioned everything.
The deaths of innocents, the random little disasters that swept young mothers to their dooms in childbirth, their infants to their sudden crib deaths, young lovers to their demises in cars, perfect strangers to their hapless ends, seemed more evidence than anyone should need that whoever is in charge of these matters had a hit-and-miss record on humanity.
My work—I eventually got about my father’s business—put me in earshot, albeit over corpses, of some of the best preaching on theodicy available. The Book of Job, however god-awful and comfortless it is, remained for me a testament of faith: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Nonetheless, I remained devoutly lapsed in my confession and praxis.
So I was fairly shocked when, years later, having achieved the rank of former husband and custodial father, small-town undertaker and internationally ignored poet, I got a call from one of my fellow Rotarians to say they were looking for “a good Catholic to join their Bible study.”
“Let me know if you find one,” is what I answered and we both laughed a little, but he persisted. “No, really, you’ll like it. We’re going to meet at the Big Boy Diner on Tuesday mornings at half past six. We’ll be done by eight so everyone can get to work.” Before I had time to construct a proper excuse he said, “See you then!” and hung up the phone.
What harm, I thought, it’ll never last. A god-awful hour and a crummy eatery, not a great book, if a “good” one—like cocker spaniels, serviceable but ineluctably dull.
That was going on thirty years ago. Our little study has outlived the restaurant, the Rotary, a few of our roughly dozen charter members, our denominations and divided politics, and still we meet—at my funeral home now—every early Tuesday morning, every season, every weather, to read and discuss various books of the Bible. We’ve done everything from Genesis to Revelation, all of the Gospels, some extra-canonical texts, the letters of Paul. Job we’ve done three times, James maybe twice. We’ll likely never do the Apocalypse again.
I only go to church now for baptisms, funerals or weddings. The mysteries of birth and death and sex are regular enough that I count as friends the neighborhood’s clergy, whose personal charities and heroics I’ve been eyewitness to for many years. But dogma and dicta defy sound reason, and the management class of the Church, all churches, seems uniquely wrongheaded and feckless. What’s more, my own views on same-sex marriage, the ordination of women, priestly celibacy and redemptive suffering would put me so sufficiently at odds with them as to render me, no doubt, an ex-communicant.
Oddly enough, the less observant I became, in belief or de
votion, the better the “good” book seemed to me. I didn’t need the religious epic so much as a good story, something to share, a party piece.
I can’t remember not knowing about the healing of the paralytic, whether I heard it at Mass or from one of the nuns or Christian Brothers who were in charge of my education or read it as part of our Bible study. There it is, in three Gospels out of four, the details more or less the same. It is one of the three dozen or so miracle stories that punctuate the New Testament, from changing water into wine at Cana, calming the storm and filling the fishnets, to healing of lepers and the blind and lame and raising the dead, himself included. There are endless demons and devils cast out, sins forgiven, apparitions after his death. It was a poem in a book published a few years back that brought it newly to life for me.
The last time I heard Seamus Heaney read was in the Glenn Memorial Chapel at Emory University. It was and remains a Methodist church, which doubles as an auditorium for gatherings of a certain size. It was the 2nd of March of 2013 and I was occupying the McDonald Family Chair, a cushy sinecure with the Candler School of Theology at Emory, teaching a course with the great preacher and theologian Thomas Long on “The Poetics of the Sermon.” Dr. Long and I were just putting the final touches on a book we’d coauthored called The Good Funeral, due out later that year and written for clergy, mere mortals and mortuary sorts. And I was learning words like exegesis and hermeneutics and studying the dynamics of fiction, which Dr. Long regarded as a workable template for homiletics. We examined narrative arc and point of view, plot and character and setting. We read poems and short fictions and published sermons.
I was delighted that Heaney would be coming to town. His had been the most amplified and ever-present voice of my generation of poets. His work, since I first encountered it forty-five years ago, reading by the fire in the ancestral home in County Clare I would later inherit, had never failed to return a rich trove of the word horde and metaphoric treasures. Because so much of his poetry came out of a Catholic upbringing in rural Ireland, he became for me a useful guide for the parish of language and imagination.
Possibly because I first encountered prayer as poetry, or at least as language cast in rhyme and meter, addressed to the heavens as a sort of raised speech, poetry had always seemed sacerdotal, proper for addressing the mysteries of happenstance and creation. That Heaney held the natural world and human work—the chore and toil of the mundane, earthbound and near-to-hand—in awe and reverence, seemed more attuned to the holy than the politicized religiosity of the culture. Still, the Latin I’d learned as an altar boy in the 1950s, the sacraments, devotions and sensibilities I’d been raised with found many echoes in the early poems of the Irish master, even if my own life’s experience and further examinations of scripture and secular texts had left me apostate. Though freighted with doubts and wonders and religiously adrift, I treasured the language of faith as an outright gift—the hymns of Charles Wesley, the angel-wrestling contemplations of John Calvin, the exile and anchoritic adventures of Columcille, and the rubrics of holy women and men—I retained some level of religious literacy given me by nuns and Christian Brothers, but I rejected the magisterium of the church. By the time I’d arrived at Emory in the late winter of 2013, I was deeply devoted to a church of latter-day poets, skeptics and noncompliant but kindly sorts. The irony of such a backslidden fellow as myself teaching at a school of theology named for the Methodist bishop and first chancellor of Emory, whose brother was the owner of our national sugar water, Coca-Cola, was not lost on me. Though I had been schooled in my apostasy by H. L. Mencken, Robert Ingersoll, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and by the feckless malfeasance of bishops and abusive priests, I had also witnessed, over four decades in funeral service, the everyday heroics of the reverend clergy and their co-religionists. These were men and women of faith who showed up whenever there was trouble. Their best preaching was done when the chips were down, in extremis, at death beds, in the hospitals and nursing homes and family homes and funeral homes. They pitch in and do their part even though they cannot fix the terrible things that happen. They are present, they pray, they keep open the possibility of hope. And I’d been schooled by my semester among the Methodists and seminarians at Emory, and by my friendship with The Reverend Thomas Long, whose scholarship and work in words has re-formed me in a way I thought impossible.
