Tuesday, December 20, 2022

It is the 20th of December 2022. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I’m Dan van Voorhis. 

Suppose you listened to this show in the first years. In that case, you remember that I used to end this show with a piece of poetry- while I’m happy with the switch to the daily lectionary, I fondly remember those days of being seeped in poems from the Middle Ages to the present- reading and rereading and practicing reading for the air. There are some I go back to- T.S. Eliot, Malcolm Guite, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Denise Levertov, to name a few- and I remember reading about Levertov and her conversion to the faith after becoming a famous poet- and reading her poems from just before and after her conversion. Levertov died on this, the 20th of December in 1997, at the age of 74. On this anniversary of her death, I would like to tell you the story of her life.

Her father, Paul, was a Hasidic Jew who was placed under house arrest in the first World War. He was a rabbinic scholar who, upon finding a forbidden copy of the New Testament, decided that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and converted to Christianity. He would meet his wife, Denise’s mother, in Turkey. She, Beatrice Adelaide Spooner-Jones, was from Wales and a descendant of the Welsh mystic Angell Jones. The couple moved to England, where Paul became an Anglican priest, and her mother homeschooled both Denise and her older sister Olga.

At the age of 12, she sent a poem she had written to T.S. Eliot, and he responded back with helpful criticism. During World War II she worked as a nurse and continued to write poems- her first work, “The Double Image,” was published in 1946. In 1947 she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman, and the two moved to New York, where they had their only child- a son named Nikolai. It was an unhappy marriage, strained by professional jealousies and affairs- it ended in 1975.

In the 1960s and 70s, Denise was politically active and spiritually ambiguous. She did not take to the faith of her parents. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “I’m religiously vague (I mean chronically undecided as to what I do & don’t believe, to put it with a bit more grammatical clarity).”

Her politics put her in the company of a few Catholic activists, such as Daniel Berrigan, with whom she would have a friendship, and they would invite her to contemplate the things of God. She did have an affinity for the story of Doubting Thomas and, in the early 80s, began writing a poem, “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus”- she figured there were other unbelievers who had taken on sacred subjects- but in her own words: “when I had arrived at the Agnus Dei, I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form. . . . The experience of writing the poem--the long swim through waters of unknown depth--had been also a conversion process.”

Hear this from that poem:

And after the empty tomb
when they told me He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,

told me that though he had passed through the door like a ghost

He had breathed on them the breath of a living man—

even then when hope tried with a flutter of wings to lift me—

still, alone with myself, my heavy cry was the same:

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

Later she spoke of the stumbling blocks that kept her from faith-

[She] “began to see these stumbling blocks as absurd. Why, when the very fact of life itself, of the existence of anything at all, is so astounding why…should I withhold my belief in God or in the claims of Christianity until I am able to explain to myself the discrepancy between the suffering of the innocent…and the assertions that God is just and merciful?”

She would join the Catholic Church- largely on account of the centrality of the aesthetic of the Mass, its social positions, and the influence of St. Julian of Norwich and the mystical tradition. Her works from 1982’s Candles in Babylon and 1984’s Oblique Prayers dwell on the topics of her faith. She would continue to teach, moving to California and then to Seattle, where she died due to complications with her lymphoma on this the 20th of December in 1997- born in 1923, Denise Levertov was 74 years old.

The last word for today comes from Denise Levertov- the incarnation was central to her faith and this season so please indulge me- this is her “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”:

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 20th of December 2022 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by

A man about whom I thought I would write a poem

maybe something about the place he calls his home

Where he produces audio, pastors and does Coffee make

Yes, it’s there in Wisconsin, Sheboygan, the village of Random Lake

He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who noticed today is also the 24th birthday of Kylian MBappe- what a match the other day- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.