During the 1999-2000 school year, SCI faculty were asked by then-President Suzanne Sims, O.S.U., to speak on "the wisdom of his/her life and discipline that he/she would share if indeed this was the last opportunity to give a lecture." This lecture was delivered in the President's Room, Becker Library L-15, as part of that series. -- Peter Ellertsen
Kathleen Norris, poet, Presbyterian lay minister and Benedictine oblate of South Dakota, has a poem that I like a lot. She calls it "Hope in Elizabeth," and it's about looking out a train window in New Jersey at "bald men in spectacles / and torn shirts" tending roses in:
backyard arbors
shadowed by refineries
and the turnpike.
jungles of scrap,
still brown water, and poisoned marsh. (Little Girls 33)
You know how the view from a train flashes from people's backyards into desolate industrial spaces a minute later. Norris takes in the contrast and marvels at the men who tend the rose arbors:
From the backyards of row houses
they bring forth pink roses, yellow roses
and around a house on its own
green plot, a hedge of roses, in red and white.
Surely, faith and charity
are fine, but the greatest of these
is roses.
Of course she's talking about more than roses here. She sets the poem up so we think about faith and hope as well as scrapyards, refineries and roses. And charity and stewardship, our duty to care for the beasts of the field and the green herbs that bring forth seed. And most of all, of course, she's talking about hope, too. Hope is a gift, and the roses are a gift.
Anyway, that's what Kathleen Norris sees in New Jersey -- it's part of what she calls her "spiritual geography." The poem is in a collection of poetry called Little Girls in Church, and in the back cover blurb Norris says: "... this volume of poetry is a spiritual geography. Its places are varied -- the grasslands and small towns of the western Dakotas, the industrial landscape of northern New Jersey, the quiet spaces of a Benedictine monastery -- but I find each inspiring in its own way." As far as I know, spiritual geography is a term of Norris' own coining. She titled her first book of meditations Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and she uses the term a lot. Once she was asked what she meant by it. "At its Greek root," she replied, "geography means 'writing about a place,' and the vast, almost sculptured landscape of the western Dakotas has a spiritual quality that I couldn't ignore. 'Spiritual geography' also describes the way a place shapes people's attitudes, beliefs, myths" ("Conversations").
My own spiritual geography is, if you'll forgive the expression, all over the map. It includes the old Episcopal diocese of Tennessee; the university bookstore and All Saints' chapel in Sewanee, Tenn.; an inner-city ecumenical ministry in Knoxville; a tree-shaded, sun-dappled bend in the Oconoluftee River just above Cherokee, N.C.; several mega-bookstores and Starbucks coffee shops; Lutheran churches in Springfield and the suburbs of Atlanta; and, of course, Springfield College in Illinois, the Margueritte Matthews chapel and Ursula Hall. In East Tennessee I learned to love bluegrass gospel, Bach cantatas, Anglican chant and shoutin'-glory spirituals from shape-note songbooks. Also a part of my spiritual geography is the 20th-century conflict between science and religion. That's what I want to talk about this morning. I think it's possible to reconcile some of the opposites.
In this "Last Lecture Series," Sr. Suzanne invited us to relate "the wisdom of [our] life and discipline that [we] would share" with our students if it were "our last opportunity to give a lecture." Well, that's a large order. As a journalist and now as a freshman English composition teacher, I've always been impatient with abstractions. I'd rather find wisdom in odd juxtapositions of concrete detail, in the here-and-now. But I do think it's possible to find a unified vision in our increasingly fragmented and scatter-shot lives through exercising what I'll call the poetic imagination. And I think exercising this imagination can go a long way toward resolving the apparent conflict between science and religion, among others. I imagine there are potentially at least 6 billion legitimate ways of accomplishing those ends, since the earth's population has now passed that mark, but I find one good way in the poetry of Kathleen Norris.
Here's how conflict between science and religion got to be part of my spiritual geography. When I was in high school it was a criminal offense, by act of the Tennessee legislature, to teach "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals" (Public Acts). That was the law, but I grew up in a scientific community, home to a Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric project and the World War II plants in Oak Ridge where the first atomic bomb was made. My father was a scientist, a TVA forester who worked with the genetics of white pine seedlings. And we talked about his work at home. But the basic scientific theory behind genetics wasn't taught in my county schools. My ninth-grade science teacher said evolution was just a theory, and we didn't have to believe it. Oh boy, I thought in the back of the classroom, what if I don't believe in the law of gravity? Does that mean I won't fall down? In Tennessee you couldn't escape a sense that religion went hand-in-hand with enforced ignorance. Even more damaging, I think, was the sense that religion had nothing to do with the "real world" where trumpet blasts do not ordinarily topple stone walls, the sun does not stand still, pi equals 3.1416 and moral choices often lie hidden in a fog of ambiguity.
