Of the prophets Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one easiest to identify is Jeremiah. If you’re thinking of going to Rome, let me tell you where this Jeremiah is. Were our ceiling at Saint Francis like that of the Sistine Chapel, the weeping prophet would be up here directly above the pulpit. It is a potent psychological portrait of weakness, weariness and despair. His sitting posture, his crossed legs, his downcast eyes, his right hand covering his mouth, Jeremiah is a picture of anguish and inner suffering. Michelangelo uses every angle to convey his pain. Everything in the scene points down; his head, the fingers of his left hand. His right hand covers his mouth as if he’s weary of his own complaints, a prophet who has nothing more to say.

The book of Jeremiah is about the crisis of the last days of Judah, a crisis culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC. We read about it in the last chapter of Jeremiah (52: 12 – 14): “Now in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — that was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. He was raised about three miles northeast of Jerusalem in Anata, a town halfway from Jerusalem to Jericho. He spent much of his life denouncing things which is why denunciations are called jeremiads. Recreational sex. The rich for exploiting the poor. The poor for having it coming to them. His own people for batting her eyelashes and winking at every new god who came riding in someone’s saddlebags into town. He stood at the gate of the Temple and told people as they walked in that if they believed God was touched by the highjinks that went on in there they should have their heads examined. When some took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, Jeremiah showed up with a clay pot which he smashed to smithereens to show them what God was going to do to them when the time came.

At the beginning of the book we hear the voice of the Lord say to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It sounds like a nice appointment but it isn’t long before the work of being God’s mouth, of trying to reform Judah, makes Jeremiah more pitiable and exasperated than any curate in the novels of Anthony Trollope, so that by the fifteenth chapter Jeremiah laments not just the work but the One who saddled him with it. Taking his complaint directly to God he asks him, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” To this last question there isn’t any doubt that Jeremiah thinks the answer is Yes. A little later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you,’ making him glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?”

To understand his anguish, you have to remember that in the Jerusalem of Jeremiah the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the kapporeth or mercy seat — the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel’s repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. What the people of Israel lost above all when Jerusalem fell was the empty space between the cherubim, the place that was the center of their life as the covenant people, the space behind the curtained holy place where God is, the place where all the mercy comes from, what the psalmist refers to as “help from the sanctuary” and the “answer from heaven”.

The crisis that the burning of the Temple presented for Jeremiah was about the destruction of that empty space between the cherubim. If that seems strange to you just think of the crisis of having someone you cherish taken away. If you’ve lost someone you love you know a bit of what it is to live as Jeremiah had to, in exile. You have to live every day with what’s missing. When Jeremiah and the people of Israel lost the empty space between the cherubim, the place where all the mercy comes from, they lost everything. God himself was in the empty space, and the empty space was gone.

Today’s Gospel story takes place six miles up the road from Jeremiah’s hometown and six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. The silence between the cherubim, the silence from that empty space where God speaks becomes a God who has stepped into the world, becomes for a little while a physical hand outstretched as it were to Bartimaeus. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” he says. It’s the first time Jesus is called the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. Jesus stood still, and Bartimaeus came to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus said, “Let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” He could see again but Bartimaeus didn’t go. Instead he followed Jesus.

The way Mark tells the story, here’s the next thing he writes: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village of Bethany and you will find a colt tied….” And riding that colt Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple.

I picture Bartimaeus watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem where he’s brought to trial, following Jesus as he is led by the Praetorian guard outside the walls of Jerusalem to Golgotha, named for the skull of Goliath whom David defeated to win victory on behalf of all the people of God. It was at Golgotha that they crucified him. According to Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”

There is that silence again, the silence between the cherubim from which God spoke becomes the silence culminating in the death of the Beloved Son; the silence where God has nothing more to say.

You and I live between the Old Jerusalem and the New. Jesus is our altar and our sanctuary, our kapporeth or mercy seat. He’s the One I trust, the One you trust. He knows what it is to experience God’s absence, the empty space, the empty space being gone. And when he breathed his last the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Because the God of Jeremiah, the God of the Temple, the God of that empty space between the golden cherubim had come out from behind the curtain to hang between two thieves.

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

— Jeremiah 31: 7 – 9

The University of Michigan asked applicants for undergraduate admission to submit essay responses to the following prompt:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 16)

Author Robert Pirsig (1928 — ) suggests that science has traditionally concerned itself with truth, while art has concerned itself with beauty. How might these two endeavors be the same? How might they be irreconcilably different?

Science doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about truth. Scientists do. Art doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty. Artists do. The scientist and the artist know what they are doing when they abstract — when they say “science concerns itself with truth” and “art concerns itself with beauty” — which they sometimes have to do. The artist is as smitten with truth as the scientist. The scientist is as smitten with beauty as the artist. Both knock on the same door, see the same splendors, drop the same handkerchiefs. And in their earnest flirtations with the world sometimes their very earnestness gets in the way.

The problem isn’t that science and art are irreconcilably different. The problem is that scientists and artists are irreducibly people, and people can be amnesiac. They forget that the world is as modest as she is alluring; that she can stand to be admired or studied only so much. Sketches and biology satisfy so long as we don’t reduce life to them.

