ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE NORTHLANDS: MARCH 4, 2007
Hey God, it's for you!
Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God
John Donne (1572-1631)
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearley’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.
I love John Donne. I once read a commentator state that his is ‘the most seductive spiritual poetry and the most spiritual seductive poetry ever written’. This sums him up pretty well. Born Catholic, after succumbing to pressure from King James To convert to Anglicanism he eventually became the Dean of St Paul’s, gave really cool sermons and obsessed about death in a very creative manner.
The reason I love him (apart from the fact that his poetry rocks) is that he really craved God. He ached for God with an intensity that shakes me. I can taste it in every line of this poem. I understand it. I feel the same, sometimes.
Yesterday Wolf and I were in a book shop and I saw Richard Dawkins‘ book The God Delusion. The title scared me, I leafed through it with ill-concealed hysteria and asked Wolf if he found the title sad or threatening. Wolf is grounded in his faith (unconventional, he is no monotheiest) and moves easily past naysayers. I fear contamination. A guy, a clever guy, a scientist, publishes a book asserting God is nothing more than a dangerous delusion and I linger, fearfully – wanting to read it, and yet not.
It is like passing the scene of a car accident, not wanting to look and yet wanting to. You want to look and see people ashen faced and trembling, lighting cigarettes and saying “what a relief I could have been killed”. You want to see survivors not corpses. I want to read The God Delusion and survive. I don’t want to be contaminated with even more doubt.
Like Donne I crave God, like Donne’s God, mine remains just beyond my fingertips. People who know God exists draw me, people who know He doesn’t scare me. The beauty of faith is in its struggle.
To protect myself from Dawkins the non-believer I call upon another love, Einstein, the pantheist – speaking in Hindu:
‘A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.’
So who’s deluded now? Thanks Albert I owe you one.
