Awake in Advent: Living God's Patience and God's Impatience. A sermon for the first Sunday of Advent.

The season of Advent began today, Sunday November 27, in the Western Christian liturgical calendar. Here's a meditation for those of you who observe this season, which marks the beginning of the Christian year.

I preached this sermon at the Parish of St. Paul in Newton Highlands, a small congregation in one of Boston's nearby suburbs. I'm grateful to the Priest-in-Charge, the Rev. Cara Rockhill, and the lay leaders and members of the parish, for their invitation and hospitality. I'm a great believer in offering apologies when they are needed and appropriate, and you will see at the beginning of the sermon an apology for the length of my sermon of a few weeks ago. This is my third or fourth time preaching in this parish, which I serve as a consultant on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

The sermon is new, written and spoken for a particular time and place, but some of you will recognize both the title of the sermon and some of its content from retreats and meditations I have offered in the past.

In the name of the One

Who made us 

Who saves us 

and Who walks with us always, 

Amen.

It’s good to be back here with you.

Thank you for your hospitality.

I owe you an apology.

That sermon I preached a few Sundays ago was

Much. Too. Long.

I promise you today’s will not go on and on.

 

Lend me your ear, though,

for a different mood from Sundays past. 

We are entering Advent.

 Do you have an Advent wreath at home?

Do you light Advent candles?

When did you light the first candle?

On the vigil of the first Sunday, last night?

Or do you plan to light it tonight?

Or perhaps, as has happened to me more than once in the past, 

Will you begin your daily lighting of the Advent calendar 

midweek, 

because you haven’t made or bought your Advent wreath before then 

and the dining room table is a mess?

We have an Advent wreath here.

Take a moment (or two) to gaze at the flame of that first candle,
the one we have lit in our communal space
in this sanctuary.
Simply gaze.
Take a long slow breath or two

and look at that one light.

        (Silence.)

* * *

Advent and Christmas are in some ways
the ultimate celebration of space,
the celebration of God entering human space
in the most intimate way possible:
by becoming human.

The celebration of word become flesh,
of word becoming flesh
the discovery that God-the-other
is also God-with-us[1]:
That is the good news of Advent.

We celebrate in Advent
God's invitation
for us to view our space
—our society,
our environment,
our neighbor,
our own flesh—
    as sacred,
    pregnant with justice and hope,
    filled with hidden treasure.

But Advent is also a celebration
of time
and a celebration in time.

God enters
not just our space
but our time:
our history,
our present moment,
our human future.

Advent
challenges
our very relationship to time.

Advent challenges our impatience
and invites us to enter God's patience.

It is the season
of taking the long view,
the view beyond
our own small range of vision.

If we are to hear the good news
that God is
Emmanuel, God-with-us,
we may have to slow down.
        To slow down externally, bodily,
        But also to slow down inside
        —which can be even harder than slowing down with our body
    or slowing down our behavior.
Often God speaks very softly,
in ordinary ways and places,
in the daily events of our lives.

If the good news
is to take root in us,
we need to enter God's time,
God's timetable.

Advent
is not a flashy season.
It takes time for good news to sink in,
for love to grow,
for wisdom to ripen,
for lives to be transformed,
for truth to dawn in us,
for hope to take shape.

So in Advent, season of waiting for Christ,
we take in the good news slowly,
steadily,
lighting candles one at a time,
adding a new insight,
a layer of understanding,
every day
and every week.

(and) Yet

Advent is also a time to enter
God's impatience,
a time of righteous anger,
a time when prophets
challenge our apathy and paralysis
and urge us forward.

It is a season of visions and yearnings,
in which the stories and songs in the scriptures
speak of a God
who longs to transform
our hearts,
our society,
and creation itself –
soon, now, urgently.

***

One of these visions
is in the text from the prophetic book of Isaiah
for this first Sunday of Advent.[2]

Did you notice
how much this reading,
in addition to its images taken from nature,
addresses our life in human community,
including the community of nations?

