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Monday, June 26, 2006

Diving Deep and Surfacing

Monday, June 26, 2006

I’ve found myself deeply challenged by the image of the church as the whale tangled in the waters off the coast of San Francisco, beyond the Golden Gate which I used in my sermon on Sunday.

It seems to me that the church is going to need divers – strong, experienced divers –to cut the church loose from the tangle of sin in which we’ve just placed her.

I am remembering, just now, that it was Carol P. Christ who wrote one of the first books on feminist spirituality. It was entitled, “Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest.”

A reader of this blog reminded me of the poem by Adrienne Rich: Diving into the Wreck.

It has become, for me, a poem for Katharine Jefferts Schori, our Presiding Bishop elect of The Episcopal Church and the first woman to be primate in The Anglican Communion.

It is a powerful metaphor for the work she must do – and a vocational call to all of us in the church who must dive deep and surface as we enter into this spiritual quest with her.

(Good thing she's a marine biologist!)

I reprint Rich's poem here. May it inpsire and challenge you as it has me.


Diving into the Wreck
Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,
we who have used it.

Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass.

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.

6 comments:

karl maria said...

Another poem by Rich which has moved me lately... it captures for me the irony of what happened at GC... and which is from her collection Dreams of a Common Language (pardon the formatting which doesn't come over well):


Power by Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Mike in Texas said...

ew-3's quote from Isiah about those who call good "evil", etc. brought the following to mind.

1 Timothy 4:1-5 The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

Mike in Texas said...

Bravo, Diocese of Newark, for not backing down to the forces of bigotry!!!

INTEGRITY APPLAUDS INCLUSION OF GAY CANDIDATE IN LIST OF NOMINEES FOR BISHOP OF NEWARK

The Very Rev. Canon Michael Barlowe

Mike in Texas said...

ew-3 ... Pardon me for getting a large chuckle from you little outburst. I just couldn't help it.

One good thing came of it, however. Your comment reminded me of the following.

"The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Gordon said...

Thank you, Rev. Elizabeth. Thank you for your ministry, your witness, your terrific writing skills, your not being afraid to speak out and your message of social justice based on the teachings of Jesus.

And while here, I'd like to echo Mike in Texas' words:
"Bravo, Diocese of Newark, for not backing down to the forces of bigotry!!!"

Mike in Texas said...

ew-3 says, "Thanks for calling me a bigot, Mike in Texas."

Take a deep breath and calm down, ew-3.

Read my post again. You will see clearly that I didn't call you anything other than ew-3. I found your post quite amusing. And it provided the bonus of reminding me of a quote I hadn't thought about for quite some time.

Do have something against Oliver Wendell Holmes?