Thus Heaney’s reading from the raised sanctuary of Glenn Memorial Chapel seemed a “keeping holy” of a Sabbath, and his poems, portions of a sacred text. And when he said, deep into what would be one of his last public readings, that he’d like to read some poems from his “last book,” and then corrected himself to say, “my most recent collection . . .” I thought the insertion of the shadow of death was a deft touch by a seasoned performer of his work. It is also true that his “most recent collection,” Human Chain, seemed so haunted a book, dogged by death and impendency and the urgency of last things.
On that day he read one of my favorites of his poems. “Miracle” proposes a shift of focus in the scriptural story of Jesus healing the paralytic, my favorite rendition of which occurs in Mark 2:1–12. Jesus is preaching in Capernaum and the crowd is so great, filling the room and spilling out the door into the street, that four men bringing the paralytic to be healed have to hoist him up to the roof, remove the roof tiles, or dig through the sod and lower him down on his bed by ropes, whereupon Jesus, impressed by their faith, tells the poor cripple his sins are forgiven. Of course, the begrudgers among them—and there are always begrudgers—begin to mumble among themselves about blasphemy, because “Who can forgive sins but God, alone?” Jesus questions them, saying which is easier, by which he means the lesser miracle—“to say, ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’?” It is, of course, a trick question.
Because forgiveness seems impossible, whether to give it or to receive it, and impossible to see. It would always take a miracle. Nor is God the only one capable of forgiving. Do we not pray to be forgiven our trespasses “as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Who among us is not withered and weighed down by the accrual of actual or imagined slights, betrayals, resentments, estrangements and wrongdoings done unto us most often by someone we’ve loved. And in ways I needn’t number, we’re all paralyzed, hobbled by our grievances and heartbreaks, by the press of sin, the failure of vision, by fear, by worry, by anxieties about the end.
Whereas the scripture directs our attention to the paralytic, and to the quibbles between Jesus and the scribes, Heaney’s poem bids us be mindful of the less-learned toil and utterly miraculous decency of “the ones who have known [us] all along,” who lift us up, bear us in our brokenness, and get us where we need to go. On any given day it seems miracle enough.
The everyday and deeply human miracle, void of heavenly hosts or interventions, has special meaning for Heaney who, in August of 2006, woke up in a guest house in Donegal paralyzed by a stroke. He had attended the birthday party for Anne Friel, wife of the playwright and Heaney’s schoolmate and lifelong friend, Brian Friel. After the night’s festivities the Heaneys were spending the night with other friends and fellow poets in the local B&B. He awakened to paralysis on the left side of his body. So it was his wife, Marie, and Des and Mary Kavanagh, Peter and Jean Fallon and Tom Kilroy—ones who had known him all along—who helped strap him onto the gurney and get him down the steep stairs, out of the building and into the waiting ambulance to ride with his wife to Letterkenny Hospital. In the poem, which took shape in the weeks of what he called “rest cure” in the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook, in Dublin, the narrative power proceeds not to “the one who takes up his bed and walks,” rather to “the ones who have known him all along and carry him in—” who do the heavy lifting of his care and transport. They are the agents of rescue and restoration, their faithful friendship miraculous and salvific. Their hefting and lifting and large muscle work is the stuff and substance of salvation. Here is the short poem.
MI
RACLE
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in—
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
This language of shoulders, aching backs and waiting for the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool honors the hands-on, whole-body habits of human labor that the poet learned as a farm boy in Derry. From comparing his father’s spade work in the turf bog to his own excavations in meaning and language in his poem “Digging,” to the town and country indentures of blacksmithing, well-gazing and kite-flying at the end of Human Chain, Heaney’s work upholds the holiness of human labor and the sacred nature of the near-to-hand.
Hearing its maker read “Miracle” from the pulpit at Emory put me in mind of my conversation with him at the funeral of our friend Dennis O’Driscoll, who had died less than three months before, on Christmas Eve, 2012, and was buried near his home in Naas, County Kildare.
Seamus had been Dennis’s principal eulogist on the day, just as Dennis had been Heaney’s most insightful interlocutor. His book of interviews with Heaney, Stepping Stones, is the nearest thing to an autobiography we will ever have of the Nobel Laureate and more thoroughly than ever examines the life of the man in relation to the work.
