Ash Valentine

Here's an ashy Valentine in honor of the conjunction of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day... an unusual marriage. It's an illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins from Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Press, 2012.)

A crumb of dust

George Herbert, who left us gold...
"To be a window, through thy grace."
St. Andrew's, Bemerton, Wiltshire.

Ash Wednesday.

Flakes of snow falling out of the ash-light.

As I am dust, and to dust I will return, I started off the day properly with tea (needed to moisturize that dust in the meantime!) and a rich, metaphysical poem from the marvelous Anglican poet-saint, George Herbert (1593-1633), writing of "a crumb of dust." Some poems are touchstones that tell the gold a poem can be--how large and bold and beautiful. This is one.


The Temper (I)

How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes
     Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
     If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
          My soul might ever feel!

Although there were some forty heav'ns, or more,
     Sometimes I peer above them all;
     Sometimes I hardly reach a score;
          Sometimes to hell I fall.

O rack me not to such a vast extent;
     Those distances belong to thee:
     The world's too little for thy tent,
           A grave too big for me.

 Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch
      A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell?
      Will great God measure with a wretch?
           Shall he thy stature spell?

 O let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,
      O let me roost and nestle there:
      Then of a sinner thou art rid,
           And I of hope and fear.

 Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:
      Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor:
      This is but tuning of my breast,
           To make the music better.

 Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
      Thy hands made both, and I am there;
      Thy power and love, my love and trust,
           Make one place ev'rywhere.

Ashes to ashes

Flannery O' Connor meant a great deal to me as a young woman, and probably some day I will have to go back to her. The only book of hers I've reread in the past decade is her wondrous book of essays, Mystery and Manners. Here are some quotes from it in honor of Ash Wednesday.

The Regional Writer: When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery...

On Her Own Work: I have found, in short, from the reading of my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.

The Grotesque in Southern Fiction: There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted and lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

The Regional Writer: The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Click on her name below if you can't get enough of Miss Flannery of Milledgeville.