“Passion”
| by Rev. Ken Sawyer ~ January 26th, 2012 | Options | |  Print This Sermon
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“Passion”
by the Rev. Kenneth W. Sawyer
A sermon preached at the First Parish in Wayland
On Sept. 16, 1979; Feb. 6, 1994; and Jan. 22, 2012
To the list of the basic categories of religion, elements of life most fully lived, to faith, belief, doubt, compassion, justice, mercy, community and love, this morning I want to add one other. I want to talk about passion.
I do not mean passion as the word is most often used, to mean that which, for instance, goes on in many a movie or television soap opera, I am told. It is not that I wish to reinstitute religious wars against that sort of behavior, by which I mean your basic 6a definition, passion as “ardent affection,” mixed with something of 6c, “sexual desire,” both of which, you understand, are affirmed in Scripture, but not what I mean to talk about this morning.
While I suppose that that is the most common use of the word “passion” that I don’t want to use – passion as in passionate embrace, or as in “passion pit,” which is what teens once called a drive-in theater - there are a wealth of other meanings of “passion” that don’t fit my intentions this morning. I don’t mean, for instance, to affirm the religious nature of outbreaks of bad temper, however well Jesus’ example in the temple with the money-changers would provide a text.
Nor do I mean to affirm uncontrollable displays of emotion, nor a physical disorder that causes suffering, nor (and this one’s the most obscure) that state of being subjected to or acted on by what is external or foreign to one’s true nature, especially a state of desire or emotion that represents the influence of what is external and opposes thought and meaning as the true activity of the human mind. End quote. I definitely do not mean that. I don’t even understand that. (It sounds to me like a definition snuck into the dictionary to get back at someone with whom someone had argued about the proper use of the human mind, perhaps a disliked relative or a professional colleague.)
Nor do I have in mind even more far-fetched uses of the word, of which I know one in particular. I took a course in Cambridge years ago from a brilliant sociologist and psychologist whose passion it was to decry passion. (This brings to mind May Sarton’s poem, “Dialogue”:
The teacher of logic said, “Reason.”
The poet said, “Passion.”
“Without logic, we muddle
And fail, said the teacher
Of reason.
The poet said, “Fiddle!
What about Nature?”
“Has Nature no plan,
You poor fuddled creature?
You’re a rational man,
Not an ape or an angel.”
The poet said, “Nonsense!
I’m an angel, an ape,
And a creature of sense,
Not a brain in a box
That a mere jackanapes
With logic unlocks.
I’m total. I’m human.
It’s you who are not.”
“You sound like a woman.”
The poet said, “Rot!
You’re just a machine.
You can’t write a poem.
You can’t make a dream.”
But the logical man
Said, “I’ll stick to my reason.”
(He said it with passion.))
So it was her passion to decry passion, to study it in surveys and interviews and unmask it for the danger that it is to us all, to women in particular, to anyone who strives for full maturity.
But her definition was so forced as to create no end of confusion, for what she really wanted to attack is what is commonly called Romantic Love. And one kept having to translate as she would lambaste passion as the root of a good deal of evil, meaning by passion none of the things I have mentioned so far, nor what I mean to affirm later, but meaning instead the kind of ardent affection that is not love, the kind that is not focused on another person but on one’s own idealizations projected onto another. That’s not mature love at all but a form of narcissism, common to people in their late teens. She labored mightily and well to identify that kind of behavior, and to contrast it with mature love, which cares for the other person as herself or himself, not as a mirror that we hold up to stare into adoringly; she wanted to insist on the dangers of that deception, and the poor grounds that such feelings make for a marriage.
Which I thought a good point. But it helped not at all for her to call that passion, since nearly everyone already had a perfectly good definition or two of what passion is and none were apt to be that.
For instance, the way I want to use the word is in the sense my dictionary calls 5b: depth or vehemence of feeling, a state or capacity for emotional excitement. Like ardor, like enthusiasm, most of all, I suppose, like zest. Like the gusto the beer ads used to speak of, however unlikely their claims were for providing it; but more than just gusto, just bigness, something like that but better focused, more intent, more purposeful.
