The Elevated View: William Bronk

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

A poem by William Bronk

FOR ANY SPEAKERS

Oh, God, who in the night-quiet called
Samuel to you, call us then too
and in the day-noise call that, hearing you,
we may more plainly say the nameless name.

- in Life Supports: New and Collected Poems,
North Point Press, 1981

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Le Mont-Saint-Michel is the site of a Christian monastery that sat for a thousand years on a high tidal island just off the coast of western Normandy in France. It was established in the 8th century, and 300 years later, an Italian architect, William de Volpiano, laid out the Romanesque church of the abbey at the very top of the mount, assuring an expansive, elevated view across the farmland and hills of coastal France.

In 2008, I stood on the ramparts of that abbey and saw the same views that 35 generations of monks and soldiers had seen, and countless tourists since. The view toward the sea faces away from the light and is uneventful. So it is natural to look toward the light and toward civilization -- calling to mind what St. John the Revelator saw in his vision of "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea." Wilderness, wet or dry, is no longer our habitat. An earnest 20th century educator and historian of mysticism, F.C. Happold, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, once had a profound vision of intense, certain peace, and among the words he heard were these: "Those who sought the wood, found the city."

As I stood on Mont Saint Michel, I realized that its elevated view had probably been deliberate. However vaunted the spiritual vision that any monk might strive to attain, he would always be looking out at the land of his people, at all of us. He and his fellow monks would be trading with them, blessing them, giving them shelter, receiving pilgrims, repelling occasional invaders (no attack ever succeeded), and yet also using the height and isolation of the island to try to reach a purer understanding.

This blog attempts to use the equivalent of that elevated view, to consider the questions and quandaries of our time, in the context of what has come before and what will follow -- to notice the eddies but also sense the deeper currents of change, and to glimpse the truth of what it means to love the world and yet believe that it will be transcended. The great American poet William Bronk put it this way:

Sense in the world what was the world before
the creation of the world. Not the world but the world's
intention is the true world. We feel it here:
the uncreated still. The rest will go.

The Elevated View

Saturday, May 30, 2009

A poem by William Bronk

"A city set on a hill..."

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