At the Christmas Eve service at my church, the first half hour is choral music sung both by the large and excellent choir and by the congregation.  One of the choir offerings this past year was a setting of “Mirabile Mysterium,” written by Anne Kilstofte to commemorate the first tolling of large bells in the Basilica’s belfry.  I want to ponder the meaning of the last stanza translated from the Latin: “That which he was/he remained,/and that which he was not/he assumed:/suffering neither mixture/nor division.”

Though I initially thought “Oh, this is a classic riddle like those found in some fairy tales,” as I listened to the hauntingly beautiful chords coming from the 90-voiced choir, I knew I was being asked to accept the quintessential paradox that lies at the very heart of Christianity.  What I and many other contemporary Christians believe is that what we mark on December 25th is not just the birth of the baby Jesus who will become the lynch-pin of our faith, but we are being asked to accept the tremendous generosity of a god who decided to take on human form in order that humans could inch just a little closer to goodness and love.

Parsing the quoted lines, I feel on familiar but exciting ground.  God stays just as was true before Jesus is born; simultaneously, God becomes what has never been before this historic moment, i.e., human.  Then the last two lines give voice to ultimate mystery:  God becomes human while remaining divine, and, miraculous mystery indeed, this seeming bifurcation causes no alteration at all in the original divinity.  This is something perhaps an avowed mystic or a brilliant chemist might grasp.  If we try to “figure it out,” we will get nowhere, that’s why it’s the ultimate paradox.  We simply have to stand before this moment and accept that the God of our understanding is simultaneously the deepest abstraction and the most mundane infant in a bed of straw out under the stars.  This is a prophetic declaration not a scientific or rational hypothesis.  For my part, I am able to rest inside this seeming impossibility.  And giving my assent to the final assertion fills me with spiritual excitement:  my God is “suffering neither mixture/nor division.”  My God is inviting me into the mirabile mysterium if I have the imaginative stamina to accept.

When I heard that Pete Seeger had died, I felt like I’d lost an era of my own political life.   In the mid-1970s, I was part of a large audience in Minneapolis that fell in love with the singer and his songs.  We all know that the Hudson River would have died had Pete not organized, at first with a tiny group of like-minded New Yorkers, and unrelentingly kept on organizing until the river was cleaned up and reborn.

While I never heard him in person again, I had many recordings and knew all the words to many of his emblematic songs.  My own favorite is “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, Halleluia,” a call to activists to stop doing whatever it is we are doing and focus on the injustices and horrors all around us.  News of Seeger’s death came at the same time that my church lesson from the Gospels reminded me of Jesus’ earliest recruitment of apostles.  His first two were Matthew and his brother,  simple fishermen who were in their boats when Jesus passed by them.  He asked them to row their boat to the shore, lay down their fishing gear, and follow him into a radical movement for justice and love.  Since the song Pete sang included the sacred “halleluia,” and since he often talked about his grounding in the gospel tradition in African American churches, I am convinced that he was thinking of that moment in time when he made up his words that we all responded to so fully.

So we won’t hear any more live recordings of this man of good works, but I and thousands of others will hold him in our hearts as a model for how to live in a deeply flawed world without either falling into cynical despair or being mesmerized by fame and fortune.  As he must have felt sad over so many of his fellow travelers who did become stunned and then damaged by the lime-light, Pete Seeger just kept on putting one foot in front of the other, telling truth to whatever power base he felt needed to hear it, staying centered in his fundamental belief in inclusivity–“This land is my land, this land is your land….”

In a review of a new book discussing Emily Dickinson’s 52 poems written on envelopes or parts thereof, Holland Cotter notices that some of these seem to match words to the shape of the paper.  He speaks of one about “The way/Hope builds his/House” that is written “on the top half of an envelope that has its flap raised like a peaked roof.”  Though Mr. Cotter doesn’t go to call such poems by their proper name–emblem poetry–this is clearly what Dickinson was writing.  Scholars have a pretty good idea about what books she read from her father’s extensive library.  She knew the work of early 17th century English writers who called themselves metaphysical poets because they broke with conventional ideas of what was acceptable subject matter and metaphor pools for poetry.  Names usually best known for this group are John Donne and George Herbert, though a slighter younger pair of poets (Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan) also belongs in this school.  Dickinson admitted in her private writings that she was most drawn to Herbert’s work, which means she would have been entirely familiar with his two most famous emblem poems, “The Altar” and “Easter Wings.”  In each case, Herbert arranges his lines so that they look like their titles, just as Emily worked on her envelopes to shape them to their subject matter.

Not only did Dickinson get permission to write emblem poems from her English predecessor, but she also would have felt akin to Herbert as he struggled with his relationship to God, trying to balance his deep belief in God as the ultimate creator with his own artistic talents for “making” poems from scratch.  To help him avoid what he would have seen as hubris, he used a different form for virtually every poem he ever wrote; that way, he never became polished at executing any one model.  And, though Herbert ultimately found a way to remain inside formal religion and Dickinson remained on the circumferences if even that close, they both understood something about forces larger than themselves before which they stood in awe.

I’m very glad this book has been published so that people devoted to Emily Dickinson’s work can see how important these “gorgeous nothings,” as its authors name her envelope poems, can begin to take them seriously as more signs of the intentionality underlying her carefully sewn-together books of her poems.  And I hope Mr. Cotter will perhaps look up George Herbert’s earlier emblematic poetry since Emily put such stock in it.

For the past few decades, most new books I’ve read have been written by women.  There have been, of course, the occasional exception, e.g., Charles Frazer’s Cold Mountain, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, and more recently, Edmund DeWaal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes.  A month or so ago, I googled “novels about gardens” to get some help making up my 6-month list of books to teach at the University of Minnesota Arboretum.  One title intrigued me, though its author was entirely unknown to me.  The book was The Garden of Evening Mists and its author was one Tan Twan Eng.

Born in Penang, on the Malaysian Peninsula, in 1972, Eng studied law at the University of London and worked as an advocate and solicitor in Kuala Lumpur until he decided to write full time.  His first novel, The Gift of Rain (2007), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and his second, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has helped him win the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2013. 

What draws me to him is not the awards but his writing style.  I’ve recently concluded that so-called contemporary fiction does not appeal to me, so stumbling upon Eng has been nothing short of a pure gift.  He trusts language to work its magic through metaphor and through subtly constructed sentences that carry weight as well as content.  Because his cultural roots are Asian, those metaphors fall with incredible freshness and surprise on my literary ears, often causing me to stay reading way past my usual turn-off-the-lights time.

The other reason I am so drawn to author Eng centers on his historical context.  He writes about the interplay of Chinese, Japanese, and Malaysian cultures in the 1930s, during World War II, and in the decades after that war came to its violent and merciless ending by this country’s dropping two atomic bombs on Japanese cities.  Eng’s characters clash in terms of politics and quests for military dominance; they hate each other’s countries and tactics but find themselves becoming attached to and then incredibly intimate with a particular member of the opposing country.  We readers then must suspend any simple ideas of good and evil as we watch relationships build and flourish between putative “enemies.”  There is no romanticization in the name of love, however.  Rather, Eng limns every painful consequence—to the characters themselves, to their families, to their very deepest belief systems—accruing from culturally forbidden intimacy.

In the end of each powerful novel, love triumphs but not by anyone’s living happily ever after.  Indeed, the kind of love that outlasts the human cost of warfare isn’t romantic love at all, but a much deeper embracing of otherness as being indistinguishable from one’s self.  So, if you are looking around for reading that will leave you thinking differently than when you began doing it even as it freshens your appreciation of words woven into often stunning sentences, Tan Twan Eng is your man.