[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
When he defended Christian faith against pagan intellectuals
who claimed its doctrines were absurd and unbelievable
and who mocked Christians for their childish belief in miracles
saying Augustine pointed out that if the scoffers were right
then nothing could be more miraculous
than the nonviolent non-chorus triumph of Christian faith
in all four corners of the Roman Empire.
Yet that was precisely what had happened by the time Augustine
was writing the city of God at the beginning of the fifth century.
Sometimes historical reality itself is wholly incredible.
And even earlier Christian apologists, Tertullian famously wrote,
"And the Son of God died, it is wholly credible because it is ridiculous."
And buried he rose again, it is certain because it is impossible.
Silence must be clear, all day when I swim away.
The friend of God's will to live, to live, to live, to live, to live, to live.
[ Music ]
[ Speaking in foreign language ]
Of all the Christian doctrines at pagan wisdom found scandalous,
none was more so than the resurrection.
We'll never know exactly what happened.
If anything on the morning of the day we call Easter,
the earliest written account of the events purported to have taken place in Jerusalem on that day
comes to us from St. Mark's Gospel, composed around 70 AD,
so almost four decades after the death of Jesus.
Mark relates that when Mary Magdalene, Salome and the Mary the mother of James,
arrive at Jesus' tomb on the first day after the Sabbath
to anoint his body and complete the rights of burial,
they discover that the stone has been rolled away from its entrance.
Inside a young man dressed in white tells them, "Do not be alarmed.
You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.
He has been raised. He is not here.
He, knownest in the Vulgate.
Look, there is the place they laid him."
The angel then alludes to a future appearance of Jesus,
but go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee,
there you will see him just as he told you,
and then the Gospel ends abruptly with the women running away in fear.
The last ten verses, which describe Jesus' post-resurrection appearances to the disciples,
are later additions to Mark's original text.
As for the much more elaborate appearance narratives in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John,
they were composed anywhere from fifteen to thirty years after Mark's.
Even if one believes that the Gospels contain a faithful memory of eyewitness accounts of what actually happened on Easter,
in all their different versions the emphasis falls on what the women and disciples don't see
when they look inside the tomb.
Look, there is where they laid him.
This there is the sight of a disappearance whose void gives rise to the Christian faith that Tertullian,
Augustine, and countless other apologists have defended across the ages.
One might even be tempted to say that it also gave rise to that it is the very source of,
the stories of Jesus' posthumous appearance to his disciples,
all of which could be understood as subsequent elaborations or expansions of the story of the empty tomb.
The tomb offers evidence of what it does not contain.
In that respect it is the very Mark of Faith, which the Pauline letter to the Hebrews defines as,
"The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen."
The empty tomb is evidence enough of things unseen, heek, known est.
He is not here.
There is nothing left of Jesus here except the sign of His elsewhereness.
There is a fundamental analogy therefore between the tomb and the scene of history,
both of which Jesus has disappeared from, leaving behind a depulcural promise that belongs to the futurity of hope rather than to the aftermath of grief.
The radical question posed by Christian faith is,
"What do we make of this here, this heek that has now been evacuated?
How do we inhabit its promise? What meaning does it have for us?
What ethical obligations does it impose on us?"
To discuss the empty tomb and other matters of Christian faith, Matthew Farley joins me in the studio today,
Matt Farley received his undergraduate degree from Stanford ten years ago,
and not long after that he entered the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits.
He is seven years into a ten-year process of Jesuit formation.
He is currently in the penultimate stage of that formation, teaching high school English to juniors at San Francisco's Jesuit High School,
Saint Ignatius College Prep.
At the end of this year he will begin immediate preparations for priesthood.
As a Jesuit Matt Farley has worked with the missionaries of charity at a home for the dying in Kingston, Jamaica,
he has done prison ministry with white supremacist youth in LA,
he has built a baptismal font in Blackfoot Country, Montana,
he has taught writing at USF and has helped produce a documentary on Saint Francis Javier,
all in all a very impressive curriculum for such a young man.
Matt, welcome to the program.
Robert, it's a boon to be here with you.
