Monthly Archives: January 2014

Wonder in the Culture of Possession

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Tillich Park - "Man & nature belong together..."

Tillich Park – “Man and nature belong together…”

Do you sense the heart’s yearning for wonder?

Our hearts in the West are well-trained in possessing, controlling, and cajoling reality, bending it to suit our wants. The spiritual culture that accompanies “free market” economics is the drive to acquire and possess. Could our training in the culture of acquisition and possession be like the wall through which the flower breaks in Tennyson’s poem “Flower in the Crannied Wall”?

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

– Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1863

The flower lures him. Yet seeking to possess it, he destines its death. Having to possess it, analyze it “root and all”, he destroys the magnificent beauty that had drawn his eye.

Having and being are not the same. Only being is filled with wonder. Perhaps that is why Christmas Eve Candlelight services are packed with people who otherwise are not drawn there. There is a beauty to the story and the natural light which lifts yearning hearts from the wintry chill of an having into the warmth of wonder beyond our control or possession.

Verse – Sonnet

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A sonnet is made up of fourteen lines
With just ten syllables in each of them–
Which means for people reading on their phones
Some lines are split–which really is a shame.

Almost all of old sonnets had a rhyme
On every other line for the first twelve.
Which works just fine almost all of the time,
But sometimes words are very hard to melve…

The first four lines of this end with “half-rhyme.”
This is a trick that helps a poet make
More choices–not repeating all the time
The same old rhyme… A sonnet may then take

An image to go far beyond the words–
Though some seem quite forced: two flying birds!

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, New Years Day, 2014