When I was 16 or 17 and drifting away from the church, I met with an Episcopal priest in Oak Ridge, Fr. William G. Pollard. He was a nuclear physicist; executive director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, which he had founded; and associate rector of the Episcopal parish in Oak Ridge. He was balding, and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. Even when he was wearing clericals, we all thought he looked more like a physicist than a priest. I don't remember much of our conversation, except right at the end. I said I couldn't make myself believe in miracles, and I didn't see how I could stay in the church. Fr. Pollard was a pipe smoker, and I'm sure he fiddled with his pipe for a moment. I know he paused for emphasis. "Oh, well," he said, at last. "You'll come back." Do what? I asked. "Give it time," he said. "You'll come back to the church." Well, that was not exactly what I was expecting to hear from a priest. But it was delphic enough to keep me speculating on how and when, not whether, I would return. It turns out Fr. Pollard had made the same faith journey.
A Tennessean and an Episcopalian by upbringing, William G. Pollard in college rejected religion as "a fairy tale" preached by "Bible fundamentalists insisting that Adam was the first man and that the world was created in 4004 B.C." When World War II broke out, he left the University of Tennessee, where he taught physics, to join the atomic bomb project. There he worked with U235, the hot isotope of uranium used in nuclear warheads. Starting the same day Nagasaki was bombed in 1945, he began his return to the church. When he later recalled it for Daniel Lang, a reporter for New Yorker magazine, his wife shifted nervously in her chair. Lang described what came next like this:
... her husband, after glancing over at her, went on to explain, "Marcella doesn't want me to say what I'm about to say."
"You know how people are," Mrs. Pollard said. "They'd think Bill turned to the church because of a sense of guilt."
"They'd be mistaken, I believe," Pollard said. "But whether they'd be right or wrong, I don't see why that should keep me from talking about a meaningful experience." He hesitated briefly, and then resumed where he had left off. "After the Nagasaki bomb, my exuberance was replaced by something approaching terror," he said. "I thought the bombs would be sprinkled all over Japan. When I got back to Mount Vernon [on Long Island, where the family was staying] that evening -- it was a Thursday -- I picked up a newspaper and saw on the religious page that I had just enough time to get to a service in New Rochelle. I walked out of the house alone and took a trolley to Trinity Episcopal Church there. ... As the service progressed, I became conscious of a feeling that it wasn't just an empty rigmarole, and when I got back home, I was no longer disturbed. I slept calmly that night."
After the war, Pollard wound up in Oak Ridge. It was a raw, unfinished town, thrown up in a wartime hurry by the U.S. Army, and church groups met in the high school gym. "It was hard not to lend a hand," he said, "but if you did, you let yourself in for more than you'd bargained for." So he did, and so he chaired the fund drive for a church building, taught Sunday school, became a lay reader (Lang 193-96). In 1950 Pollard began formal theological studies, and in 1954 he was ordained.
In his interview with Lang of the New Yorker, Fr. Pollard suggested he had come to accept limits to what we can learn through scientific investigation. "I no longer believe that the approach of size-up-and-solve will produce a formula explaining all natural phenomena," he said. "If this sounds like heresy to any of my scientific colleagues, I can only say that the more I have learned of science, the more I have become convinced that the origin of the universe will forever remain a mystery to us" (188). Yet he retained his faith in the scientific method:
I decided that a person could, without violating his intellectual integrity, both think within the framework of a Judaeo-Christian view and believe all scientific knowledge of the structure of the world. ... I decided that science was a way of investigating the wonders of God's creativeness, such as the marvelous unity of a living cell and the intricate combinations of particles that make up matter. That being so, it seemed to me irreligious to oppose the work of science. (198-99)
From its establishment in 1946, Pollard headed ORINS (now known as Oak Ridge Associated Universities) until he retired in 1974. He served St. Stephen's Episcopal Church until he died Dec. 26, 1989, appropriately enough on St. Stephen's Day. In the meantime he wrote books and articles on the nuclear sciences, religion and, naturally enough, the relationship between science and religion. An ORAU biography puts it like this:
Throughout his studies, Pollard had to resolve in his mind a complicated marriage of science and religion. As he struggled with the issue, he came to believe, to put it simply, that science was a way of investigating the wonders of God's creations. In one of his sermons Pollard cited the Genesis passage where God says to man and woman: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.' For Pollard, dominion over the earth included man's ability to control fire, metals, and finally nuclear energy -- the focus area of his research.
When Pollard suggested the origins of the universe were a mystery, he did not mean they should be off limits to human inquiry. "Science still may have a long series of puzzles to solve, but the more we learn, the stranger it all seems," he said in 1970. "This is true mystery, the mystery of what is, and of what lies ahead, the mystery of existence. That kind of mystery is very much alive today in modern science" (Science and Faith x-xi). In the end, I think, it came down to faith. A strong faith in science increasingly augmented by faith in God.