Excellent.
Our acquaintance is actually one that we owe to this show in title opinions,
because over the summer he wrote me an email,
we didn't know each other before that, telling me that you were a fan of the show,
and telling me why you were a fan of the show.
I don't know if I ever asked you how you discovered in title opinions in the first place,
with all that's going on in your life at the moment.
Right, well, maybe you can hear a confession.
Go ahead.
Well, your show wasn't the first one I listened to.
I was casting about for a radio show at the end of my first year of teaching high school.
I found the work so innovating that I wasn't able to do my special reading I would normally do at night.
So the first show I landed on was a talk show on the life of the mind,
and I found the style there to bear what Poe called the heresy of the didactic,
and the host of that show was always cutting a bee line for lessons.
And what I really enjoy about your show, Robert, is the sense of "Joo, you take with the English language,
and your obvious relish in the show itself."
So I like listening to your show on my lazy boy at night with my house hushed,
and I let the, what Barth called the "grain of the voice" bathe over me.
Okay, well, that's good enough for me.
Thank you.
Matt, I suppose a number of people will be interested in how someone, like you,
makes such a momentous decision to graduate from an institution like Stanford,
which of course opens a lot of possibilities one has to assume to anyone who graduates successfully from Stanford,
and yet you chose to enter the Jesuit order.
It's a momentous decision.
How does one make such a decision like that, or how did you?
Well, I can't cut a bee line and talk straight way about why I entered the Jesuits,
so maybe I just tell you real quickly about one of my conversions,
because I don't think it's all that helpful to talk about a conversion to Christianity when,
when really the basis of that word, met anois, look again, and we're always looking again.
So what happened to me at the end of Stanford was that right as my junior year was ending,
and many of my successes in school were kindly coming to fruit academically,
athletically, romantically.
Something mysterious happened to me, and I started to not enjoy those things the way I used to enjoy them.
And since then, I've come to call this experience in Ignatian speak desolation.
It's a little different than depression, which is more clinical.
Desolation is a disconnection between that affective enjoyment of certain activities and the activities themselves,
and I basically became, as Augustine said, a mystery to myself.
I think there's another word for that, called Anhedonia.
Is that right?
Yeah, it means the inability to take pleasure in anything.
And the reason I know that word is because that was the original title that Woody Allen wanted to give his movie Annie Hall,
and he donated instead, he didn't think it would, he rightly changed it to Annie Hall,
who knows what would have happened to that movie had been, and he donated.
But no, so this desolation, I think you're right, it's a different thing than depression.
So you went into the order, and I want to ask you about the Jesuit order shortly, but can you tell us something about your missionary work?
Because that's a crucial part of the formation.
It certainly is.
When I was one of my first experiments, we call them experiments in Jesuit speak,
and I like the connotation of that word experiment because it makes it sound like you could be in the lab
and burn the buns and burners and break everything, and it would still be okay.
So we take experiments to do certain kinds of direct service with the poor,
and I went to Kingston, Jamaica, not to those golden sand beaches behind you,
but to really the heart of one of the most violent cities in the Americas.
Was that your choice or were you assigned there?
I'm stalling because the truth is, I'm never quite sure when I meet with my superiors.
They end up making me think that everything's my idea, but I'm not.
No, I wanted to go there for sure.
And I work with the missionaries of charity who are mother-trees' order,
and really I was just a sidekick to these sisters who are really well-oiled machines in their care for the sick and the dying.
What they would do in the mornings they would patrol the streets of Kingston, literally amidst gunfire,
and rescue poor people out of dumpsters who'd crawled in there to die,
you know, without all the money we have in this country for end of life care,
the poor will often just deep-six themselves into dumpsters to not be such a burden on their family.
So these sisters would rescue people and we'd give them a dignified death, essentially.
They would be rescued and kept alive, obviously.
Yeah, to the point of their death, right? Exactly. Exactly.
And my role in all of that was just that of an erstwhile hospital order I would bathe in,
sing songs with them, and play cards.
Well, good for you. Yeah. How long were you there?
I was there about seven months in total.