God's righteousness and wisdom
and our human responses to them
are, in the text, directly related
to whether and how humans make peace or war,
whether we make the land into a battleground
or cultivate it.

The "swords into plowshares" passage[3]
is so well known
that we can gloss over it,
or in some way romanticize it.
Or perhaps more likely,
think it is nothing but a vision or a dream.

That metaphor has, however, been used in recent history
to describe something concrete:
what in the late 1970s we began calling "economic conversion"—
—the shifting of industrial, manufacturing, and scientific priorities
from military to civilian.
The movement continued for a couple of decades
and found its way into policy conversations:
there was even a bill
introduced in 1977 by bipartisan sponsors in the Senate
and then in the House of Representatives.
It was called the National Economic Conversion Act
and was repeatedly reintroduced through the years
but never became law.

Nowadays we speak more often
Of another kind of economic and environmental conversion:
Away from over-use of fossil fuels
and over-production of carbon emissions
that threaten us and God’s earth on which we live
with a greater danger than swords
and toward forms of energy
that can keep us and our children
and our companion plants and animals
and soil and water and sky
healthy and full of life.

Swords into plowshares.

It is up to us to take up the vision
and turn it into reality,
wherever we can.

Swords into plowshares.

* * *

So here we are:
smack in the middle
of cosmic,
personal, political,
ecclesial,
social, and economic
issues and upheavals,
all at once.

We are also
in the realm of visions of the messianic age,
which both Jews and Christians cultivate,
though in different ways.

The characteristics of that age,
of that kin-dom,
are the same, though:
peace among humans,
harmony in nature,
and the transformation
—some of it subtle, some of it dramatic—
that makes these possible.

* * *

Meanwhile, Jesus,
as the Gospel of Matthew presents him,
is far from meek and mild.
He warns us, puts us on alert,
shakes us up.

"Keep awake!"

Advent may be the slow and gentle season,
but it is—equally—
also the shake-up season.

God enters time,
but
the end of time is looming.

Jesus
grabs his companions by the collar.

No gentleness in this Gospel.

But no hypervigilance either.
By which I mean no jitters,
no super-speedy-overwrought reflexes.

Rather, we can read the Gospel as an invitation
to be awake and alert in a centered way.
It may be useful to read this Gospel in tandem
with a good dose of Buddhist mindfulness practice:

Can we be alert
but not reactive,
ready for the storm
but not overwhelmed
by its presence?

Can we spend Advent mindfully,
letting go of some of the reactivity
that has characterized so many of our conversations and responses
this election season
and the two preceding election cycles?

Can we spend Advent mindfully,
letting go of the reactivity that rises from us
not just in political conversations
but in many of our circumstances
today?

Can we spend Advent
mindfully, gently,
in the present
despite all the uncertainty and anxiety we are carrying
–in our work lives,
our relationships,
our family lives—
and yes, our church lives?

* * *

One of the challenges of this season
is to readjust our sense of time:
to discern when it is appropriate
to enter into God's patience
and when it is time to enter into God's impatience.

Perhaps it is also, then,
a time to learn mindfulness in a new way.

It is helpful to do this in community.
That's why we have the seasons of the church year.
That's why we have each other.

* * *

Today, on this first Sunday of Advent,
this first day of the new year[4]
and in the next few days,
before you do anything else,
take time.

Rest
in the patience of God.
All else will unfold,
in God's time.

        Amen.

[1] Emmanuel = “God with us” in Hebrew.
[2] The Revised Common Lectionary texts are here.
[3] A similar use of this image exists in chapter 4 of Micah, another prophetic book of the Bible.
[4] The new liturgical year.

Forty Days of Tenderness

The short essay below was published online yesterday (Sunday, March 1) as part of the Intent series of daily Lenten meditations. (Copyright © 2015 LEM).

Intent is a joint project of the Lutheran Episcopal Ministry (LEM) at MIT, Episcopal BU (the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Boston University), the Lutheran Episcopal Campus Ministry at Northeastern University and the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Boston College, The Crossing, St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Cambridge, and Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston.