For Pollard, faith was not "a set of propositional statements to which an unquestioning verbal assent is demanded" (Physicist and Christian 17). That, he said, was the proper realm of doctrine. Instead, faith meant action. And that held true equally with religion and science. "The scientist," he said, "has to really believe in his bones that the world must be made in a certain way, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in order to find the strength and the courage to keep going" (14). So faith isn't so much something you have, as it is something you do -- a belief you live by.
At any rate, because I grew up where and when I did, science was part of my spiritual geography. It wasn't just that the priest in a neighboring parish was a nuclear physicist, it was an entire ethos that he was a part of. I grew up with stories of how the atom was split, the Y-12 and K-25 uranium plants at Oak Ridge were rushed into production during World War II, the atomic bombs were dropped, the war won and the forces of nature harnessed for peaceful uses like nuclear power production and the treatment of cancer with radioactive isotopes. To me, Fr. Pollard's progression from A-bomb research to the church was part of a broader sweep of history. We still believed in progress in those days: If we had learned to question the uses to which science might be put, as so many physicists of the postwar generation did, I think we could still believe even the questioning was a sign of progress. My boyhood heroes included not only Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson but scientists like Madame Curie and Albert Einstein as well. Pioneers of 20th-century science typically showed the same faith in science that Pollard spoke of, and often they grappled with fundamental issues traditionally left to religion or philosophy.
Werner Heisenberg, one of the three or four greatest physicists of the century, spoke of his faith in science in these terms:
I do not mean by that [faith] only the Christian faith in a God-given meaningful work, but simply the faith in our task in this world. Having faith does not, of course, mean thinking this or that true; having faith always means: This is my choice; on this I will stake my existence. When Columbus set out on his first voyage to the West, he believed that the earth was round and small enough to be circumnavigated. He not only thought this theoretically correct; he staked his existence on it. ("Atoms" 124)
Again, faith isn't a proposition you accept or reject. That's doctrine, in science as it is in religion. Faith isn't something you have -- it's something you do, something you take action on.
Heisenberg's faith in science led him to a truly revolutionary idea known as the uncertainty principle. He expressed it mathematically, but its clear implication was that we cannot measure the speed of a subatomic particle without changing it by the very act of measuring it. Its effect could hardly be more profound, since it undermines the Cartesian dualism that has been basic to modern science since the 17th century. Named for French philosopher Rene Descartes, this dualism posits a separation between human, or thinking, beings (res cognitans) and the objects of thought (res extensa). But the uncertainty principle blurs that separation. "Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning," says Heisenberg, in a 1958 book titled Physics and Philosophy. "This was a possibility of which Descartes could have not thought, but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the I impossible."
Together with Niels Bohr's related principle of complementarity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle provided the theoretical underpinning for what is known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics -- the basic explanation of matter at the subatomic level reflected in so much of 20th-century science and technology, from nuclear fission to the microchips that made it possible for me to research and write this lecture on a home computer. Bohr said his complementarity principle
... implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear. ... Consequently, evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects. (Discussions)
Every schoolchild knows that light acts like a particle at times and like a wave at others. The complementarity principle tells why -- the pictures complement each other, even though they are theoretically inconsistent. But to formulate the Copenhagen principles took a kind of faith. And the early debates about quantum mechanics revolved around bedrock issues of faith and philosophy.
Albert Einstein in particular objected to quantum theory -- its uncertainty, or indeterminancy, violated his sense of an order that must underlie the phenomena observed in the universe, of God as he understood God. Bohr recalled their debates in 1927 like this:
... in spite of all divergences of approach and opinion, a most humorous spirit animated the discussions. On his side, Einstein mockingly asked us whether we could really believe that the providential authorities took recourse to dice-playing ("... ob der liebe Gott würfelt"), to which I replied by pointing at the great caution, already called for by ancient thinkers, in ascribing attributes to Providence in every-day language.
Einstein's version of the exchange goes like this: "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret of the 'Old One.' I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice" (qtd. in Weart et al.). But the principles of quantum mechanics formulated in the 1920s still stand. Followed by DNA and Einstein's theory of special relativity, astrophysicist Hans Bethe says they were the most important discovery of the 20th century. "Quantum theory gives you the key to all atomic phenomena, and that in turn gives you the key to chemistry and biology," he said at century's end (Bethe 28; Brand). Bethe's was an informed opinion. A friend of Bohr's and Einstein's and a Nobel laureate, he was still active in the anti-nuclear arms movement and in 1999 at the age of 93 he lectured on quantum mechanics at his retirement community in upstate New York.