Would you like to say anything about the other missionary work you did down in Los Angeles?
Sure. Well, in Los Angeles, I worked with some white supremacist youth, some Aryans, and, you know,
my theologically cultivated listener out there in the audience might think I'm talking about an early heresy that Mary and Mary was.
Right. And the Aryans were in one block of this prison and the Nestorians and another block.
I'm kidding about that. I minister to a kid who had burnt his mom's boyfriend in a trunk of a car and he had done this at the age of 14.
And so I basically just chatted with him in the cell.
The violence that when young people commit acts of violence like that, they have no sense yet of the laws they violated, either of their own integrity in that act or of another person's rights.
So the grieving process is incredibly long.
I'm not sure I'm going to agree with that, Matt, because having been raised a Catholic, I believed and was told, believed perhaps.
Because I was told that seven years old is the age of reason. And after seven years old you're liable for mortal sin and damnation.
14 years of age is pretty late in life not to have any moral, fully foreign moral conscience.
And I'm sure that you're right when you say that this youth and many others don't have it.
But I would have to imagine that that's because among other reasons they have their some failure in their education, they're either moral, ethical or religious education.
Most definitely. In fact, I don't mean to go soft pedal such a nutritious crime obviously.
And when I first met this kid, he was weeping in a huddle on floor of his jail cell. And I thought those were tears of contrition, but I realized soon that those were tears of feeling sorry for himself.
So, most I don't know about when humans take on reason at what age, but certainly this kid knew what he had done.
I'm talking about the process of really coming to grips with that.
Were you successful in awakening him to that cognition?
Well no, because the system moves the guys so quickly. And I only had a few months with him. I still write him letters.
He signs his letters to me, KO, Keep on, Keep in on. So sometimes I wonder who's ministering to whom?
Yeah. And is this missionary work something that Jesuits continue to do after ordination?
So in three years presumably you will be ordained as a priest and will your future as a Jesuit priest, the entail these kinds of missions or experiments as you call them?
It will, of course, the experiment is your life now. So the goal of the formation is to wet your beak in different kinds of apostolates as we call them.
You know, works of mercy. And the presumption is that these will be what keeps you going as a priest without some certain other comfort you would have in a family.
It's really the bond you create with the people you serve and love that nourishes you and your priesthood.
And this is part of Saint Ignatius' vision, I presume, no?
Indeed. If Ignatius being the founder of the Jesuit order.
He is. Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about the Jesuit order and his philosophy and at its founder?
Sure. Well maybe start with the second part. First Ignatius was born in 1491 to nobility.
And I don't want to go into his whole hagiography. But most of our audience to the degree they're familiar with him at all will think of him as
a sort of soldier priest. And that's all true. Ignatius fought against the French with Spain and was the last one to try to stay a siege of Pamplona and his injury from a cannonball precipitated a sort of deathbed conversion that he had.
That's all true. The reason I have a devotion to Ignatius personally isn't because of his this hidalgo martial sort of medieval bravura figure.
But I think he's a real, he's a person of theological re-imagination over and over again in his life. He abandoned his ideas of God to some degree and certainly of what he wanted to do with the Jesuits in light of what he learned in prayer and life.
So I think of him as not as a real strict martial leader, but as somebody was really quite supple to the spirit and the hour.
And how about the philosophy now of the Jesuits? Because we know that it's intimately linked to education.
It is. I went to a Jesuit college and graduated from one and a number of other people had a very heavy emphasis on the classics on Greek and Latin.
And even up through the moderns. So it's a very complete, reasoned, systematic, thorough concept of what it means to form students.
It is. It is. And anybody wanted to know more about how it came about that Jesuits were operating so many colleges and really they provided the humanist infrastructure of a good many of European people.
The Jesuit commitment I think you're sort of angling about to education comes from their humanism. And their humanism in terms stems from a certain spiritual experience they have in the spiritual exercises of saying Ignatius of Loyola.
And at the beginning of this 30-day retreat of contemplation of the life of Christ really in entering imaginatively into the scenes of the life of Christ. Ignatius makes us imagine that we have an aerial view of the world with the Trinity.
