Suffering
Note of explanation for this selection: In Donne’s time, reasonably well-off people stayed at home and had their doctors visit them at home. Poorer people went to hospitals, where doctor’s would occasionally visit, but not reliably.
How many are sicker (perchance) than I, and laid in their woful straw at home (if that corner be a home), and have no more hope of help, though they die, than of preferment, though they live! Nor do more expect to see a physician then, than to be an officer after; of whom, the first that takes knowledge, is the sexton that buries them, who buries them in oblivion too! For they do but fill up the number of the dead in the bill, but we shall never hear their names, till we read them in the book of life with our own. How many are sicker (perchance) than I, and thrown into hospitals, where (as a fish left upon the sand must stay the tide) they must stay the physician’s hour of visiting, and then can be but visited! How many are sicker (perchance) than all we, and have not this hospital to cover them, not this straw to lie in, to die in, but have their gravestone under them, and breathe out their souls in the ears and in the eyes of passengers, harder than their bed, the flint of the street? that taste of no part of our physic, but a sparing diet, to whom ordinary porridge would be julep enough, the refuse of our servants bezoar [i.e., antidote] enough, and the offscouring of our kitchen tables cordial enough. O my soul, when thou art not enough awake to bless thy God enough for his plentiful mercy in affording thee many helpers, remember how many lack them, and help them to them or to those other things which they lack as much as them.
Posted by Lon on March 14th, 2009 in History, Suffering | No Comments »
O eternal and most gracious God, who calledst down fire from heaven upon the sinful cities but once, and openedst the earth to swallow the murmurers but once, and threwest down the tower of Siloam upon sinners but once; but for thy works of mercy repeatedst them often, and still workest by thine own patterns, as thou broughtest man into this world, by giving him a helper fit for him here; so, whether it be thy will to continue me long thus, or to dismiss me by death, be pleased to afford me the helps fit for both conditions, either for my weak stay here, or my final transmigration from hence.
Posted by Lon on March 12th, 2009 in Suffering | No Comments »
Make my bed again, O Lord, and enable me, according to thy command, to commune with mine own heart upon my bed, and be still; to provide a bed for all my former sins whilst I lie upon this bed, and a grave for my sins before I come to my grave; and when I have deposited them in the wounds of thy Son, to rest in that assurance, that my conscience is discharged from further anxiety, and my soul from further danger, and my memory from further calumny. Do this, O Lord, for his sake, who did and suffered so much, that thou mightest, as well in thy justice as in thy mercy, do it for me, thy Son, our Saviour, Christ Jesus.
Posted by Lon on March 10th, 2009 in Suffering | 1 Comment »
“God suspends me between heaven and earth, as a meteor; and I am not in heaven because an earthly body clogs me, and I am not in the earth because a heavenly soul sustains me. And it is thine own law, O God, that if a man be smitten so by another, as that he keep his bed, though he die not, he that hurt him must take care of his healing, and recompense him. Thy hand strikes me into this bed; and therefore, if I rise again, thou wilt be my recompense all the days of my life, in making the memory of this sickness beneficial to me; and if my body fall yet lower, thou wilt take my soul out of this bath, and present it to thy Father, washed again, and again, and again, in thine own tears, in thine own sweat, in thine own blood.”
Posted by Lon on March 9th, 2009 in Suffering | No Comments »
I think I might try to post something every day from John Donne — both his prose and his poetry make for outstanding Lenten reading.
David professes himself dead dog to his king Saul, and so doth Mephibosheth to his king David, and yet David speaks to Saul, and Mephibosheth to David. No man is so little, in respect of the greatest man, as the greatest in respect of God; for here, in that, we have not so much as a measure to try it by; proportion is no measure for infinity. He that hath no more of this world but a grave; he that hath his grave but lent him till a better man or another man must be buried in the same grave; he that hath no grave but a dunghill, he that hath no more earth but that which he carries, but that which he is, he that hath not that earth which he is, but even in that is another’s slave, hath as much proportion to God, as if all David’s worthies, and all the world’s monarchs, and all imagination’s giants, were kneaded and incorporated into one, and as though that one were the survivor of all the sons of men, to whom God had given the world. And therefore how little soever I be, as God calls things that are not, as though they were, I, who am as though I were not, may call upon God.
Posted by Lon on March 7th, 2009 in Suffering | No Comments »
I often read John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions during this time of year. Here are a few sentences from what I read today:
If I were mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lord’s hand made me of this dust, and the Lord’s hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lord’s hand was the wheel on which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lord’s hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.
