The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, is a book about a group of small, vocal animals who lived once upon a time on the banks of the stripling Thames in Oxfordshire. There is one rather famous chapter in the book called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and the way the chapter begins is roughly this. A family of otters discovers that a small, fat, otter child named Portly is missing. Rat, who is a water rat, and Mole, who is a mole, decide to go search for him in Rat’s boat, and off they go one morning just before daybreak.

Strange things begin to happen. Rat suddenly hears a scrap of music such as he has never heard before, and then before he knows it, it’s gone. “So beautiful and strange and new,” Rat sings (and since these are British animals you have to imagine the British accent). Rat also has a rather flowery way of expressing himself. “Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.”

At first his friend Mole can’t hear anything — “only the wind playing in the weeds and rushes,” he says — but then when it comes again, he does hear it; and then, as Grahame writes, “breathless and transfixed, he stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on Rat’s cheeks, and bowed his head and understood.”

Religion is listening the way Rat and Mole listened — which is listening with more than just your ears, of course, which is listening with your hearts, with your intuition, with whatever is that part of you that longs, like a castaway, to hear news from across the seas. Worship is a response to that news, hearing it even in the ancient words of our forbears who themselves were listeners, who heard and then spoke of what they heard — Shema ’Yisrael, adonai Elohenu, adonai echad. Ecce agnus Dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.

Maybe it’s misleading to speak of religion as listening to something, maybe listening through would be more accurate — listening through the silence, through the prayer, through the music, through the sound of the wind in the rushes or through the sound of your own life, for whatever is to be heard through these things. It is listening the way a child listens or the way an animal listens for all I know, without any presuppositions about what you are going to hear or what you are not going to hear.

When you hear something like what Rat and Mole heard, what do you call it? Rat called it music that struck him dumb with joy and at the same time sent tears running down his cheeks. As for me, I would call it the sense that not the world certainly, not existence, but whatever it is that existence itself comes from, the power and ground out of which our lives spring, wishes us well, you and me, wishes to restore us to itself and to each other. It is the power that ultimately all theology is about. It is the power that stirs inside us at those rare moments when we make the effort of real speech with each other, and with it.

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.

“To Carthage then I came, and a welter of corrupted loves assaulted me from all sides. I was not yet in love; I was in love with being in love. With secret yearning I despised myself for not yearning enough. I searched for an object of love, loving to love.”

—Augustine, Confessions, iii. 1.

Remember Veni Carthaginem when hearing of deadly nonsense such as “Japanese Launch Campaign to Marry Comic Book Characters” or “Fantasy Funeral Brings Out Thousands of Real Mourners”. The Japanese make easy targets (he said, whose mother’s maiden name is Akiko Tamaoki), but on the high-speed chase to nowhere, they are only faster—and more smitten with animé—than those of us in the West. “The modern conception has made freedom the content of the moral life. It matters not what we desire, but that we desire. Our task is to become free, not through the acquisition of virtue, but by preventing ourselves from being determined, so that we can always keep our ‘options open.’ We have thus become the bureaucrats of our own history” (Stanley Hauerwas, The Peacable Kingdom [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1983], 8).

The heart’s restlessness is no accident, any more than its pursuit for an object outside itself, as if desire were a casino and Christianity—or the Blessed Sacrament—the Blackjack table. Moses would find the cult of animé, like the golden calf, banal. Aaron, the priest, looks away.

If we’re incredulous, let’s hope we have the incredulity of Father Brown. “It’s drowning all your old rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition, … calling all the menagerie of polytheism, … Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning; … and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made Man’” (G. K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown [reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1958], 70-71).