And in the fullness of time, the Trinity overlooking the circuit and spread of humans and all of their glory and fragility, their beauty and brutality, decide to mission the second person.
And what does that mean? Well, it's a way of speaking I suppose, but it means that the contemplation is to imagine the sun.
The second person being the sun, going in the fullness of time, entering into human history.
And it's really the basis of Jesuit humanism and commitment to all things human because Christ himself literally mucked around here with us.
He's spit and mud in his cures. He had his dwelling amongst us. And our commitment to education comes from the notice also that he was a great teacher.
So the second person, Jesus Christ is a crucial. To what extent is the, I don't want to get too theological here, but how about the third person? Is there a distinctive presence or importance of the third person of the Trinity, namely the spirit, the Holy Ghost, which the nuns always used to tell the girls that the dances.
The room for the Holy Spirit room for the Holy Ghost. I find myself telling my students that dance is the same thing.
Well, you know, I think the mystery of the gift of the Holy Spirit gets short shrift and we can't go into all of the theological implications of Pentecost.
I think the Holy Spirit is simply the mode in which Christ has remained present and this gets back to your beautiful monologue there about the emptiness of the tomb. Well, the elsewhereness of Jesus now is in the spirit in live and hearts of believers. So the elsewhereness is here in studio B where we're recording the show and looks a bit like an empty tomb actually.
Well, I know that there's been some near here here, heretical doctrines in the past where some theologians or theorists tried to chronologize the Trinity in terms of ages and saying that we had an age of the father, largely associated with, you know, the Judaic moment of the pre, pre Christ event, Jewish God.
Then an age of the Son, which is the life of Christ during the years that he was alive. And then with the death of Christ we've moved into the age of the Spirit and that one age supersedes the other age.
Now obviously we would not have two centuries of, I mean, two millennia of Christendom if this theory had been or doctrine had been embraced because the second person of the Trinity never gets superseded by the Spirit.
But as I like the way you put it, given that Jesus disappears from the tomb and by association from history, from his direct present, but that if the Spirit is left behind, then that Spirit can locate itself anywhere where there are two or three people who gather in his name, no?
The beautiful scripture is one of my favorites. And that's why I also believe one of the other reasons that the Church can found itself anywhere is not just because it's eutopic in the sense that it believes in a no place, which is the true homeland of the soul, but also because the tomb, as you were, I think even alluding to yourself, is the tomb being empty, can no longer serve as that old traditional foundation of the
placehood where so many other cultures, previous Greek and Roman for sure, I think even Hebrew, that the Sepulchrol foundationalism of these other cultures was such that there was a specific placehood associated with the tomb which had an inhabitant, a kind of quasi divine ancestor in it.
But if the tomb there is empty, that means the Church can lay its foundations really anywhere.
Exactly, exactly. And the significance, theologically of the rending of the Temple Vale at the time of the great terrible events around Christ's crucifixion, is that the Holy God's presence, Shikhana, is spilled out, so there's a complete collapse of that distinction between the profane, literally that which is before the Temple, and the secular.
So, Christian spirituality is a spirituality that's been shaked out, spilled out in its holiness and hearts of believers.
Well, you've used the word secular there, and you've used in the context of humanism, I mean, Jesuit theology and practice humanism.
And of course, there's this other phenomenon which is called secular humanism, that fundamentalist in this country always point to us belonging to the other side, and is antithetical to Christianity because it seems to evacuate the divine from the equation.
How do you see secular humanism in relation to Jesuit humanism?
Or even Christian humanism in general? Well, I guess as an opening gamut, I would make a radical denunciation of the idea of secular humanism, because the idea that there is a secular
or a...
What does secular mean?
Or an order of time that is bereft of God's grace, that somehow autonomous biosphere, where God's creative active existence isn't necessary.
I don't believe all of us are here biographically contingent active existence, and all world is graced as a...
The country priest says at the end of the Bernano-Snovel, "Tut de gras." Everything is graced.
But is everything graced because there was an incarnation where it was graced through the Christ event, and in which case, I'm here now going to try to play a devil.