Let me tell you about Giacometti’s dog. In 1951, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the one who does those tall, skinny people, that year he did a dog. It stands 18” high and is now at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Jonathan Aaron has a poem about a dog, in which he credits the inspiration to Giacometti:
A Dog
(After Giacometti)
While he jogs
head-down toward
memory of a taste,
a voice, a pale rectangle
of open doorway,
his front legs
constantly fail
to correct his hindquarters’
sleepy need to travel
somewhere else.
Only his narrow,
low-slung muzzle
gives the rest of him
reason to follow.
His skin
is a thin blanket
thrown over the old argument
of his skeleton
to keep the rain out
and the dry guts in.
Each step he takes
is an achievement
of what remains
ready at any moment
to become less
than the sum of its parts.
But whenever paw hits
pavement, and the shock
ripples down or up his knobby
spine, his bones are shaken
into cooperation,
and all of him
settles into motion
as continuous as the
twist of water
in the gutter beside him.
Ready to cross the wet street
he glances at the traffic,
his eyes glowing zeros,
neon and depthless
before they dim
to a green of sea-worn glass
as he looks the other way.
(The New Yorker)
OK. that’s a picture of a dog like Giacometti’s. Now I will offer another poem, this time by Robert Wallace, and this time precisely about Giacometti’s dog (that’s the name of the poem), which shifts our focus at the end:
Lopes in bronze:
scruffy,
thin. In
The Museum of Modern Art
head
down, neck long as sadness
lowering to hanging ears
–he’s eyeless –
that hear
nothing, and the sausage
muzzle
that leads him as
surely as eyes:
he might
be
dead, dried webs or clots of flesh
and fur
on the thin, long bones – but
isn’t, obviously
is obviously
travelling intent on his
own aim: legs
lofting
with a gaiety the dead aren’t known
for. Going
onward in one place,
he doesn’t so much ignore
as not recognize
the well-
dressed Sunday hun-
dreds who passing, pausing make
his bronze
road
move. Why
do they come to admire
him?
They wouldn’t care for real dogs
less raggy
than he
Is. It’s his tragic
insouciance
bugs them? or is
it that art can make us
cherish
anything – this command
of shaping and abutting space - -
that makes us love
even mutts,
even the world, accept
even
the starry wheels by which we’re hurled
toward death, having
the rocks and wind
for comrades?
It’s not this starved hound,
but Giacometti seeing
him we see.
We’ll stand in line all day
to see <anyone>
love anything enough.
Now we are speaking of passion.
That love, that focused, affectionate, active engagement with the materials of his life and of his mind, with the bronze and with the image he holds of the dog, that engagement is a passion whose model bespeaks a more general awakeness, an involvement in life that is available to us each.
“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun,” said Thoreau, “the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of <women and>
men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”
Marvelous! Morning has broken, indeed, but only if we are awake to its dawning, said Thoreau: but if we are awake, it our senses are opened, our vitality stirred, if the world has engaged our attention, our love and our energy, if our lives are “passioned,” as the verb used to be, passioned by life itself, then morning breaks ever for there is dawn in us.
But were Thoreau’s words the mere boasting of youth, a young man’s taunting celebration of a vigor that characterizes our earlier years, repeated by me first when I was not yet thirty-five. The vigor of youth, the wisdom of age, a hundred liturgical pieces in every tradition speak of and praise, as though youth were daft and maturity enfeebled.
But even granting time’s toll on the body, the passion of which I speak knows no such season, it stirs the old at least as well as the young. This is from Clarke Wells:
“I suppose I should write this week something institutional or churchly or ethical, but my heart
isn’t in it. Where my heart is these days is a very personal thing between me and God. Or who-
ever it is that turns the seasons and lays the sun across the trees with that sudden and terrible
beauty.
“You know, I’ve been taught all my life to believe that growing up meant to become less
vulnerable, that getting overwhelmed by life is what happens when you are young, that the
charge of visions, feeling, and nameless longing gradually spends itself in the process of
maturing, that life as we get older is less tearing, not as confusing, ecstatic, strange.
“Well, I’m here to testify to the opposite. And to warn you and others…about what life may
have in store. I was driving back from Lowell State University yesterday afternoon on some
country roads, and I simply had to stop the car near a stone fence and go through it for an
hour.