Quantum mechanics led to futher theories of what goes on at the heart of things. Now scientists believe the protons and neutrons that make up an atom's nucleus are made up of triads called "quarks," and their components in turn are classified as up, down, charmed, strange, bottom and top quarks. I think there's poetry there. In fact, the very word comes from a line by Irish novelist James Joyce, "Three Quarks for Muster Mark!" (Hawking 67). In recent years, scientists and mathematicians have begun to reconcile Einstein's theories of relativity with those of quantum mechanics in something known as string theory. And we're hearing now about an M theory that may get at the underlying order Einstein believed to exist in the universe. "Depending on whom you ask," says journalist Douglas Merrill, who covered a 1999 string theory conference for the electronic magazine Salon.com, "the M stands for matrix, mystery, magic or even the mother of all theories." We also hear about a TOE, not part of a foot but an acronym for a "Theory of Everything." British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says if we develop a unified theory of matter and energy, "we would know the mind of God" (191). Well, that statement strikes me as metaphorical. For one thing, Hawking leaves entirely open the question of whether there is "a God who intervenes in the universe, or who wound up the clock to set things going" (Cherniak). But advanced physics continues to have plenty of implications for philosophy and religion.
Without saying much about it, Heisenberg noted that the Cartesian duality left God out of the picture. "In this [modern] period," he says, "there was in some cases an explicit agreement among the pioneers of empirical science that in their discussions the name of God or a fundamental cause should not be mentioned." In Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg said the principle of duality "has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality." Yet there are harbingers of a new attitude. Fritjof Capra, physicist turned New Age philosopher, finds "an essential harmony between the spirit of Eastern wisdom and Western science" (25). John Polkinghorne, a physicist, Anglican theologian and past president of Queens' College, Cambridge, offers a "new-style natural theology" that he hopes will complement science "by setting it within a wider and more profound context of understanding" (10). In efforts like these, and in the search for basic laws of nature, I think there's a lot of faith -- faith in God and faith in the scientific method. I think there's a good measure of hope and poetry, too.
I don't think it's any accident that the postmodern age coincides with the nuclear era. In fact, I would make a case that both began at precisely 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as the first atomic device was exploded at a test site -- code-named Trinity -- in New Mexico. At that moment Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos laboratory that created the bomb, thought of a scrap of poetry from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One ...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds. (Lamont 235)
It is now difficult to recapture the feeling of awe that came with the end of World War II and the dawn of the nuclear age. Writing in the heat of the moment for Time magazine in August 1945, journalist, novelist and poet James Agee put it like this:
When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul, and, in the terrible words of the Psalmist, that no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him. (qtd. in Ellertsen 709).
More prosaically, Wernher von Braun, who had developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and wound up with the U.S. missile program at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama after the war, decided the only hope of lasting peace was "to raise everybody's ethical standards" and became a regular church-goer. "Any real scientist ends up a religious man," von Braun told a reporter. "The more he learns about natural science, the more he sees that the words that sound deep are really poorly contrived disguises for ignorance. Energy? Matter? We use them but we don't really know what they are" (Lang 23-24). From the beginning, the nuclear age has been an age of skepticism, but also an age of profound searching and at times of renewed faith.
In fundamental ways, the postmodern era is an age of diminished hope. Now, it is not my purpose here to offer a critique of literary postmodernism. Nor is it to indulge in a "PoMo" bricolage about science, religion, poetry or Kathleen Norris. My concern is, rather, with how Norris' poetry reflects what Steven Best and Douglas Kellner call an "era of postmodernity" marked in part by a retreat from the "search for a foundation of knowledge" and the "universalizing and totalizing claims" of the modern era. French philosopher Jean-Françoise Lyotard's dictum is often quoted: "I define postmodernism as an incredulity toward metanarratives" (qtd. in Formaro). By this he means something like a distrust of sweeping theories. It is not a bad thought. It was hard to sustain a belief in science and progress when Western technology brought forth the bombs and gas chambers of World War II, and Auschwitz grew out of the same German culture that produced Bach, Beethoven and Einstein's theory of relativity. Even Heisenberg, in fact, worked for the Nazi war effort.
And it was even harder to believe in progress when the good guys, the guys who wore the white hats and won World War II, were the first to drop the A-bomb. The postmodernist L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein suggests that World War II, the Holocaust and Hiroshima "undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the Enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way Eurosupremacist or hierarchic" ("Second War"). In terms echoing Bernstein's, Philip Hefner of Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology says "the Enlightenment is [seen as] white, male, European and rationalist, and is regarded as a key agent in perpetrating imperialism, colonialism, racism and the exploitation of the natural environment" (88). More usefully, perhaps, Hefner says postmodernist thinkers have come to distrust the rational underpinnings of the modern era, especially the assumption "that we can possess knowledge based on publicly recognized fundamental principles that enable us to engage the world as an object of investigation" (89). In this, postmodern thought carries with it an implied rejection of Cartesian duality that traces back not only to postwar cultural politics but also to Heisenberg and the Copenhagen physicists.