The devil's advocate where the devil is actually my colleague, Tom Sheen, who on a previous episode of entitled opinions, we had a long-spirited discussion about whether Christianity, the Christian message properly understood dissolves into a secular humanism or not.
One could say that Christ's canosis and his taking of a human form, and even as you said, the most human behaviors and associations, prostitutes and so forth, in the unclean and the taxpayers, if all that which we associate with the secular world was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it might be good enough for the rest of us.
And that might be an argument for how Christian faith and secular humanism can be conjugated together.
Well, I'm going to hold on to this statement. Your friend, Tom Sheen, is unknown to me personally, but he's kind of a part of my Jesuit ambiance. He studied at Fordham where I studied.
And so this is a, I consider this a interfamiliar and broguely, you know, but I would say quite the reverse of what he says that it's a secular humanism that dissolves into Christian humanism.
There's an incredibly astonishing gospel Matthew 25. It's one everybody knows. The Son of Man comes to judge at the end of time, and he separates the sheep on the right from the goats on the left.
And what he says is that whoever clothed the naked, fed the hungry, etc., are blessed and will be with him. And those who haven't, not, well, what's astonishing there is that there are people among the sheep who didn't know that they were doing that for Christ when they did that.
You mentioned in your Pro-Eem, they're the militant atheist, and you never know out there if you've done those things that Jesus said you might be in heaven some day. So you better watch out.
Here we're on very, very difficult and contested theological grounds about the whole debate about justification by faith or justification by works. And I'm all with you on this.
And I guess I'm with the Jesuits for whom works are not exclusive of faith, but certainly works what it behooves us to put our minds to as long as we're alive.
But certainly there is another strain of Christian faith which believes that no amount of such works will avail anyone for their salvation.
And I guess it's because if you appeal to certain interpretations of Scripture, it's by faith alone that one one has his justification, which of course is not Catholic doctrine.
And I suppose it's one of the reasons why if there is a divide there between the gross O'Mode of the Catholic and the Protestant traditions I find myself naturally allied with the Catholic on this issue of works because it's directly affecting my
My relation to my neighbor. And even Paul who is the great authority for the others, for the Protestant theologians when he says that it all dissolves into love that love is the most essential of the three theological virtues that love takes a form of cadditus.
And cadditus is something that translates itself into works and that's why your experiments and the missionaries and what the nuns do on a daily basis all around the world.
I think it's really doing work of a, let's call it even a secular salvation. If you can save someone from dying in a beastly manner in Kingston, Jamaica, that is a work of provisional salvation if you like.
And then as for his or her soul, I don't know about that, but that's already a lot.
Well, you know, I think it's completely possible for a secular humanist and a Christian humanist to share the same social agenda. I mean, who wouldn't wish a general remission of human ill?
It seems something we all strive for. My perplexity over the secular humanist is the source of motivation.
There are a few, and this comes mainly from my pastoral experience that I say this, but it's very hard to fight a battle that you don't think you can win.
You know, paraphrase Breck Teary says something like, the very good man fights his whole life and he's the best, but there are very few who can fight without hope with desire, yes, but without hope makes it very hard.
But Camu, you know, I'm devoted to Camu, he was a great freedom fighter, he did it his whole life.
So I think that Cisaphyssean kind of virtue that it takes to fight without the hope of a victory is sufficiently rare, whereas there's generations of very ordinary believers who've taken up the struggle for social justice.
Simply out of a hope that the ultimate reconciliation is going to happen on God's own time.
So they're not burdened by that frayed of thinking that their work is actually going to make a difference, you know, in AmeriCorps speak, we have to change the world and make a difference.
And how does that relate to secular humanism?
I think you and I both know that if your goal is to change the world, you're going to be very frustrated very quickly, since utopia is utopus, it's nowhere.
So the kingdom of God is a little bit different and so far as it isn't contiguous with these social efforts, you know, Christ on the cross inaugurates a sort of kingdom, which is an isn of this world.
So I think it's just extremely hard to carry on the struggle as a secular humanist without hope in a victory.
