The Uninvited

           A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself...- May Sarton

The Flowering Tree

       The Saguaro Cactus …growing to the size of a tree. It also gets a number of greedy house guests during its life time… The Gila Woodpecker, for example, seems completely at ease among the spines… gorgeous Red-shafted Flicker –  the hummingbirds– the House Wren… another visitor – a lizard – well camouflaged… a party of house finches… the major pollinator is the lesser long-nosed bat… the flowers of the saguaro produces a fruit that can hold up to two thousand seeds… The paper wasp… White Winged Dove– even the humble house sparrow… The Great Horned Owl and Red-tailed Hawk…and vultures…

‘The Uninvited’

There is a city that through time shall lie
in a fixed darkness of the earth and sky,
and many dwell therein this very hour.
It is a city without seed or flower,
estranged from every bird and butterfly.

Who walked these streets of night? I know them well.
Those who come out of life's sequestered places:
the lonely, the unloved, the weak and shy,
the broken-winged who piteously would fly,
the poor who still have starlight in their faces.

They are the outcast ones, the last, the least,
whom earth has not invited to her feast,
and who, were they invited in the end,
finding their wedding clothes too frayed to mend,
would not attend.    –Jessica Powers(1935)

How easy to walk by without a glance on the busy streets filled all day, all night with those whose clothes are “too frayed to mend”.  As I climbed the stairs humming my own tune I was startled again by the ‘blue pale eyes’ of a child.  There are no crisp uniforms for her, no friendly eyes and smiles as I often see on many in playgrounds under the sun.  I am frightened for her.  She, only six, is unbroken still even though familied in great, great poverty and darkness.  She walks and plays on streets of murderous dangers to soul and body yet God sent this beautiful child to the lowliest—two broken on the wheel.  I already love her yet have only seen her twice.

‘In her book The Flowering Tree (1945), the theme is the flowering of Christ in man. "The idea that I have in mind," Miss Caryll Houselander says "is that we are really part, as it were, of a vast rhythm and that when we become more recollected we become more and more conscious of it. It (its two ways.) We can, I think, cultivate recollection by deliberately saying rhythms or poetry; and when we do this, those thoughts expressed within us rhythmically are heard by our minds in everything round us, even in the traffic in the street.''  -Caryll Houselander

Around every corner is the Poor Christ.

This vast rhythm is the beating of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart.
   For You: since I couldn't get it to work for you....

  h/t Ruth

"Jessica writes of the urban poor, proud and with starlight in their faces, as those uninvited guests to the wedding feast in the New Testament parable of Jesus.(61)   She knows them well and knows the power of their presence.  They are the ones “who, were they invited in the end, finding their wedding clothes too frayed to mend, would not attend.”  Without their presence, the party is not full, is not complete, is not a real one; rather, it is only a partial, incomplete imitation of life and not what God has willed for those who wait for the coming of the kingdom.

  Interaction with the marginalized in her society led Jessica to embrace a mystical vision of the human person in relationship with God and others that was balanced with the real world about her.  By means of her poetry, Jessica could capture the paradox of the human being pitted against odds of sure defeat yet being aided by divine grace and redeemed in the end.

    Although it would be almost ten years before Jessica Powers would enter the Carmelite community in Milwaukee, the poem, ‘The Track of the Mystic,” reveals the seeds of her Christian spirituality latent with both mystic and Carmelite overtones.  Her handling of the classic themes of St. John of the Cross, which she had been familiar with starts out with proud step in search of love, encounters torment in the struggle, and in the night of God’s light experiences the paradox of death in triumph not in defeat.  Ultimately her message is one of hope written in concrete terms and images.  First published in 1932, Jessica’s poem, ‘The Track of the Mystic, ‘ invokes a powerful vision of the human person transformed by grace:

 The Track of the Mystic        

There was a man went forth into the night

with a proud step.  I saw his garments blowing;

I saw him reach the great cloud of unknowing.

He went in search of love, whose sign is light.

From the dark night of sense I saw him turn

into the deeper dark nights of the soul

where no least star marks a divine patrol.

Great was his torment who could not discern

this night was God’s light generously given

blinding the tainted spirit utterly

till from himself at last he struggled free.

I saw him on the higher road to heaven:

his veins ran gold; light was his food and breath.

Flaming he melted through the wall of death! (62)

   As she herself became more aware and sure of her poetic call, Jessica became more determined to seek out the means to realize this call.  By 1934 she saw the link in her own life between the movement of the Holy Spirit, her poetry, and her need to journey in search of a place to realize her call, as she wrote:

Shining Quarry

Since the luminous great wings of wonder stirred

over me in the twilight I have known

the Holy Spirit is the Poet’s Bird.

Since in a wilderness I wandered near

a shining stag, this wisdom is my own:

the Holy Spirit is the Hunter’s Deer.

