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.