“It had nothing to do with practical matters or politics or theology or vocation or marriage
or my maturity or immaturity. It had to do with autumn trees against the blue and shattered
light and where I am with living. I report it to you on the chance that you’re as odd as I – that
it all gets more intense, not less – so that if you have to go through the same thing, like stopping
your car for an hour, you’ll not feel crazy at your age being torn apart that way.”
One has only to listen to recordings of the cellist Pablo Casals when he was in his 80’s as engaged, as alert, as awake as ever; while even at thirty-four I spoke of looking back on younger years beclouded by concerns of self and identity and other meager distractions.
I certainly don’t feel a whole lot less clouded over now. I suspect that at any given time many of us at our many different ages are in need of a touch of greater passion, of devotion, of enthusiasm, even a bit of what my dictionary calls “agitated vehemence.”
Now there are limits to such engagement. Passion is not IT but only a part, albeit an important one.
I like the way the poet Don Marquis has his cockroach hero archy describe the sides of the balancing act I would call us toward:
the lesson of the moth
I was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt I asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better be happy
for a moment
and burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before I could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
I do not agree with him
myself I would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time I wish
there was some thing I wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
Given excesses of drug use and violence, I think we have had enough flying into cigar lighters to avoid the boredom of only life. There are limits. But archy’s feeling at the end is mine, too, and I want and need to find ways of giving sway to passion’s enlivening spirit, that our alternative to self-immolation not be equally destructive, trivial chores and mediocre challenges and a day-to-dayness that numbs us on our passage to the grave. “Just as the hand, held before the eyes, can hide the tallest mountain,” says the wisdom of the Hasidim, “so the routine of everyday life can help us from seeing the vast radiance and the secret wonders that fill the world.”
The water metaphor stays with me from Thaddeus Clark.
(“Life and no moment of it can any more be seized and held than the flow of
water which streams from an open faucet. One can only drink and drink deeply
and continue to drink.” Quoted by Laurel Hallman, “Salvation”)
Of course, it also suggests that any too-consuming thirst for life is going to have us gasping and gagging. We have to rest, like a person drinking from a faucet, we have to catch our breath. But still, the water flows and flows, and for all of us the well will run dry. Our hope and our task and our glory is to drink fully and deeply of life as it flows.
And I say that even knowing that at times the taste is bitter at best. The word itself knows this. “Passion” derives of all things from the Latin word for suffering, and it still means that in one sense, as in the passion of the martyrs or of Jesus. The passion flower is called that not for romantic reasons but because its petals reminded someone of Jesus on the cross. “Passion” contains in itself etymologically
and as a secondary meaning an awareness of the suffering and pain that passion can involve, and redeem.
I don’t know why I’m so quotey today. Every now and then it happens, usually with a subject like this one that I have been turning over for years and tossing things into a folder somewhere, anticipating an eventual morning.
I have quotations that are mystic, like this from Annie Dillard: “Everywhere I look I see fire: that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” (Which reminds me, although I don’t have the quotation, of a literary contribution, from Brendan Behan, who said about the same thing – as I recall, that one is a fool who cannot see that all the world is on fire.)
And I have quotations psychoanalytic. This is from Freud: “The difference between nervous health and nervous illness (neurosis) is narrowed down to a practical distinction, and is determined by a practical result – how far the person concerned remains capable of a sufficient degree of capacity for enjoyment and active achievement in life. The difference can probably be traced back to the proportion of energy which has remained free relative to that of the energy that has been bound by repression…”
Energy, enjoyment, active achievement – elements, then, of the healthy life as well as of the religious life.
I even have quotations theological, and with that we come full circle, back to an artist – not surprisingly, to Vincent Van Gogh: “You must love with a high and intense determination,” he said, “with your will and your intellect, and seek always to deepen, expand and improve your knowledge, for that way lies God. If a <person> loves Rembrandt profoundly, then in his heart of hearts he knows he knows God.”
If a person loves Rembrandt, or bronze and the image of a dog, or nature, or the progress of the humankind, or excellence, or beauty, or leading the minds of youth to goodness or knowledge, or trading honorably and well in the marketplace of goods or services or ideas – if a woman, if a man, love deeply and fully some good thing, some decent aim, some ennobling process – if her life, if his life be touched with passion, just so much is that person blessed.
May life’s entrancing challenges and joys arrest our wandering attention, and invest our lives with such love, such engagement, such passion. Amen.