Really talented people have had at least moments of trying. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and a Nobel Prize-winner in genetics, says that we human beings are “lumbering robots blindly programmed” by our genes which “control us body and mind.” Van Gogh had the gall to call this world “a study that didn’t come off.”

Disenchantment and lassitude are the subject of the celebrated early T. S. Eliot. “And I have known the eyes already, known them all — / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?” As for the American novel, the fugitive nature of the true and the beautiful reaches its apotheosis in front of a couple of cabinets:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I don’t suggest the one thing led to the other, but two years after Nick Carraway narrated The Great Gatsby, Eliot announced that he had converted to the orthodox Christian faith. The darling of the literati and the avant-garde had gone off the deep end as Auden would in 1940. Eliot published no major work for ten years. Some essays came forth, some plays, and then in 1943 Four Quartets appeared. It is the work of a man who has gotten beyond decadent aestheticism and the endlessly self-referential question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot became a critic of his earlier work, an artist with a new direction. Like Rat and Mole, he’d heard the music from another room.

By the end of the summer, when Gillian enters the ivy halls of Wheaton College — which to do is to get what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a damned good education” (he told me this as we stood next to each other making water at Boston College urinals) — only the caboose of our family will not have left home and taken his religion to school. Wherever Aaron matriculates, I hope he will be the kind of man moved by the scene of Daisy burying her face in Gatsby’s shirts. I hope he’ll be the kind of man who moves in the direction taken by Eliot and Auden and my Great Aunt Mena. If he does? He’ll know that education is something more than preparation for a game show. And when he watches the best game show ever and “Love Songs & Food for 800” is chosen, and Alex reads the answer, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ he asked, and measured out his life” Aaron will be able to pose without need of with coffee spoons the question, “Who is T. S. Eliot?” and wonder if America gets the irony.

If D. H. Lawrence doesn’t convince you that John McWhorter is wrong about Shakespeare, let me chime in. I could list about a dozen false or at least questionable assumptions McWhorter makes in his post, but let me confine myself to two. First, he assumes that difficulty in drama is bad. Second, he assumes that difficulty is a function of linguistic change — of course, he knows that there are other reasons why plays and stories and poems are difficult, but he doesn’t mention any of them. This is a great flaw.

Let’s remember that Shakspeare could write as staightforwardly as anyone when he chose to. Consider this wonderful little moment from Act V of Henry V, when the young victorious king is wooing the daughter of the King of France, encumbered by certain linguistic barriers on both sides:

HENRY. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus much English, canst thou love me?

KATHARINE. I cannot tell.

HENRY. Can any of your neighbours tell, Kate? I’ll ask them.

But then consider this passage from Act II of Troilus and Cressida, in which the woman referred to is Helen:

HECTOR. Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost 
The keeping.

TROILUS. What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?

HECTOR. But value dwells not in particular will: 
It holds his estimate and dignity 
As well wherein ‘tis precious of itself 
As in the prizer. ‘Tis mad idolatry 
To make the service greater than the god, 
And the will dotes that is attributive 
To what infectiously itself affects, 
Without some image of th’ affected merit.

This is not difficult because it is old; it’s difficult because it’s difficult. That is, Troilus and Hector are engaged in a serious philosophical debate about what constitutes worth — it’s a word that turns up repeatedly in the scene — and that’s an extremely complex topic. Shakespeare doesn’t try to simplify it in the least. Does anyone think that the average playgoer in 1601 understood the argument that Hector is making here?

So, McWhorter wants “richly considered [translations], executed by artists equipped to channel Shakespeare to the modern listener with passion, respect and care.” I’d be happy to turn that scene fromTroilus over to any poet who thinks he or she can “channel Shakespeare” and see what comes out. I don’t think it’ll be pretty.

Of course, Troilus is a uniquely thorny play, so let’s take something more famous — clichéd, even:

To die: to sleep; 
No more; and by a sleep to say we end 
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; 
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause. There’s the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life; 
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, 
The insolence of office and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of? 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action.

You think you can improve on that? Great. Knock yourself out. McWhorter thinks that someone reading that speech in modern French understands more of it than you or I do. Which means that to him the poetry is nothing. Not my view.

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Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College, writing at The American Scene

People who write are apt to be peculiar, especially people who write poetry, and certainly one of the most peculiar of them all was that 18th century Englishman named William Blake.

In addition to writing poetry, Blake engraved pictures, and in addition to engraving pictures, he saw visions. When he was a small boy he scared the wits out of his father by telling him how, when he was taking a walk one afternoon, he suddenly came across a tree filled with angels. And then, a little later, at supper one evening, he caught everybody off balance when, without any warning at all, he pointed his finger at the dining room window and announced that he saw pressed against it the great and inscrutable face of God. On that occasion, his father apparently decided that things had gone far enough, because he gave his son a sound beating.

William continued to see visions all his life. Needless to say, many people thought that he was mad, and they could have mustered considerable evidence to support that view. Mad or not, Blake nonetheless found in his visions the inspiration for a series of poems and pictures the best of which provide us with some of the uncanniest insights into the nature of things that we have ever had from anybody.

I intend to refer to one of these images — the etching pictured above in its actual size — when I preach the Baccalaureate sermon for Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School here at Saint Francis on June 4th.