Certainly, I believe that given that this is primarily a literary show, literary talk show, that the history of literature is so bound up with the Christian doctrines, some of which we're alluding to today, from, you know, Dante and earlier all the way.
Through Samuel Beckett and that if you're going to appreciate in their depths this, the great works that have come down to us in the Western era, that you're going to have to know something even just on the philological level or just kind of non-religious education, you know, regarding the Bible, for example, the old and new testament is used to be called.
So that is something that I can say just pragmatically, it's fine, I find it very frustrating sometimes as an educator to have this new sort of total ignorance vis-a-vis Bible on the part of students where they don't know, let alone the difference between a gospel and an epistle, but they don't even know what a gospel is.
And if you ask them about the crucifixion, they might know that, you know, someone named Jesus was crucified by the Romans, but any sense of why or what the doctrine believes about why and redemption, it's total blank because many parents of these kids have gotten a certain paranoia that if they teach their children anything about Christian doctrine is kind of a contamination of them for some reason.
So just pragmatically, I wish that we could institute an un-political sort of requirement to if you're going to become the heir of the literary tradition, let alone art history.
How can you understand all the greatest centuries of art history without having the same sort of theological education?
But if we could do that, as I said, un-polymically so that there would be this basic formation in the students mind that would help a lot.
But at the same time, I want to go back to something else that you were saying about incarnation or the notion of missioning the second person and the idea that there is this commitment on the part of the divine to take on human form and flesh that this is also
so, conatural with the arts, I believe.
So certainly the fact that there is no taboo on representation in Western, Christianity Catholic, let's say, in the Catholic cultures where you go into the baroque churches or you look at paintings and so forth, the Godhead is fully represented in human form.
And the arts, which speak through the senses are perfectly adequate and redeemed through the incarnation.
Certainly poetry, which gives body and substance, metaphorical substance to ideas and doctrines is something that seems to me a natural correlate of a doctrine of incarnation.
I don't know how you feel about that.
Well, I sign on to it completely. In fact, I think there's ultimately no better apology for Christian theology than the artwork itself because when you hear something like box B minor mass, even if you don't believe in a sense you have to believe because it's beautiful.
If you're a Don Tistas, you are, and you love Don T, even if you don't know that things are going to end in the beatific vision, in a sense to even enjoy the beauty of it, you have to submit to the possibility somehow.
I don't know what you think about that.
Well, I think it's more, I believe I'm agreeing with you that it's more than a momentary suspension of disbelief, which is that conventional definition of fiction that we suspend our disbelief.
And so it's not that when one reads a divine, of course one can read the divine comedy, have momentary suspension of disbelief and say, "This guy, I have, I'm making believe that he went through hell and purgatory on and then had the beatific vision."
It's more importantly, it's why someone like Dante decided to be a poet rather than a philosopher, someone who knew so much theology that he could have been a, you know, one of the great theologians of all time, we know that.
But his decision to be a poet is always intrigues me over and over again when I reread the divine comedy.
And I think that the answer is not that mysterious.
I think that he understood that Christian doctrine is the understood, or the incarnation, is not only something that licensed the poet to talk about God or the relationship to God in poetic metaphor, allegorical,
and illogical terms, but even almost invites and encourages it as the perhaps the most adequate medium.
That's true. You know, there's some false versions of mysticism out there that try to style human life as somehow an escape, a frugum, securely, you know, escape to the heavens somehow.
And we see cult of serenity still very popular. One of the reasons Jesus has been so attractive to me is that he lives so completely in the human time.
And I like the line from Emily Dickinson's poem, I seem to use the waiting.
For Dante, he probably had faith that he was going to end up with God.
So, why spend the life trying to get there before you're there instead?
There's something about the material culture of art and stuff that glorifies the hour, glorifies the human hour while we're human.
Well, the other thing about Dante is that although he had, I'm sure he had that, if not sortitude, that very intense hope because the only virtue that he claims for himself in abundance is that of hope.
But at the same time, he was completely committed to history and the fate of human history prior to the end of time, the ends of time, and to personal salvation after death.
And up until the very upper reaches of Paredizo, he's still fretting over.