While it is not the only thread in postmodern thought, a radical skepticism about science and rational thought pervades its expression in the humanities. Not uncommonly this skepticism is coupled with an interest in spiritual matters, especially in popular culture. Theologian Daniel J. Adams, of Hanil Theological Seminary in Korea, says there is a direct connection between the "rise of traditional religions," often fundamentalist varieties of Christianity and Islam, and a "decline and delegitimation of such quasi-religious movements as communism, secular nationalism, and the Western belief in the inevitability of human progress." In the United States, Carol Lloyd of the e-zine Salon.com speaks of a kind of "spiritual comparative shopping," with eclectic New Age gurus and fundamentalists competing for consumers who "mix'n'match outfits like they're trolling for bargains." The yearning that drives this spiritual marketplace is as much a part of the postmodern age as nuclear weaponry or Lyotard's distrust of sweeping theories.
Kathleen Norris is not by any stretch of the imagination a postmodernist poet. In fact, I can't think of any "-isms" that describe her. But her work shows what I would consider a postmodern sensiblity. Considered an up-and-coming poet with a book in print at age 21, she left New York City in 1974. And for the past 25 years she's lived and worked in the Dakotas, where she's a poet in residence for the North Dakota schools and a free-lance writer. She writes in a contemplative tradition that joins a thoroughly contemporary eye for the telling detail with an intellectual and spiritual heritage that goes back to the Desert Fathers of the early Church.
At her best, Norris finds everyday metaphors to explain how communities work, especially small towns of the Great Plains and the Benedictine abbeys she visits as an oblate or lay associate. "As a married woman, thoroughly Protestant, who often has more doubt than faith," she once told a reporter for Minnesota's St. Paul Pioneer Press, "being an oblate surprises me almost as much as finding that the Great Plains themselves have become my monastery, my place set apart, where I thrive and grow. ... I didn't know beans about monasteries, and I was fascinated by the place; I just kept going back. I liked the liturgy, sitting and reciting songs with the monks" (Grossman). She came to realize at the abbey that scripture, worship and poetry share a metaphorical approach to language and -- through language -- to reality.
Norris' affiliation with the Benedictines, at Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, culminated a return to the church that began when she moved to the high Plains on her grandmother's death. Her forbears had been pillars of the Presbyterian church in Lemmon, South Dakota, and it was all but predestined that she join it. But it didn't come easily. "The services," she writes in Dakota, "felt like word bombardment -- agony for a poet -- and often exhausted me so much I'd have to sleep for three or more hours afterward. Doctrinal language slammed many a door in my face, and I became frustrated when I couldn't glimpse the Word behind the words" (94). But in time, since she was a writer by trade, she was asked to serve as a lay preacher or homilist -- putting the Word into words. Again, it came hard. "This sounds strange, even to me," says Norris, "but it was this wrestling with the language of faith, behind the scenes of my sermon, as it were, that helped to make me a Christian. It was not therapy for me, but hard work on behalf of others who had so recklessly entrusted me with a call to preach" (Amazing Grace 185). For Kathleen Norris, faith and poetry are inextricably interconnected.
In a poem titled "Vision: A Note on Astrophysics," Norris contrasts two, maybe three ways of knowing, ways of experiencing reality. "Learned men / of the twentieth century" with complex equipment, she says,
... measure the pulse of light
from stars beyond the range
of human vision, [and] conclude that this world,
all we call nature,
was once inside such a star.
That's one way of knowing. She cites another:
Heisenberg shrugs
and says, "I'm not sure
what an electron is,
but it's something like a cloud of possibilities."
And the third comes from the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen:
Eve
as a cloud,
leaf-green, shining,
containing stars ... (38. ellipses in the original)
Norris' reference to Hildegard invites us to look below the surface. Now known chiefly for her music and her mystical writing, Hildegard was also a Benedictine abbess and the author of treatises on natural science and medicine in which she saw all of nature as "linked mutually and inseparably united in God" (Rath). Notice also that Norris set the poem up so that Heisenberg and Hildegard both speak metaphorically. The "[l]earned men" with their complicated technology do not.