Note: these congregations exploring together the possibility of becoming a mission hub or mission cluster with a focus on creating affordable housing opportunities in the form of intentional communities --hence the reference in the essay below.

You can sign up for Intent (it's free) here. Note that the daily meditations, which you can receive via e-mail, include not only written ones but visual and musical ones as well.

Dawn, Second Sunday in Lent
(c) Jane Redmont 2015

Forty Days of Tenderness

Two or three decades ago, my beloved mentor, Krister Stendahl, preached an Ash Wednesday sermon I will never forget. The cry of Ash Wednesday and Lent, he reminded us, is “Return to the Lord your God!” Return, he added, to God who is tender and merciful. Lent, he continued, is a time to remember the tenderness of God and therefore (here’s where he got me) to learn anew to be tender with ourselves.

Lent is the church’s annual retreat. It is a time of truth-seeking and truth-telling, of re-attuning our lives to live in justice and mercy, of renewal in prayer and practice. For many of us, this may involve additional time in solitude. But the self-examination of Lent is not for reflection on our self alone. It is not simply about “Jesus and me.” We are on this 40-day retreat together.

So we return to the unending tenderness of the Holy One of Blessing. We let this tenderness touch us and cradle us. We let it live with and within us. And we learn—again or for the first time—to live together, with our households and congregations, with the stranger on the street, with this new mission cluster, with our sisters and brothers who need housing, with those we love and those who are hard to love.

This takes time and care. It may feel slow and require some inner untangling and delicate steps in our community life. Lent is difficult. But it need not be harsh. How will we live these forty days of tenderness?

Jane Redmont is a theologian, spiritual director, and pastoral worker and is the author of two books including When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life.

Vigil of 1 Advent: God's patience and God's impatience

Do you have an Advent wreath? Do you light Advent candles? Did you light the first candle tonight? Will you wait for tomorrow?

This is your virtual lighting of the first candle. Take a moment (or two) to gaze at the flame here, the wooden match lighting the purple candle. Simply gaze. There is no need for words. Some may come to you later. Or not.

Advent and Christmas are in some ways the ultimate celebration of space, the celebration of God entering human space in the most intimate way possible: by becoming human. The celebration of word become flesh, the discovery that God-the-other is also God-with-us (Emmanuel in Hebrew) -- that is the good news of Advent.

We celebrate in Advent God's invitation for us to view our space --our society, our environment, our neighbor, our own flesh-- as sacred, pregnant with justice and hope, filled with hidden treasure.

But Advent is also a celebration of time and a celebration in time.

The way in which we live time in Advent is profoundly counter-cultural. At a time when many of us are caught in the frenzy of work and in dashing about to buy presents, we Christians are invited to step into a season of muted colors, whose mood is slow, gentle, and deep --though also, as we will see in some of the season's biblical readings, disturbing at times. In Advent, light increases gradually, week by week, instead of appearing in one great post-Thanksgiving burst of electricity. (For those of you not in the U.S., there is no Thanksgiving holiday in late November, but the great burst of electricity is there.)

There is a reason for this slowing down. If we are to hear the good news that our space and God's space have become one, we have to slow down enough to hear. Sometimes this good news is spoken to us by God very softly, in ordinary ways and places, in the daily events of our lives. Sometimes this good news is simply that there is immense treasure already present in our lives and hearts: all that we need to claim the treasure is to slow down, stop, and notice it. 

If the good news is going to take root in us --once we have begun to listen or to notice-- we need to enter God's time, God's timetable. Advent is not a flashy season. It takes time for good news to sink in, for love to grow, for wisdom to ripen, for lives to be transformed, for truth to dawn in us -- much more time than our frenzy will often allow.

So in Advent, season of waiting for Christ, we take in the good news slowly, steadily, lighting candles one at at time, adding a new insight, a layer of understanding, a little layer of light every week, as around us in the Northern Hemisphere* the days grow darker.  (*If people from the Southern Hemisphere read this post, it will be interesting to hear about Advent and Advent lights from people for whom it is the middle of summer right now.)