And in a certain sense, at times despairing over the failure of history to conform to the providential plan, which is so clearly laid out to anyone who had the eye of reason to follow it.
But since Free Will is one of the endowments of the human, it was through this consistent choice not to put history on the same track that led to an endless frustration.
Almost sissiphen in the comer's sense that you were talking about. You mentioned Emily Dickinson, and I know that you wrote your honors thesis at Stanford on Emily Dickinson, and that poetry is still something that you're fond of.
We've been speaking about that.
And you were telling me before we came on air that while Emily Dickinson is still that you still find her quite fascinating that you also like Gerard, Matthew Hopkins, right?
I do. Who is a much less dubious Christian poet, right?
Jesuit, in fact.
A Jesuit, although some in our audience may not think those terms dubious and Christian and Jesuit are so.
No, I was thinking about Emily Dickinson who had a more conflicted relationship to her faith, right?
She did, yeah. My thesis was what the title was the religion that doubts us fervently as it believes.
And she's a great poet because in a bit, she studying her as a bit like studying the historical person of Jesus.
You look into the well of her poetry and you see herself, so she's expansive enough to reflect back to us what we're going through.
And at the time, I was going through that doubting and fervently believing and certainly all those poems are there.
But I also enjoy poem about a sort of a steady faith, a life that never, you never completely escape from doubt in the literal sense.
It's just a hesitation. That's always going to be part of any believer's life. But I do love a more robust statement of conviction.
And you want to--
Christian hope that I find in her poetry.
And you brought a poem along, I believe.
I did. I brought along a poem that Hopkins says was the best thing he wrote.
So maybe I'll let the reader decide. I should say a word. If you don't mind me reading this poem, Robert.
Not at all.
Maybe I should say a word about an introduction to the poem.
What's the title?
It's called the Wind Hover. And that's a bird that, well, it hovers.
And I see these above the Golden Gate Bridge where I live and work. And they like to get real high.
And they hover sort of on one wing. And at the last possible minute, they vault themselves in the direction of the wind.
And Hopkins saw in the Wind Hover this symbol of Christ. He dedicates his poem to Christ, our Lord.
This meek bird that is through a graceful act of bravery, able to master a counter-vailing wind.
So this poem is in sprung rhythm, which Hopkins claims to have invented from his reading of early Welsh poetry.
And so the lines, the feet are not counted by syllables, but by stresses.
And the diction is self-consciously Anglo-Saxon.
So all those things make it a hard poem to follow on a reading. But maybe I should just try it.
Go ahead. Okay.
To Christ, our Lord.
I caught this morning, morning's minion.
Kingdom of Daylight's Dauphin.
Dauphin dawned on Falcon in his writing of the rolling level underneath him steady air.
And striding high there. How he wrung upon the rain of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy.
Then off, off forth on swing, as a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow bend.
The hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind. My heart and hiding stirred for a bird.
The achieve of the mastery of the thing.
Brought beauty and valor and act.
Oh, air-pride plume, hear buckle.
And the fire that breaks from the thin, a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous, oh, my chevelier.
No wonder of it, sheer plaud makes plow down silly and shine.
And blue-bleek embers on my dear fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.
Beautiful poem. It is.
And even when you read and reread a poem like that in a popkin's, it's difficult enough to comprehend.
And I'm sure that listening to it for the first time is going to be a little bit mystifying.
I suppose for listeners, what can you do?
But you can hear what you were talking about, the Anglo-Saxon rhythms and alliterations, of course, and the sprung rhymes and this incredible complexity that you have in Hopkins's poetry.
Complexity and the sense of things that are in folded and folded within themselves, no?
Yes.
And then unfolding through the verse.
What would you like to add to that poem?
I think the significance of the dedication to Christ our Lord, the good news is that
meekness has a kind of power and that violence doesn't really have the last say in our lives.
There's the meek shallen here at the earth. I don't know when hasn't happened yet, probably.
But there is a victory of the cross.
And in our lives, when we run up to obstacles of our will, there's a power that can come from a surrender.
Yeah, and Hopkins was a Jesuit, he was.