To Norris, science speaks the language of faith and of literature. "Once, when I was working with fourth graders in a classroom in North Dakota," she recalls in Amazing Grace, "I asked them if anyone could think of ways that poetry and science were alike. One little girl spoke up: 'They both tell good stories.'" (287). The kids went on to write a group poem about photosynthesis, and Norris found in their exercise an affirmation of the "metaphor of light as love, the catalyst that inspires this great green creation to grow." She also heard echoes of Hildegard, who "often used the word 'viriditas' (green) to convey the life force flowing from God." No inevitable conflict between science and religion here. Both science and poetry are about mystery. Norris said she also finds mystery in quantum physics:
... although I have very little grasp of how science is done, I love to read about quarks, those subatomic particles that exist in threes. There is no such thing as one quark, but only three interdependent beings; I picture them dancing together at the heart of things, part of the atomic glue that holds this world together, and to the atomic scientist, at least, makes all things on earth more alike than different. The quark is a good image for the Christian Trinity, I think; both tell good stories. (290)
So Norris' problem with the "learned men" in the first line of "Vision: A Note on Astrophysics" is not with their search for evidence of the origin of the universe. It is with their reliance on "large / finite numbers and radiotelescopes / as big as football fields." It is with their literal-mindedness, I think, their Cartesian way of pointing telescopes at a res extensa somewhere out there in space. She once complained to an interviewer that, as he paraphrased her, poets are marginalized in our "culture of 'enlightenment fundamentalism' where nothing is acceptable that can't be explained by reason" (Kelleher 70). The men with the radiotelescopes are enlightenment fundamentalists. Heisenberg and Hildegard are not.
In another poem, "Naming the Living God," Norris makes the parallels between science, worship and metaphor a little more specific. It begins:
"The Special Theory came to me,"
Einstein said,
"as shifting forms of light."
Riemann once remarked, "I did not
invent those pairs of differential equations, I found them
in the world,
where God had hidden them." (721)
As with Hildegard, the allusions here invite further inquiry. It was Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, a 19th-century mathematician, who developed the system of geometry that makes possible Einstein's theory of relativity. Science, like an abbey or a small town in the Dakotas, is a community. But Norris' meaning is straightforward enough. She ends with a veiled reference to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and a very direct reference to communal worship:
All things change
when you measure them. You might as well
sing, the sound of your voice
joining the others, like waters overflowing,
the name of the living God.
Note that all three scientists in the poem speak in metaphor.
Finally, Norris has a poem that refers quite directly to Heisenberg's principle. It is titled -- what else? -- "The Uncertainty Principle." She begins:
We change it
by looking: what's moving in the heart
or the farthest star,
and when people are true believers
we may know of the mystery
how it works
or if it does,
but not the two together. (Little Girls 39)
Bells mark the hours "[a]t the abbey," she says, though a scientist would think them inexact:
Time does not move,
the sky is not blue -- the end
of the spectrum and beginning of light --
it is all in us, breathed in, let go.
I can't parse this. I don't even want to try. Instead, I am reminded of something Norris said in 1995 at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. "Poetry," she told the theology students, "is grounded in metaphor; it's ambiguous, troubling to people with literal minds. We think of metaphor as things untrue, but in poetry, metaphor brings things together in a unique kind of truth" (Spitler). Elsewhere she speaks of "incarnational language" -- of words that "resonate with the senses as they aim for the stars," of language that "goes against the modern tendency toward abstraction" that grounds itself "in bodily experience, the experience of the mouth and the ear, the sense of touch, smell, taste" ("Incarnational" 699; "Drawing" 842). Breath, she might have added. And spirit. Norris concludes the poem like this:
Monks shift in their choir:
stomachs, and the old floor
groan through the homily.
Here in the heart,
where the hours keep,
we are learning eternity
every step of the way.
There's something else Norris said at Emory that belongs here: Worship, like poetry, is a "metaphorical exchange" (Spitler). In The Cloister Walk, her book about following the Benedictine discipline of lectio divina, or spiritual reading, Norris says both the monastic world and poetry reflect "what I mean by a poetic way of knowing" (10). She speaks of spiritual reading at the abbey as "an attempt to read more with the heart than the head ... [that] respects the power of words to resonate with the full range of human experience" (xx). In the same vein, she says:
The discipline of poetry teaches poets, at least, that they often have to say things they can't pretend to understand. In contending with words, poets come to know their power, much the way monastics do in prayer and lectio. We experience words as steeped in mystery, forces beyond our intellectual grasp. In the late twentieth century, when speculative knowledge and the technologies it has spawned reign supreme, poets remain dependent on a different form of knowledge, perhaps akin to what Hildegard termed seeing, hearing, and knowing simultaneously. (11)
That kind of knowing, I think, is what Norris is driving at in "The Uncertainty Principle."
Kathleen Norris' current spiritual formation began, in a sense, with her return to South Dakota in the 1970s and her struggle with "word bombardment" in a small-town Presbyterian church there. It has led her to the quietness and solitude of the Benedictines and, paradoxically, to a highly successful literary career. She has won Bush and Guggenheim Foundation grants, she is in wide demand as a reviewer of religious titles and she is invited to speak at universities and theological schools nationwide. Her book sales, including Little Girls in Church, are respectable, and an excerpt from Amazing Grace, on the spiritual implications of doing the laundry, has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Yet Norris thinks of herself not as a literary celebrity but as a storyteller and a homilist.
In her blurb for a 1999 lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, Norris said as "a literary writer, a storyteller," she tries to avoid "preaching to the choir." Therefore, she says, her language is incarnational. "That is, I have tried to describe Christian faith from the inside out, as I have experienced it, rather than employ religious terminology in an abstract or sectarian way." Thus we see her in the Saturday Evening Post writing of the "almost religious importance" laundry can have: "In any city slum, it's laundry -- neat lines of babies' T-shirts, kids' underwear and jeans -- that announces that families live here, and that someone cares" (50). You don't have to go to small-town America or to the abbey in order to find community. You can find it in the slums of Honolulu, where Norris spent her high school years, or South Dakota or anywhere else that people care for each other. And Norris' image of T-shirts flapping from clotheslines reminds me a lot of her rose gardens in Elizabeth, N.J.
In this series of Jubilee Year lectures, we are asked to imagine what we would tell our students if this were our last lecture -- our last chance to say what we'd think most important or most helpful to them. In thinking about what I might say, I was drawn to some of the events of my lifetime and the people who helped me. Well, it was clear right away that World War II and the nuclear arms race cast their shadow over my generation. It was clear enough, too, that my early interest in science became a lifelong thing, remaining an influence on me long after I flunked Algebra II and wound up studying literature. It was clear I was interested in religion before I left the church, during the time I was away from the church and since I returned to the church. And it was clear to me that poetry had to be in there somewhere. Then I panicked. My next thought went something like this -- how in blue blazes am I going to fit all that into one lecture?
Then I thought of Mary Schmich, and I felt better.
Schmich is the columnist for The Chicago Tribune who wrote a column on what she'd like to say in a commencement speech. It was an instant classic. It got on the Internet, as people e-mailed copies to their friends. Somehow it got attributed to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Now it's out in book form -- I saw it at Borders on North Michigan Avenue, by the Chicago Water Tower -- and a musical version hit the airwaves in Australia and the United States. Not bad for a column she whipped out "one Friday afternoon while high on coffee and M&M's." Here's how she begins:
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
Two words. Well, she does offer more advice. Some of it, I think, is pretty sound.
Sing. ... Floss. ... Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. ... Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
So here's my advice to the Class of 2000: Read poetry. Read the Trib, too, and wear sunscreen. But do learn to like poetry. It's good stuff -- it might save your life someday.
Now, I don't propose to turn my exercise in spiritual geography into a spiritual travelogue. But I do mean what I just said -- poetry can save your life. I don't recall ever hating poetry, like so many of my students do. I've written professionally for most of my adult life, and I've enjoyed playing with words. I remember liking Lord Byron in high school, and T.S. Eliot in college. You didn't study English in the 1960s, as I did, without making a diligent effort to like Eliot. And I can still close my eyes and hear the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko thundering out "Babiy Yar" and a minor poem called "Simbirsk Fair" at Vanderbilt University in the mid-70s. Add Nashville and the former Soviet Union to my spiritual geography, along with the Border's on North Michigan Avenue. But poetry, like so many things, was something I drifted away from as I finished grad school and went into the newspaper business. There just wasn't time for it, and I never had the sense it had much to do with my world of county board meetings, trailer-park shootings, elections, shifts on night city desk and constant deadlines. Then came a midlife crisis, and I needed to reorient my life along spiritual lines. As I looked into Buddhist meditation, I learned the Zen masters often counsel Americans to come to terms with the Christian spiritual tradition. So I turned to poetry for starters, to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and St. John of the Cross. Instead of reading about the via negativa, the descent into hopelessness that precedes the gifts of faith and hope, for a while there I was living it. Working my way through the Quartets slowly, with the aid of a gloss by John Booty, dean of St. Luke's School of Theology in Sewanee, I read:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(28)
And without knowing how or why, I felt comforted in the waiting. In the concluding section of "Little Gidding," the last of the four, Eliot writes:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right ...
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. (58)
And in the very last lines:
Quick now, here, now, always --
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (59)
The fire here represents the Holy Spirit, Booty tells us, and the rose is emblematic of love, of life and "the via negativa, new birth through death, the two symbols joined finally in the love that is their source and their fulfillment" (55). And here's the remarkable part -- I did feel like I had come back to the place where I started, and all indeed was well and all manner of things, in fact, were well.