Advent challenges our impatience and invites us to enter God's patience.

Yet Advent is also a time to enter God's impatience, a time when prophets (more on them in the coming weeks) challenge our apathy and paralysis and urge us forward, a time in which the stories and songs in the scriptures speak of a God who longs to transform our hearts, our society, and creation itself -- soon, now, urgently.

One of the challenges of this season is to figure out the connections between our time and God's time, to readjust and balance our sense of time, to discover  or rediscover --to discern-- when it is appropriate to enter into God's patience and when it is time to enter into God's impatience.

In this first night, before anything else, take time. Rest in the patience of God. All else will unfold, in God's time.

______________

This is the first post of a retreat I led last year during Advent. It appeared on the retreat's closed  blog (i.e. a blog accessible only to retreatants, not a public blog like this one) at the beginning of the retreat. I will be offering the retreat again this year, with a few changes. Information will be available here by the end of the day tomorrow, December 1.

Ethics, anyone?

An excellent resource for both religious and not-so-religious folks in many fields of endeavor, world-wide: Globethics.com, the Global Ethics Network for Applied Ethics. Have a look!


What the network says about itself (from the website):

The aim of Globethics.net is to ensure that people in all regions of the world are empowered to reflect and act on ethical issues. In order to ensure access to knowledge resources in applied ethics, Globethics.net has developed its Globethics.net Library, the leading global digital library on ethics. Globethics.net took this initiative to ensure that persons - especially in Africa, Asia and Latin-America - have access to good quality and up to date knowledge resources. The founding conviction of Globethics.net was that more equal access to knowledge resources in the field of applied ethics will enable persons and institutions from developing and transition economies to become more visible and audible in the global discourse on ethics. There is no cost involved in using the library. Individuals only need to register (free of charge) as participants on the Globethics.net website (www.globethics.net) to get access to all the full text journals, encyclopedias, e-books and other resources in the library.

In addition to the library, Globethics.net also offers participants on its website the opportunity to join or form electronic working groups for purposes of networking or collaborative research. The international secretariat, based in Geneva, currently concentrates on three topics of research: Business and Economic Ethics, Methodologies of Interreligious Ethics and Responsible Leadership. The knowledge produced through the working groups and research finds their way into publications that are also made available in the Globethics.net Library. One of the latest fruits of such collaborative work is the book, Overcoming Fundamentalism (edited by Christoph Stückelberger and Heidi Hadsell, 2009, Geneva: Globethics.net).

I joined initially because of my interest in the Global Digital Library on Theology and Ecumenism (online theological resources for education and ecumenical dialogue) which is housed at Globethics.net and which you can find here.

Contemplation, winter day

This is a country whose center is everywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.
It is here that you discover act without motion,
labor that is profound repose,
vision in obscurity,
and, beyond all desire,
a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Exhortation, Day, Sunday
Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours, ed. Kathleen Deignan

September 11, 2010: reflection for a student-initiated "interfaith solidarity" gathering

In light of recent events and less recent ones, some students at Guilford College, where I teach, organized a gathering for reflection and meditation. The event was simple and included readings from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy scriptures followed by Quaker-style silence with opportunity for anyone to speak. It began with a spoken reflection by a faculty member, who happened to be your friendly Acts of Hope blogger.

Here is the reflection. Bear in mind that

1) it was addressed to a particular audience --in this case, mostly "adult-escent" students and one or two faculty, including a variety of religious, non-religious, I'm-not-religious-but-I'm-spiritual, and other folks, so "pitching it" was tricky;

2) it has some repetitions and will seem a little rambling in places, with questionable sentence structure. I wrote it to be spoken aloud, slowly and somewhat meditatively.

In spite of this, perhaps some of this reflection will be useful to you.

As you may surmise from the words below, I've been teaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothee Soelle, Diana Eck, and Eboo Patel these days. And the early centuries of the Christian church.

Shalom. Salaam aleikum. Peace be with you.

Reflections on Interreligious Solidarity
Today and in the Long Haul

We welcome each other to this gathering
to which we come in peace
with both our common humanity
and our profound differences.

