March 3, 2019 Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
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“Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
Mary Oliver
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“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
These are some of the best known words of the poet Mary Oliver who died this past January. Mary Oliver attended an Episcopal church, but many call her the unofficial poet laureate of Unitarian Universalists. Three of her poems are in the back of our hymnal, and she was invited to be our esteemed Ware lecturer at our General Assembly in 2006.
As a woman named Marcia wrote recently on a blog posting asking Unitarian Universalists to comment about the prevalence of Mary Oliver poetry in their worship services, “All I know is that when people ask me if we read from the bible during worship services, i say ‘Yes, but not as often as we read mary oliver.’ ((Commenter Marcia on “There’s Something About Mary,” PeaceBang blog, May 1, 2008. Spelling original. From Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein’s PeaceBang blog post which was originally a paper written for her doctoral program.))
Mary Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and The New York Times described her as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”
So why is Mary Oliver so precious to Unitarian Universalists, and what does she have to teach us?
Her poetry addresses questions that ground our search for truth and meaning:
What is holy? Who are we? What are we called to do with our lives? What is death?
And her answers to these questions come out of a theology that is resonant with many Unitarian Universalists – transcendentalist, neo-pagan, agnostic, sometimes theistic.
In particular, she is exceptional at conveying the presence of the holy in our communing with nature. Her poems transport us to a raw, sensual, earthly delight for living in this world.
Her poems make me think of a video clip my family has of my grandmother – at 50 years old – emerging from beneath the boughs of a tree, her cupped hands filled with just-picked pears, sunbeams shining down on her face, just beginning to show signs of age, and her smile brimming with delight.
Many of us aren’t exactly sure how to name god, but we have found something approaching the sacred in nature. Oliver often wrote out in nature during long walks. She said that she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck in that place again without a way to write.
In this poem she uses the lowercase spelling of god:
The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice…
Her God is sometimes something out there – but also sometimes something immanent, infusing and saturating everything. It’s both.
She dissolves the dualism that so many UUs also resist.
We say:
It’s not true that the sacred is here but not there. It’s not true that some distant afterlife is holy, but not this worldly life. It’s not true that the spirit is holy, but not the body. It’s not true that the future is holy but not this very present moment.
Nonduality is a radical concept – because, for example, if it’s true that God is everywhere, what does that mean?
Here’s a poem from her collection Evidence which I’ll read in full (although I lament her use of only the masculine pronoun)…
“At the River Clarion”
I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.
I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition.
2.
If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God) would sing to you if it could sing,
if you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn’t sing?
If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?
Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don’t know how you get to suspect such an idea.
I only know that the river kept singing.
It wasn’t a persuasion, it was all the river’s own constant joy
which was better by far than a lecture, which was comfortable, exciting, unforgettable.
3.
Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife also?
We do not live in a simple world.
4.
There was someone I loved who grew old and ill
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do
except to remember
that we receive
then we give back.
5.
My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest, she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows from wherever it comes from
to where it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn’t much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.
6.
Along its shores were, may I say, very intense cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them, for heaven’s sakes–
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
ideas, doubts, hesitations.
7.
And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
long journey, its pale, infallible voice
singing.
Within Mary Oliver’s immanent and transcendent theology, who are we and what are we called to do? ((Thank you to Rev. Kathleen McTigue for this question. McTigue, Kathleen; God of Dirt: Theology of Mary Oliver, sermon delivered on May 7 2006 at the Unitarian Universalist Society of New Haven, CT))
Pay attention, she says.
“…to pay attention, this is our endless and proper work”
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver rarely gave interviews, but in one she talked about how her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, the photographer, taught her how to pay attention:
“…Watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.” ((https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/20/mary-oliver-molly-malone-cook-our-world/))
Mary Oliver
The Rev. Kathleen McTigue points out that Mary Oliver “carries this deliberate praise of the whole of creation to extremes that we might not imagine for ourselves – and then she makes them imaginable. In a poem about walking the beach after a storm, she writes about finding, cast up from the seabed, a dead sea mouse – something I had never heard of, and which her opening lines made me feel grateful I’d never seen” –
What lay this morning
on the wet sand
was so ugly
I sighed with a kind of horror as I lifted it
into my hand
and looked under the soaked mat of what was almost fur,
but wasn’t, and found
the face that has no eyes…toothless, legless, earless too…
“It sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel!” McTigue says, and then points out that just a few stanzas later at the end of the poem, Oliver writes:
Little mat, little blot, little crawler,
it lay in my hand
all delicate and revolting.
With the tip of my finger
I stroked it,
tenderly, little darling, little dancer
little pilgrim,
gray pouch slowly
filling with death.
You might be surprised to learn that Mary Oliver’s life was not idyllic. She didn’t talk much publicly about her childhood, except that her walks in the woods, her books, and her writing saved her from [quote] a “very dark and broken house.” “To this day, I don’t care for the enclosure of buildings,” she said. ((https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world-jan2019/)) “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.” ((https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/20/mary-oliver-molly-malone-cook-our-world/))
And in her adulthood, she fought lung cancer, and later on her spouse Molly died, plunging Oliver into deep grief, which she wrote about:
“Of course nothing stops the cold,/black, curved blade/from hooking forward — /of course/loss is the great lesson…”
But also she wrote:
…it’s true, isn’t it,
in our world,
that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns
are a single thing —
that even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness
would be without expression —
that love itself, without its pain, would be
no more than a shruggable comfort…
So there she is again fighting the dualism between light and dark, between death and life. Her observations of nature taught her that light and dark need each other, that life and death are part of one another.
So, many of us love Mary Oliver’s poetry because she shows us how to move through the world with attention, and how that attention ushers us into deep gratitude & confirms our at-home-ness in the world.
But before I close, I’ll include a moment of self-reflection for us Unitarian Universalists – something that sometimes gives me pause about our love –my love – for Mary Oliver.
My colleague Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein puts the challenge well: “[Perhaps UUs also love Mary Oliver because she] writes poetry that is almost entirely interior; preoccupied with private thoughts, feelings and reactions to her immediate natural surroundings. It is the rare poem that takes Oliver into an urban or even suburban setting or finds her among a group of other human beings. … ‘Oliver worship’ within Unitarian Universalism in the current era may represent, therefore, a holding onto rampant individualism and self-absorption that is currently being challenged by 21st century proponents of a far stronger community ethos in the denomination.” ((http://www.peacebang.com/category/the-church/unitarian-universalism/))
I think she is right – and yet, if we look at the kind of attention, the kind of loving presence, the grateful, humble spirit that Mary Oliver cultivates in her solitary observations of nature, or with her partner Molly…it’s all these same qualities we need to bring into our lives within the complex grittiness of community: loving attention, a grateful, humble spirit, the courage to see and to love.
And so I’ll end with one more poem, this one on death, by this poet Mary Oliver, who died two months ago at the age of 83.
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world
So let us live this life well. With a loving attention.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Benediction
Well, there is time left—
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!…
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
– Mary Oliver
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver