Clearhat

The first John Donne poem I ever read, about a month ago, brought tears to my eyes and made me breathe differently. I fell in love immediately. I sent the poem as a text message to my dearest friends, several of whom hadn't heard from me in months until receiving the random Donne. One response was my favorite, a single word: "Amen." That friend is more dear to me than before, because he got it.

I read the poem several times, and realized that I didn't like the reference to "three-person'd God," which is odd because I typically adore any reference to the number three. I didn't like it because what religion has done with the three-person thing, which is to destroy any delicate nuance and replace it with such a bizarre polarizing parody of whatever was originally meant by the idea it causes a disgust reaction within me.

Disgust is the oldest of all emotional reactions, one that the single-celled ancestor of all life developed billions of years ago in order to recoil from that which brings death, and which all life, even plants, have. So, rather than tolerate a tinge of disgust in a poem I loved, I "Rumi-ized" the poem: I used Rumi's word for God, instead of Donne's. I removed the reference to three-person'd and replaced it with beloved.

Here is the poem I promptly printed out, taped to the wall near my desk, and began to memorize because I loved it so much I wanted to weave it into my life:

Because of where I had placed it near my desk, I began to read it often, savoring the words, eventually starting to untangle the parallel between "knock breathe shine seek" and "break blow burn renew" and caressing my soul with each line, seeking to enrobe myself with its fabric. I am not exaggerating. No other poem has pierced to the center of my soul so quickly. After a few days of engaging with such focused intentionality, the words began to percolate through my daily mundane life. I enjoyed such moments, and fell more and more deeply in love with the poem, drawing it inward through the layers which protect the most sacred places within the soul.

It became a prayer; I began embodying its intensity, bringing it to God within my heart, asking him to ravish me with chastity, to set me free into the prison of his love, as if I were Thomas Traherne or Rumi or Donne. I do this from time to time as I read such intimate writers and yearn to escape the desert of spiritual loneliness which is dominant in the world where we live. I desire their tenderness in loving their God, the same affection King David felt when he wrote "the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." I particularly enjoyed the word "beloved" each time I read the poem.

And then, after a few weeks of this, God answered.

What does it look like when God batters one's heart?

I can think of no better words to describe the whirlwind which appeared in my life one day -- while in a co-parenting therapy session, thankfully -- than "God battered my heart." He did so in the safest, most isolated place to do so outside the heart. Although therapy sessions are private, they have the extra dimension of at least one external witness, than that place where one is alone with God only.

That more public dimension, protected by law with Therapist-Client Privilege because our culture understands the value of this kind of sacred, is what God used to contain the energy of "battering my heart." If he had battered my heart so fiercely while meditating, I may have been unable to bear it. But by answering the prayer within a therapy session, where everything is contained, isolated, safe, like that giant metal box police Bomb Units have, into which they can put a suspected bomb and blow it up safely without hurting anyone or anything¹, I felt that answer roaring through both me and my therapist.

We both yelled at each other in a way that had never happened before -- should never happen in therapy -- but because it should never happen, when it does, can be profoundly cathartic.

We were at the very precipice of our wills. We both lost track of therapist and client roles. It was pure roar energy between two males, rams butting each other fiercely for control over a single thing, which was basically... my destiny... insofar as he has earned the trust and the right to define it in certain ways.

He was wrong, I was right -- in one dimension.

I was wrong, he was right -- in another dimension.

It was intense. It was quite unlike either of us. Both of us were stunned. No further details will be given, except that I have a good therapist who can roll with surprises like this.

Afterwords, for days after, I was shaken in my soul, deeply moved and feeling both wounded and victorious in a way that rumbled through everything I was. It was hard for me to focus on the mundane daily life for a few days because I was struggling with this still-rolling earthquake within². I had to spend extra time during my daily meditations, getting centered, bringing that primal energy back into its normal confines. Something had been released within my soul which needed a lot of effort to put back into its place.

At some point in this energy-normalizing process, I realized with a grand laugh: "Oh, that was God battering my heart, just like I asked!"

I then decided to pull back from the intensity of my new prayer.

Be careful what you pray for

It's not the first time I've prayed for something intensely and then watched as life circumstances folded in around me, answering. It reminded me of the time years ago I intensely prayed "to be more humble." I remember well the answer I received then, as my life rather quickly collapsed into chaos and broad spectrum disarray which severed several friendships and rearranged the priority of others. I knew as it happened that God was answering that prayer, so it was bearable. However, that answer shook me. I resolved never to pray for humility like that again, and ever since, approach such yearning with trepidation and... humility.

I kept that resolution faithfully. A couple decades went by. And then... the John Donne poem a few weeks ago. I made the same mistake. I sincerely went to God asking for something with that same intensity of focus. He answered, not in words, but with the fabric of my life.

As an aspect of daily meditation, I long ago learned to speak and listen in that "fabric of my life" language, and I've written about it elsewhere, so this wordless language was not new to me. Here's what was new: A few days after the "God battered my heart" insight, and resolving not to continue praying the Donne poem anymore like that, a deeper insight, full of hidden wisdom came to my awareness.

Graduating from John Donne

I began to see the Donne poem from a completely different light. It was like I had somehow "graduated" from it, and could see it from the other side. I began to understand that, beautiful though the poem is, it contains a deeply hidden flaw, an assumption about God which was typical, even canonical, at the time that Donne wrote 400 years ago, but which is not true about God at all.

God is love, and does not batter. To desire him to batter your heart is like asking him to create something out of nothing³, or desiring to be God, or something else equally paradoxical. If he needs to, and you're willing⁴, God will completely rearrange your language and perceptions in order to reveal to you that praying to him to batter your heart is more like asking for a curse, than a blessing. And that's what he did -- he changed me so that I could read the poem in a more mature manner.

I still love the poem and always will, but I won't pray it in that same way anymore. As deep as the poem is, the lesson learned is deeper: God is love, so purely love that if you pray to him to batter your heart, he will bring about a change in your ability to desire such things. He will allow circumstances to batter you -- but he will not batter. That last sentence needs to be explained:

In truth, God only set the stage: I battered my own heart

I knew even as I roared at my therapist, and as he responded in kind, that I was doing this to myself. But it took a few days to recognize what I knew, as it was buried a few layers deep in my motives. As I reflected on the scene from within the insightful frame of "God battered my heart," there came the full understanding that I was battering my own heart. Admittedly, that's a more nuanced interpretation, and doesn't address what is happening in John Donne's poem, so it is sensible to keep ahold of the God frame, like this:

In order to help me understand the deeper truth on the other side of the poem, God answered my prayer by... allowing me to answer it for myself. He set up the dynamic tension in my life (for example, helping me see how the therapist was confining me to an old version of myself because doing so made his job easier, even though it made my life harder) and prepared the scene so it could happen safely, as it did. He knew exactly what would happen. But all along it was me discovering a boundary within myself, not God setting a boundary, or battering.

This is a mature way to process all of these dynamics, but the insight arrived over days and pales in comparison to what happened while writing this present essay about the Donne poem. I marked with a footnote earlier (#2 above) the moment when a phone call interrupted my writing. As described in the footnote, that phone call ended up being a powerful conversation that was the culmination of years of seeking on the part of both people in the conversation, coming to the same key insight which replaced fear with love and which has already and will continue to change our lives.

My friend who called was coincidentally the only person with whom I had shared these present insights about the Donne poem, so that is part of the context here. The conversation between friends was deeper and broader, more revelatory, and far more gentle than the raucous therapy session -- and more meaningful. Although the experience is still too fresh to grasp fully, this much is obvious: both of us arrived at one of those rare insights that changes lives. A third party -- an important figure in a certain ongoing drama -- who was previously framed in a bad light was discovered to be innocent due to a change of heart in the friend who called me. It immediately became clear: We don't need to fight or fear this third person, we need to help them in their role within this unfolding drama. No further details need be given, because the point here is not in the details but simply showing how my life is still rippling in response to the sincerity of the original "batter my heart" prayer.

Meanwhile, as I continue writing these words, I'm still on the original intention of preparing you the reader for a poem I finished writing shortly before I started this essay. I write poetry from time to time and much of it is garbage. But every now and then, the stars align, and something wonderful flows onto the written page. This is one of those gems: I want to share this with everyone. But I know only a few will ever read it, and even say so in the poem.

As I read it again a few minutes later, after having read what I just wrote above, and thus being more able to place myself better within the context of the poem... I agree. It's a gem, though it may not seem so at first.

That's enough preamble, here's the poem.