I always smile and take a deep breath
when someone says to me
“Well, all religions are the same.”
Actually, they are not.

Our gathering today
is an invitation to open our hearts and minds
and (as Thomas said in his invitation letter) our arms
to those who are
not us.

To learn:
Allah is worshipped by Muslims,
as all-merciful and compassionate.

To learn:
There was a Muslim nonviolent leader
Kahn Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as Badshah Khan)
in what is now Pakistan
in the same era as the Hindu nonviolent leader
Mohandas Gandhi
(known as Mahatma Gandhi).

To learn:
Jewish law is not a set of rules
but a path of life.

To learn:
The Torah and the whole Tanakh
and Judaism
are not just a prelude to Christianity.

To learn:
Jesus was not a Christian.

To learn:
Orthodox Christians who venerate icons
of Jesus, Mary, and the saints
are not worshiping idols.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have killed in the name of God.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have lived together and learned from each other.
Cordoba. Sarajevo. New York.

To learn:
Muslims worshiped peacefully
on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center
and were among the dead 9 years ago
along with Christians, Jews, Buddhists,
humanists, agnostics, atheists, and
many people whose faith we will never know.

To learn:
On that day,
an openly gay Franciscan Catholic priest
was one of the people who died
not because he was working in the twin towers
but because he rushed over there
and went in
to help care for and pray for
the wounded and the dead.

To learn:
Long before 2001,
September the 11th was the day in 1973
that a coalition of military generals
toppled the democratically elected government in Chile
and established a dictatorship that ruled with terror
for 16 years, banned trade unions,
exiled 200,000 dissenters
killed thousands of others,
and used its laws against a million native people,
the Mapuche.
The U.S. government, except during the Carter era,
supported the dictatorship.

Now,
having said all this,
let me make something clear.

Knowledge alone will not save or heal the world.
Higher learning will not guarantee justice
or alone teach compassion.

That would be to say
that only educated people can be holy
and that all educated people are righteous.

That is not true.

The Nazi doctors had lots of education.
They had medical degrees
from distinguished universities
and they used their knowledge
to torture and kill other human beings
both children and adults.
And then they went home
and listened to classical music.

Education is important
and truth and accuracy do matter.

but I want to raise the question for us today
of what kind of education we need.

More specifically,
I want to ask
what practices
–I’d like to call them spiritual practices
and I hope this is a phrase that has meaning
to all or most of you—
I want to ask what spiritual practices
we need to cultivate
in order to live as compassionate neighbors
in this conflicted world.

The world in which we live
is dangerous as well as beautiful.

The hate which we have witnessed in so many ways
--poverty that kills,
violence that kills,
cultural violence,
the threat of burning scriptures, the Qur’an, in Florida,
the burning of bodies in New York and Washington (and Pennsylvania),
the bodies maimed and raped and murdered in wars
right now
in so many countries,
the hasty language in the comments on news websites,
the swastika that showed up on someone's door
in Binford dorm the other day, right here on campus—
all that hate is not going to go away.

The hate is not going away,
though the good news is that there are
many people and groups
from many religions and places and cultures
who do the work of love,
who embody solidarity,
who exercise humility and who labor for justice.

In this world
you will be asked to stand up
for the same values and sentiments
for which you stand today
here in this circle.

You will need to do so
in hostile environments.

Will you be ready?

How will you prepare yourself?

How are you preparing now, while you are in school,
for the kind of witness we give today?

On what (or on whom)
will you draw to help you?

Let me use a word
that will not have a benevolent meaning
to all of you;
it is the word "tradition."
Thank you for bearing with me.

What tradition
or traditions
will you drawn on?

You see, we have company here.

We have company in the way of peace:
in religious peacemaking
and in secular groups devoted to peace.

We have to forge new paths
but we do not have to reinvent the wheel.

People have been here before us.

This is part of today’s good news.
We are not alone, here in our little group.

Both the dead and the living
walk with us and teach us and encourage us
if we will only listen.