Posted by Lon on March 5th, 2009 in Suffering, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Our downstairs bathroom has had problems for quite a while — six or seven years ago, we had a minor flood, which damaged the floor and caused several ceramic tiles to come loose. Of course, those tiles were no longer made, so I couldn’t just replace the things. We pretty much ignored the situation until six months ago, when one of the family put her foot through the floor. Now, I know that there are some home repairs that I’m just not capable of doing well — I don’t have enough obscenities in my vocabulary to tackle certain tasks, and laying a new subfloor for ceramic tile (with those heavy concrete-laced panels) is one of them. So I hired someone to do that job, and meanwhile had Katie figure out what kind of tile pattern would look good and be appropriate for the period of the house. We decided on a pattern, I gutted the bathroom in late April, and the handyman guy laid the new subfloor. And then we discovered the problem with our tile pattern: it was made up of 2″ tiles, and we had to place each of some 2000 of the things one tile at a time, paying close attention to the pattern to make sure it came out right. This process took quite a while — the bathroom wasn’t really usable again until early June. By the way, did I mention that our downstairs bathroom is the guest bathroom? That it has the only shower stall in the house? We have a bathtub, but if you’re a shower person, you get kind of desperate for a shower after a while. Well, I’d like to announce that after six weeks of single bathroom showerless life, the Mendelsohn household has a newly tiled, bathroom. We still have to finish the mouldings, and we need to replace the door (we’re using a curtain to meet the demands of modesty), but the room is functional. Once we finish the last bit of work, I’m tempted to have celebratory event of some sort…
By the way, lengthy home improvement projects are ordinarily a recipe for low-level strife in the Mendelsohn household. Everybody gets out of sorts, arguments happen, and members of the household, particularly husband and wife, end up saying things we later regret. We actually got through this project without it being a cause for sin. Sure, we disagreed on how to proceed from time to time, but even with all the unplanned-for challenges, life went pretty well during the course of the project (other than the lack of sleep — we stayed up really late almost every night that we were working on the floor to make sure that the room would be functional by the time Sam came home from Ireland).
Posted by Lon on July 12th, 2008 in Suffering | 1 Comment »
This meditation was written by James Kiefer, an old friend of mine. I’ve posted it to the church e-mail list every Good Friday for the past several years; this time I’m mounting it on my blog, which is a bit less ephemeral.
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There is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called Morts sans Sepultre (The Living Dead – literally, The Unburied Dead: one English translation calls it The Victors.) I have not seen or read it recently, but part of it goes something like this: The scene is the attic of a house in France during the Second World War. In the attic are a half-dozen prisoners, captured members of the resistance. It is night, and the next morning they will be taken out one at a time and tortured for information. None of them has any information of value, so they need summon no will power. There is nothing to do but wait, and then suffer, and then die. But now the attic door opens and the soldiers throw another man in. He is the leader of the resistance for that region, but the soldiers do not realize this. To them he is simply someone caught out-of-doors after curfew, and so they are detaining him for the night and will release him in the morning. Now the other prisoners are in a different position. Now they have an active and mot merely a passive role to play in what awaits them. They tell the leader, “Don’t worry. We will hold our tongues.” He begins to say, “I thank you, for myself, for the Resistance, for France. Your courage and your sacrifice will not be forgotten.” Suddenly, one of the others, his fiancee, says, “Oh, shut up. Nothing you have to say could possibly mean anything to us. I am not blaming you. It is not your fault. But the fact is that you are a living man and I am a dead woman, and the living and the dead have nothing to say to each other. Tomorrow you go out that door to freedom and life, and I go out it to torment and death, and that fact puts an impenetrable barrier between us. I do not hate or envy you. I simply do not see you as a meaningful part of my universe. Now go sit down over there, and leave me to talk and hold hands with my brothers and sisters, the people with whom I shall be dying in a few hours.”
It occurred to me, when I read this, that an important reason for the Crucifixion is the breaking down of precisely that barrier between God and us. Without it, many of God’s demands on us would be simply infuriating. Consider a driver seated at the wheel of a car as his associates try to push it out of a mudhole. He keeps saying to them: “Push harder! Put your backs into it! Don’t give up. You can do it if you try. Oh, come now, you can do better than that. Keep at it. Two or three more good pushes and you’ll have it out.” And so on. They may remind themselves that it is essential to have someone steering, and that it is therefore unreasonable of them to resent his being where he is, but they would be other than human if they did not feel an overpowering urge to pull him out of his seat and send him sprawling face down in the mud. Note how different it would be if he were himself standing thigh-deep in the mud, shoving the car with all his might and gasping out encouragement to his fellow pushers. He might be saying exactly the same things as he was saying behind the steering wheel in the first scenario. The difference is that by getting into the mud and pushing with the others he has earned the right to say them. In just this way, God, by taking human nature upon him and living in poverty and dying in shame and torment, has earned the right to ask us to bear our burdens willingly. By forgiving those who have wronged him, he has earned the right to ask us to forgive those who have wronged us. (more…)
Posted by Lon on March 21st, 2008 in Good Friday, Suffering | 1 Comment »
