Those Who Know Their Need 5 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

When I knit at bedtime, if I’m on a simple stretch of garter or stockinette that doesn’t require much attention, I like to see the stitches as prayer beads that pass through my fingers. With each row of stitches, I say to myself a favorite line from Scripture or from a poem.

Not long ago, I decided to use these prayerful stretches to say the Beatitudes—Matthew’s version, from the NRSV. But I kept getting stuck on the very first beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

While I’ve dabbled in the scholarship on what Matthew might have meant by “the poor in spirit,” none of the explications have satisfied my own spirit. Was it that the economically poor are blessed in spirit? Or that those whose spirits are poor are blessed? Neither interpretation could become prayerful for me, no matter how many rows of it I knit.

So I asked my friend Bill Jones, pastor and poet, what his take on the line was. He immediately quoted the New English Bible translation: “How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.”

Ah! That was it. “Poor in spirit” as knowing one’s need of God. Instantly the meaning clicked for me, because if there’s anything on earth that I do know, it’s my absolute and constant need of God. So now I gratefully knit into my rows “how blest are those who know their need of God.”

This is why, reading Greg Wolfe’s editorial in issue #63 of Image, I leapt with assent to Irenaeus’s statement (in Greg’s paraphrase) that “The religious sense, inherent in human nature, grows out of the awareness of our dependence”—our dependence, that is, on God. Greg goes on to argue that the artist has a special gift in this regard: the gift of helping us see both our neediness and the source of its satisfaction:

The artist maintains her gaze at human neediness and dependency, and through the honesty and beauty of the form she creates, enables us to connect that need with its true source and lasting fulfillment.... The artist does not show us the world as it ought to be; she shows us the world as it is, here and now, and enables us to see that our redemption is always present, always available.

My own mind runs to particulars, so reading this I began flipping through my memory bank for art works that have struck me as achieving most powerfully this combined vision of our neediness and our redemption.

First I recalled the collages of Mary McCleary, who will be on the 2010 Glen Workshop faculty. Her Ash Wednesday, Waller County came to mind: its representation of the back of a youth who is looking into a thicket of serpent-like branches, image of our sinfulness that we turn to face every Ash Wednesday.

The entire collage is dotted with the eyes that are characteristic of McCleary’s work, those eyes representing God’s eternal presence, watching us and available any instant to gift us with redemption.

I remembered, too, my favorite poem of Richard Wilbur’s, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” with its luscious image of laundry hung to dry outside the apartment window of someone who wakes to perceive it all as angels.

And then, flipping through more of this issue of Image, I came to a poem that images exactly what Greg is talking about: Rod Jellema’s “Window.” Yes, another window; and like Wilbur’s it opens onto a world very much of the everyday (Greg’s “world as it is”), but the everyday perceived continually on the brink of a redemptive transformation.

Jellema’s protagonist is an elderly man who is aware of his forgetfulness, aware that everything around him “is young and new,” aware that his waking state has become “more like a long sleep.” But he is graced with an acceptance of his diminishments, and so the poem can poignantly close:

Nothing is wrong if the book he brought down
slips from his lap and claps the patio bricks, once again
startling him to the high wonder of where he is.

“Startling him to the high wonder of where he is.” It’s a line we might all apply to ourselves, whatever our age, a line recalling us to the desired spiritual state of wonder. We need—at least, I know I need—to be repeatedly startled into the high wonder of where I am: in the eternal presence of a loving, forgiving God.

Blest are those who know their need of this God.

“Startling him to the high wonder of where he is.” I can hear this becoming a prayer-line for my bedtime knitting.