Although It Is Night

 

Station Island XI by Seamus Heaney/St John of the Cross

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
I plunged once in a butt of muddied water
Surfaced like a marvelous lightship

And out of its silted crystals a monk’s face
That had spoken years ago from behind a grille
Spoke again about the need and chance

To salvage everything, to re-envisage
The zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift
Mistakenly abased ….

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

“Read poems as prayers,” he said, “and for your penance
Translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.”

Returned from Spain to our chapped wilderness,
His consonants aspirate, his forehead shining,
He had made me feel there was nothing to confess.

Now his sandaled passage stirred me on to this:

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,
Although it is the night.

That eternal fountain, hidden away
I know its haven and its secrecy
Although it is the night

But not its source because it does not have one,
Which is all sources’ source and origin?
Although it is the night.

No other thing can be so beautiful.
Here the earth and heaven drink their fill
Although it is the night.

So pellucid it never can be muddied,
And I know that all light radiates from it
Although it is the night.

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,
Nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom
Although it is the night.

And its current so in flood it overspills
To water hell and heaven and all peoples
Although it is the night.

And the current that is generated there,
As far as it wills to, it can flow that far
Although it is the night.

And from these two a third current proceeds
Which neither of these two, I know, precedes
Although it is the night.

This eternal fountain hides and splashes
Within this living bread that is life to us
Although it is the night.

Hear it calling out to every creature.
And they drink these waters, although it is dark here
Because it is the night.

I am repining for this living fountain.
Within this bread of life I see it plain
Although it is the night.

Sometimes a gift like grace just drops into one’s life. Just before entering the season of Lent, on Shrove Tuesday specifically, I encountered the poem above and not only experienced a shift of soul but felt summoned, passionately, to the wonder and suffering of wilderness at once. The poet Seamus Heaney and the author of Dark Night of the Soul, St John of the Cross, place before me an offering of insight and I intend to carry this with me for 40 days.

The refrain of “Although it is Night” underlines the non-dualism of darkness, the necessary presence of shadows and desolations in order to cause the seeking of light and consolations. The blessed baptismal lens cleaner is that “eternal fountain” which gives and gives and gives, “although it is night”. 

For today I am turning the phrase “repining for the living fountain” over as an accompanying refrain which brackets the uncertainty and “although” of wilderness with a return to that hope which does not disappoint, the hope which causes us to persist even in shadow for we know that streams of living water do not discriminate between darkness and light; streams of living water bathe desolation and despair as well as joy and delight in grace.

“Read poems as prayers” and return to them as often as possible, even if things are dark and dismal, even if the “crystals are silted”.