 

---

Footnotes:

1. Please don't ask me how I know this with such specificity.

2. At this moment while writing, the phone rang and a rather intense conversation began with a beloved friend. I thought at first that the conversation had such intensity -- this time all of it positive, revelatory, catharsis without the roaring negativity -- that it must surely be an echo of the therapy session. "What is an echo of a therapy session?" you may ask. You know how intense moments can echo, with slightly-less-intense emotional moments happening like ripples in a lake for weeks afterward? I thought it was that. But as the conversation progressed, I realized there was a sublime grace happening, a growing awareness that was changing two souls more elegantly and with more healing than the roaring therapy of a few weeks earlier. Trying to organize this sequence of two similar intensities in my mind, I soon decided the therapy session was not the moment of God battering my heart. No, that primal intensity was just preparation for what was happening in this conversation more gracefully. The meaning of the moment that the phone call interrupted this present narrative was not lost on me. So I decided this second intensity was not an echo, but it was the eye of the storm. The yelling two weeks ago was just the storm surge as the outer edge of the hurricane arrived. If I'm right, in a couple weeks, something equally intense will happen, concluding this trilogy. If so, I'll come back here and update this footnote, because that would mean I should continue memorizing the Donne poem; not for the aspect of it from which I have graduated, but to continue the profound dialogue with God which Donne's "ravish me that I may be chaste" has opened. [Update, six months later: Yes, something equally intense happened a few weeks later, concluding the trilogy, but this whole three-part sequence was only the beginning of six months of intense inner work. These past few months have taken me on an intense inward journey which puts me in a completely different frame of mind from when I began writing these words. The most concise way to describe this without going into detail is simply: "God is battering my heart." The fruit is very good -- an aspect of my pride, my ego, is being dismantled, inch by inch, day by day. But the daily experience is very painful, lasting for months and still going. Thankfully, after the attention-getting experiences decribed above, it is all happening in a private, inner, way which only I can see. At this point, I do not quite know what to do with the Donne poem; intensely praying it opened a door to something deep and profound within me which I am... not able to put into words yet⁷. I'm afraid to "pray" it more, but also... maybe I will again someday. A deeper narrative will be written some other day when this process is complete and I can see it all more objectively⁸.]

3. Creatio ex nihilo is a philosophical concept I have studied deeply. It is an ancient debate, and the best answer on the matter is the ancient answer from Jewish thought: God first creates a "nothing out of something" and then out of this island of nothing, he creates a "something out of nothing." Therefore the nothing is not absolute nothing, but a space within everything (himself) wherein certain aspects of his divinity are suppressed in order to establish a place where free will can be truly free. There is much to say on this subject, but that's a decent summary.

4. Like, specifically praying "thy will be done" every day for years, and daily seeking to understand how God answers such a prayer not in words, but in life-changing events like what is being described here. 

5. This references an obscure fact that I stumbled on one day when I was somewhere I shouldn't have been: at the most advanced levels of evil, although the lower levels pretend to hate him, they well know who the Father is, and that he answers even their dark prayers. They just don't know that, in the end, justice favors the good. For if they knew that, they would repent. They are lost, but He is not.

6. I love when Rene Girard observes how this is the single point Nietzsche got wrong. He well recognizes Nietzsche's deep brilliance and even borrows from him because he got everything else right, including such ideas as "God is dead." (Yes, that form of God is dead). But sadly, Nietzsche's insight about the way Christianity makes the victim the victor was such a core point that its negative interpretation permeated his whole philosophy. He developed the Ubermensch concept in order to reject it. Girard is even so bold as to say this is why Nietzsche went insane -- intense cognitive dissonance over this point. As Girard goes on to reveal, with the positive interpretation of this same point: yes, the Untermensch, "the meek," inherit the earth.

7. After years of writing in this weblog regularly, at least every few weeks, sometimes every few days, I have not written anything for six months. The intensity of this inner journey has an aspect that is literally beyond words, eclipsing my ability to write, and I'm only just now regaining my normal writing posture.

8. [Update]: Nearly a year later, I read footnote #2 again and realized where the intense adventure of the last year began. It's still going on! It all began with the John Donne poem experience written about in this article. His poem is far more intense than I realized even when I realized it was intense! I speculated above that I would write about the whole process when it was finished, but the whole process has gone to a new level altogether, with no finish in sight. The current entry in the adventure is just published, so I'll link it here as promised, although the full adventure appears to be a long way from ending.