We can’t do this work
without community.

And we are not the first.

Our particular community
may be a community of faith and practice,
or a humanist community.
Our communities may be
communities of struggle,
communities of peacemakers,
long established
or fairly new groups
(like the Interfaith Youth Core).


Some of us here
believe that our way
and our community’s way
is the best and the holiest.

Others
are not sure what we believe
or where the way is for us.

Whether we are one or the other
or somewhere in between,
encountering the other
is part of our work in the classroom.

It is also our work everywhere else.
Everywhere.

Think of how often
you –let me say “we” here
since of course I do it too.
Think how often we
respond hastily,
inwardly or outwardly,
jump to conclusions,
think first of our own good.

Especially those of us who are privileged
by virtue of our education,
our race, our gender,
and yes, our religion,
if we are members of the majority religion.

Others
are our teachers.

The poor and the uneducated will teach you.

The one you fear will teach you.

Your own fear will teach you.

We have to school ourselves
for solidarity.

It is hard for all of us.

Those of us who are older,
who have some experience and perhaps some wisdom
can lock ourselves inside that experience
and wall off new insight.
We need to remember that wisdom will come
from those half our age
and from territory
where we have not ventured
over the years
out of fear
or habit
or laziness.

Those of us who are younger
who are still figuring out who we are,
building our egos,
shoring them up,
and in the process resisting and reacting,
which is good and part of the journey,
may find out we need to ease up
to let wisdom in.


Solidarity:
this will cost you.
This will cost us.

Wherever we draw our inspiration and our strength,
whatever our primary community,
of faith
or blood
or friendship
there will be a cost.

So again,
ask yourselves:

Given the state of the world,
given the misunderstanding, the bias, the hatred,
and given the hope and vision that others
here and elsewhere
have shared with me,
how will I spend these college years?

I urge you,
spend these years equipping yourselves.

And do remind us who teach
that we need to equip ourselves
and school ourselves as well
for the path of peace.

Solidarity is not just today.

Solidarity is a long road.

Learning about each other takes time.

The Torah and the rest of the Tanakh,
the Christian Bible,
the Holy Qur’an:
the riches in them,
the commentaries on them
the disagreements about them
take years to study.

The traditions of the children of Abraham
take years to understand.

So do the traditions of the children of Sarah,
of Hajar (her Muslim name – Jews and Christians call her Hagar),
of Mary, who is also Mariam and Miriam.

Some traditions are written, others not.
They are also part of our collective story
and may take even more discernment and insight
to learn and understand.

Can we take the time for this?

Can we learn
not to make assumptions
about why someone covers her head with a scarf?
Can we learn not to make fun of people
who live by a different calendar from ours
or won’t do business one day a week?
Or of people who lay a mat on the floor to pray
or fall into the joyous ecstasy of Pentecostal Christian worship
or use images in prayer?

Can we learn not to make haste?

How do we learn to discern
when to choose holy patience
and when to choose holy impatience?

How do we learn to listen?

All this requires practice.

Daily.

More than daily.

Zen Buddhists would call some of this
the practice of mindfulness.

How do we take a breath
and not rush to reaction?

Can we learn
what gives the other person sorrow
but also what gives this person joy?

Can we try to understand
the whole person before us?

Will we also learn to understand systems and communities?

Can we acquire understanding of how
the many media and modes of communication
work
and of how they shape our perceptions?

Can we learn to understand
our own emotions and reactions?

We can’t do this alone.

We can’t do this without community.

It starts right here.

Holocaust map - Europe and the teaching of 20th century theology

The link to this map doesn't work, but I saved the image as a jpg.

I am linking a Facebook post to this since the link is cranky and refuses to show up on Facebook.

Make sure you click on the image to enlarge it. (Click twice and it will get really big and detailed.)

Post on Facebook:

Map for the little darlings to study. Yeah, I'm teaching a Christian theology course and they are also getting a good dose of theological vocabulary & questions. But woe unto those who study European theologies in the mid-20th century & after without looking this in the face. And without asking whether & how this affects the questions & the language. And how we understand God. And how theology & ethics are related. And what responsibilities Christians bear.

