Attuned to the Horizontal Sacred: Why Process Theology needs Mary Oliver

Attuned to the Horizontal Sacred

Why Process Theology Needs Mary Oliver

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Wild Geese
Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

*

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

The looming ecological crisis will affect cultures and societies around the world and, by extension, the world’s religions. Because religion can play such a vital role in individual and community life, interreligious solidarity on the work of ecological civilization is a worthwhile task. How will religious worldviews be affected by the increasing focus on transitioning to sustainable practices? In what ways can the world’s wisdom traditions inspire and guide this global transition?

-- Institute for Ecological Civilization, The Institute for Ecological Civiization

Why Process Theology Needs Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver presents process theology in poetic form, and thus much more beautifully than most process theologians, with the remarkable exception of Patricia Adams Farmer.

Here are some ideas we glean from Oliver's poetry which resemble process theology:

that we humans belong to the larger web of life: to "the family of things."
that each and every individual creature is unique and singular, with its own wild and precious life.
that prayer is the activity of paying attention to the things of these world, honestly and lovingly and caringly.
that death is real and hard, but that it makes space for an appreciation of life's beauty.
that we find our true home on earth by learning the arts of awe and wonder: by becoming brides of amazement.
that when we die, we become part of everywhere, and perhaps transformed in the process.

We process theologians believe these things, although we sometimes forget them, becaise we lost in our speculations concerning God. Mary Oliver's gift to process theology is to help it reclaim (or discover) a sense of the horizontal sacred.

The Horizontal Sacred

The horizontal sacred can be appreciated with or without belief in God. It is the web of life itself, known through both the joy and the melancholy of being alive. We discover the horizontal sacred in personal relationships: that is, with family and friends. And we discover it in reverential relations with the more than human world, including wild geese.

As Patricia Adams Farmer makes clear in her essay Mary Oliver and the World of Everywhere, an appreciation of the horizontal sacred can be combined with belief in God: that is, a trust in the vertical sacred.

The vertical sacred is heaven. It is a larger whole, with a life of its own, in which we are small but included. It is God. Because God leans into the world in love, a person who trusts in God may find God in, not apart from, the horizontal sacred. She has an "incarnational" understanding of God. But people who do not find belief in God easy or plausible can nevertheless find great meaning, great consolation, in the horizontal sacred.

In the biblical story, God took delight in this value on the seventh day of creation, finding the world good in its own right. According to the story, God, too, takes delight in the horizontal sacred. Mary Oliver and Patricia Adams Farmer invite us to do the same.

No Certainties, only Love

Patricia Adams Farmer writes:

But these theological musings are mysterious and invisible. Mary Oliver dealt with the visible, the touchable, the particulars; she gave them room to ask questions about God and the world without certainties, only love. I wish more theologians could leave it at that.

And so we can catch a glimpse of the everywhereness of heaven when we read her poetry. Her poems do taste like heaven, and she is alive in them. But she is more now—she is everywhere—and I see God smiling in that small cloud of hers.

Oh yes, let's leave it at that.

More on Mary Oliver

She constructs a form of subjectivity that does not depend on a separation from a world of objects.

"Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’”

-- from Poetry Foundation: retrieved 1/18/2019

She is sensitive to to the Wonder and Pain of Nature, without hiding from either.

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”

-- from Poetry Foundation: retrieved 1/18/2019

She combines the primal Joy and primal Melancholy of being Alive.

"Given its seeming contradiction — shallow and profound, uplifting and elegiac — Ms. Oliver’s verse is perhaps best read as poetic portmanteau, one that binds up both the primal joy and the primal melancholy of being alive."

-- Margalit Fox, NY Times Obituary, Jan. 17, 2019

Her poems are Homilies in an age too often devoid of accessible religious wisdom.

"Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work; composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music; and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver."

-- Margalit Fox, NY Times Obituary, Jan. 17, 2019

She presents the observation of life itself as a form of spirituality.

"Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins."

-- Margalit Fox, NY Times Obituary, Jan. 17, 2019

Married to Amazement

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

-- When Death Comes, Mary Oliver

Prayer as Paying Attention

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall downinto the grass,
how to kneel in the grass,how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to doWith your one wild and precious life?

-- A Summer Day, Mary Oliver