Booty says, and I agree with him, that poetry speaks to us powerfully because its statement is artistic. "The arts," he says, "are a possible means to wholeness because they do not seek to analyze ... The poet uses words, which are parts and pieces of the whole. By arranging words in patterns the poet can reach beyond the words themselves to their ultimate, unified meaning" (16). At times poetry brings things together. Kathleen Norris, for example, recalls hearing pop standards played on a church carillon. "One day," she writes, "I heard 'My Way' wafting down from the ethereal heights of the church's bell tower, and I knew that I had the making of a poem. This is how many of my poems begin, with a simple juxtaposition that seems too juicy to pass up" ("Sinatra" 301). Or, sometimes, a juxtaposition that goes to the heart of things.
Norris also has written of the via negativa and the gifts of faith and hope. One such poem is called "The Companionable Dark," and her images have almost a homespun feel in comparison with Eliot's as she speaks of the dark
... to which all lost things come -- scarves
and rings and precious photographs, and
of course, our beloved
dead.
But Norris' dark is also
The floodwater dark
of hope, Jesus in agony
in the garden, Esther pacing her bitter palace. A dark
by which we see, dark like truth,
like flesh on bone ... (Little Girls 54)
The poem that speaks most directly to me, however, is titled "The Monastery Orchard in Early Spring." Norris begins:
God's cows are in the field,
safely grazing. I can see them
through bare branches,
through the steady rain.
Fir trees seem ashamed
and tired, bending under winter coats. (45)
We're speaking here, of course, about early spring in the Dakotas. Bleak and wintry enough to be at odds with Norris' desire to "push like a tulip / through a muddy smear of snow." Yet it is spring, however early and however far north. So I think the poem is about renewal and hope, in the face of that which makes renewal necessary and hope a gift we do not attain by ourselves. Look at the wealth of allusion Norris gets simply by setting her poem in an apple orchard:
Newton named the force that pulls the apple
And the moon with it,
Toward the center of the earth.
Augustine found a desire as strong: to steal,
To possess, then throw away.
Encounter with fruit is always dangerous
The pear's womanly shape forever mocked him.
I see here a double-duty reference to gravity, both in the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple and in the attraction of bodies in space to each other. I also am reminded of original sin, St. Augustine's theory of concupiscence and the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and I suspect that doesn't begin to exhaust the list. And look what Norris does with the last image in the poem:
A man and a woman are talking.
Rain moves down and
branches lift up
to learn again
how to hold their fill of green
and blossom, and bear each fruit to glory,
letting it fall.
Again, I can't parse this passage. But I'm reminded of Eliot -- in the end is a beginning and each beginning implies an end. And I'm lifted every time I read the poem. To me it suggests life and hope, the struggle of creatures great and small to be whole, and the gift of wholeness in a fallen world.
Here's one last poem, also about cultivating things. It's titled "Foggy," although I don't have the faintest notion why. Echoing the prophet Jeremiah, "Break up / your fallow ground," Norris sets about the job of tilling a garden. "It's a hopeless task," she says, looking ahead to breaking up "great clods of earth" and predicting,
First weeds will come,
then whatever it is
I've planted. I feel the struggle
in my knees and back. (Little Girls 71)
Then she envisions the monks who have "slouched, shuffled, stumbled, strutted, / and sauntered into church" day after day, and her mood lifts:
Isn't that something? I say
to myself. I have no idea what,
except that it's happiness, pure
and simple, and questions fade
as great clouds
descend, as furrows
reel beneath my step: no what, or how, or
where is your God?
Only return, come back,
cleanse your hearts.
Well, our exercise in spiritual geography this morning has taken
us from rose gardens in Elizabeth, N.J., to some of the realms
of advanced physics and postmodernist philosophy, and now back
to a monastery orchard and a garden in Norris' home soil out in
the Dakotas. Here's what I think holds it all together: In response
to 20th-century developments in science, including positive steps
like quantum theory just as much as the horrors of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, we have come to question the linear, often simplistic
thought that came out of Cartesian dualism. All too often it leads
to what Fr. Pollard, down in Oak Ridge after World War II, dismissed
as a "size-up-and-solve" approach to scientific investigation.
At the same time, I believe the openness to paradox that people
like Heisenberg and Bohr brought to advanced physics has a great
deal in common with the poetic imagination. So do the traditional
ways of knowing that Kathleen Norris discovered among small-town
Presbyterians and Benedictines in the Great Plains. I hope I will
be forgiven if I call them (pre-)postmodern. Anyway, I think they
all fit together. And I'd like to think that's why Norris so enjoyed
the image of quarks dancing together in threes, and why she was
so moved by the gift of rose gardens surrounded by scrapyards
and oil refineries in New Jersey. Deep down at the heart of things,
poets and physicists alike tell good stories. And so do gardeners,
monks and orchard-keepers.
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