End of speech. I'm off to edit the Tome.

Thursday night / early Friday : from the New Zealand Prayer Book

Lord,
it is night.

The night is for stillness.
**Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
**What has been done has been done;
**What has not been done has not been done;
**let it be.

The night is dark.
**Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives
**rest in you.

The night is quiet.
**Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
****all dear to us,
****and all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.
**Let us look expectantly to a new day,
****new joys,
****new possibilities.

In your name we pray.
Amen.

God forgives you.
Forgive others;
forgive yourself.

Silences, part 2

From Tillie Olsen's Silences (New York: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1978).

In case it is not obvious, italics in black are my words. The words in color are Olsen's.


Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.

What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that time? What are creation's needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me.

These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.

The great in achievement have known such silences --Thomas Hardy, Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They tell us little as to why or how the creative working atrophied and died in them--if ever it did.

...

Kin to these years-long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, denied --hidden by the work which does come to fruition...

Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on Jennie Gerhardt after the storm against Sister Carrie). Publishers' censorship, refusing subject matter or treatment as "not suitable" or "no market for." Self-censorship. Religious, political censorship --sometimes spurring inventiveness--most often (read Dostoyevsky's letter) a wearing attrition.

The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments. Isaac Babel, the year of imprisonment, what took place in him with what wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a pencil until the last month of his imprisonment?

Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer ceasing to be published. Was one work all the writers had in them (life too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? or--as instanced over and over--other claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent commentary that this one-book silence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice. [Olsen backs up her statement with a citation; note that she was speaking in 1962.]

There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year...

...

Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement. [T.O. names writers including George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen]-- all close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; [more names, including Laura Ingalls Wilder] in their sixties. Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost;" in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished... ; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement...

Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Millions: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silences the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitions--but we know nothing of the creators or how it was with them...


Olsen then quotes Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, as one expects. I think of Alice Walker's title essay in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens about the creative gifts of Black women. Olsen also quotes Rebecca Harding Davis, who writes of the illiterate ironworker in Life in the Iron Mills who sculptured great shapes in the slag: "his fierce thirst for beautiy, to know it, to create it, to be something other than he is--a passion of pain."

....

..."Without duties, without almost without external communication," Rilke specifies, "unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround. "

Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
***"For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation... mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day... a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection."

I'll bet that was a woman. Who was silent and watchful, that is, and made the food, and provided affection.

...

But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at something besides their own work--as do nearly all in the arts in the United Sates today.

I know the theory (kin to "starving in the garret makes great art") that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. .... But the actuality testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grants--undivided time-- in the strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)

Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only two, was "trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house: "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangered -- for only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for future work. ...

There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others than testify as unbearably to the driven stratagems for time, the work lost (to us), the damage to the creative powers (and the body) of having to deny, interrupt, postpone, put aside, let work die.

... [Excerpts from Kafka's diaries follow. Also comments on Rilke, who neglected and moved away from his wife and child to protect his poetry writing, and on marriage and childbearing and how rare, till recently, most women writers did not marry, or if they did, did not have children. Or if they did, they had household help.]

The power and the need to create, over and beyond reproduction, is native in both women and men. Where the gift among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because of circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation.

Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self. But women are traditionally trained to place others' needs first, to feel these needs as their own...; their sphere, their satifaction to be in making it possible for others to use their abilities...

...

...[W]e are in a time of more and more hidden and foreground silences, women and men. Denied full writing life, more may try to "nurse through night" (that part-time, part-self night) "the ethereal spark," but it seems to me there would almost have had to be "flame on flame" first; and time as needed, afterwards; and enough of the self, the capacities, undamaged for the rebeginnings on the frightful task. I would like to believe this for what has not yet been written into literature. But it cannot reconcile for what is lost by unnatural silences.

*******Originally an unwritten talk, spoken from notes at the Radcliffe Institute in 1962, transcribed and edited, and published in this version in Harper's Magazine, October 1965.