And in the dark in all enchanted lands

I know the Spirit is that Burning Bush

toward which the artist gropes with outstretched

     hands.

Upon the waters once and then again

I saw the Spirit in a silver rush

rise like the Quarry of the Fishermen.

Yet this I know: no arrows of desire

can wound Him, nor a bright intrepid spear;

He is not seen by any torch of fire,

nor can they find Him who go wandering far;

His habitat is wonderfully near

in each soul’s thicket ‘neath its deepest star.

Let those who seek come home through the vain

   years

to where the Spirit waits a shining captive.

This is the hunt most worthy of all tears.

Bearing their nets celestial, let them come

and take their Quarry on the fields of rapture

that lie beyond the last gold pendulum. (63)

The catalyst for change in Jessica’s life was twofold, wonder and beauty, and both were always calling her forward.  In this poem, her speaker becomes a hunter, like those who sought deer in the Wisconsin woods, but this hunter is trying to track and make captive the Spirit who calls out in wonder and beauty.  Like an artist who ‘gropes with outstretched hands,’ the speaker is trying to reach out and touch the ‘Burning Bush,’(64) again a thing of wonder and beauty existing always beyond the human grasp.  As a fisherman trying to net the ‘silver rush’ of the quarry, (65) the human subject is trying to net the Spirit only to discover that the Quarry cannot be taken except ‘on the fields of rapture’ that lie beyond time, ‘beyond the last gold pendulum.’  The paradox of the speaker driven to undertake a lifelong pilgrimage in search of God is voiced in lines like: ‘He is not seen by any torch of fire/Nor can they find Him who go wandering far,’ or ‘His habitat is wonderfully near/in each soul’s thicket ‘neath its deepest star,’ or ‘Let those who seek come home through the vain years/ to where the Spirit waits a shining captive.’ (pp.22-36)  -[The Track of the Mystic:The Spirituality of Jessica Powers by Marcianne Kappes]

Also from St. Therese’s autobiography: “O my only Friend, why dost Thou not reserve these infinite longings to lofty souls, to the eagles that soar in the heights? Alas! I am but a poor little unfledged bird. I am not an eagle, I have but the eagle’s eyes and heart! Yet, notwithstanding my exceeding littleless, I dare to gaze upon the Divine Sun of Love, and I burn to dart upwards unto Him! I would fly, I would imitate the eagles; but all that I can do is to lift up my little wings–it is beyond my feeble power to soar.”

Love/Mercy

In the late 1930s Jessica Powers lived in New York. She tells how she sat on a New York park bench arguing with an editor for over two hours as to whether or not truth or beauty was the greater attribute in God. The editor aided with truth; she, with beauty. Several months before she died, she told me that perhaps both she and the editor were wrong. "In the end," she said, "all we have is the mercy of God. That is God's greatest attribute." It is not surprising, then, that Jessica asked that her poem "The Mercy of God" (p. 1) be given prominence in her volume of selected poetry.

I am copying down in a book from my heart's archive

the day that I ceased to fear God with a shadowy fear.

Would you name it the day that I measured my column of virtue

and sighted through windows of merit a crown that was near?

Ah, no, it was rather the day I began to see truly

That I came forth from nothing and ever toward nothingness tend,

that the works of my hands are a foolishness wrought in the presence

of the worthiest king in a kingdom that never shall end.

I rose up from the acres of self that I tended with passion

and defended with flurries of pride:

I walked out of myself and went into the woods of God's mercy,

and here I abide.

There is greenness and calmness and coolness, a soft leafy covering

from judgment of sun overhead,

and the hush of His peace, and the moss of His mercy to tread.I have nought but my will seeking God; even love burning in me

is a fragment of infinite loving and never my own.

And I Fear God no more; I go forward to wander forever

in a wilderness of His infinite mercy alone.

Spirituality deals with that radical move from the acres of self into the circle of God's love and mercy. We call this conversion, metanoia. Through the action of grace, the soul now has a new center of consciousness, and directs its activity in accord with God's will. Discernment and obedience become a way of life. Conversion is a gift of God's mercy and once it is experienced, there is no longer any enduring fear. Mercy is one facet of love. In the face of sin, mercy is called forgiveness; in the face of affliction, mercy was called compassion. Jessica Powers understood that mercy was truly an aspect of love and thus a large volume of her poetry centers on love with a capital "L" (referring to God) as well as love with a small "I" (referring to ourselves). In her poem "Letter of Departure" (pp. 43-44) she makes two references to this important distinction in her spiritual understanding:

... We knew too much of the knowable dark world,

its secret and its sin,

too little of God. And now we rise to see

that even our pledges to humanity

were false, since love must out of Love begin.   

From article "The Spirituality of Jessica Powers, " by Rev. Robert Morneau, D.D., Spiritual Life, Vol 36, No 3, Fall 1990, pp. 150-161.