And I take it that there's also some sort of balance or an attempt to find the proper balance between the active and contemplative life in the Jesuit mode, where poetry would be part of the contemplation.
And so about the famous spiritual exercises and the Ignatius left behind, and those are really also exercises of imagination as you were pointing out and imagining different scenes and so forth.
And so how much closer can you get to the poets creative imagination when someone like Hopkins can find these extraordinary images, analogies, similes,
and I have to believe that part of his poetic genius was bound up with the spiritual exercise that he was engaged in as a Jesuit.
No doubt about that.
Yeah.
That's what you would call a necessary condition. It's not necessarily, it's not a sufficient condition because otherwise every Jesuit would be a Hopkins, which that might be too many because they would be what?
19,000 of that's right. 19,000 and falling.
Right.
You know, my curiosity isn't that Hopkins was a poet in light of the spiritual exercises or emphasis on the imagination and material culture.
I wonder why there aren't more Jesuit poets.
Yeah, me too.
And there are.
Yeah, and well anyway, I feel that constant debt to the Jesuit education that I had.
And it's a kind of thing that keeps paying dividends on and on and that's something about education.
In fact, even perhaps the decision to become an educator myself goes back to that sense of debt and the sense that there is something interminable about the learning process long after a student has left the classroom.
For example, no, at least that's a kind of active humanist education, which I still have as an ideal as, what say as a humanist rather than I suppose in other fields where the communication of a certain quantum of information is something that can take place in the course of a quarter.
And once that class is over, the communication has been accomplished and the education ends, but in the kind of humanist sphere that we're involved with where we're teaching poetry or the arts and philosophy and ideas, that is a kind of learning that keeps going on long after its instruction is over.
And it requires again, I think, a certain kind of exercise of the mind and of the imagination to keep it always alive.
Most definitely.
Well, Matt, I know that you also brought some exit music for us because we have enough time to play it, so I'd like you to tell our listeners what we're going to be listening to as we close our hour out here.
Great. Yeah, I see nothing wrong with the shameless promotion of some friends, and this song is by my friend Ryan McCallman who graduated some 10 years ago from Stanford with me.
And the song's called Had to Lose from his album Come Home, and you can catch him anywhere on the internet community.
I play the song as a sort of anthem of the cross, having to lose, signifies to me the importance of disillusionment of being a shorn of allusions, Ignatius called it, Disanganyo.
And that's all part of a spiritual process by which we can then be re-enchanted with some new image of ourselves in the light of God.
Well, probably all of that isn't in the song, but I wanted to ask, is that what he had in the song?
The song is about romantic disillusionment, of course, but romantic disillusionment, as you know, is often a procedure of all kinds of other disillusionment.
Sure.
So what's his name again?
Ryan McCallman.
Ryan McCallman, and the album is Come Home, Come Home, and the track is Had to Lose.
And let it rip when you're ready, Robert.
I will, not before I thank you for coming on.
Thank you.
And had a very interesting discussion and reminding our listeners that we've been speaking here with Matt Farley from the Jesuit order, who is teaching now in San Francisco at St. Ignatius prep school.
What is it? College prep, college prep. And that I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. And we will look forward to having you back with us next week. Bye bye, Matt. Thanks, Robert.
I've been tumbling, turning from that sweet purple. And I still smell her perfume on the color of my winter coat.
She had eyes like midnight, but I won't scare on the dark.
Because she had a narrow, party bright in my heart.
And I could have tear on my armor away.
And now there's a bright eye to pay.
I had to lose.
For I learned to love you.
And I've been stumbling over pieces of our life.
And I swear I still see you sometimes. From the corner of our eye.
I keep on walking away.
And now there's a bright eye to pay.
I had to lose.
For I learned to love you.
I had to lose.
I had to.
I had to lose.
For I learned to love you.
I'm turning the heart away.
And now there's a bright eye to pay.
♪ ♪
Oh my words are there for you, oh my words are there for you
I had to lose, I had to be in the mud
I had to go for my words are there for you
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I had to love.
I had to love you for a long time.
For a long time.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
you