Canticle

By Wendell Berry

What death means is not this –
the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall,
praising its absence, feeding on music.

If life can’t justify and explain itself,
death can’t justify and explain it.
A creed and a grave never did equal life
of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts
of ancient stones at the beginning of April.
The black clothes of the priests are turned
against the frail yellow of sunlight and petal;
they wait in their blackness to earn joy
by dying. They trust that nothing holy is free,
and so their lives are paid. Money slots
in the altar rails make a jukebox of the world,
the mind paying its gnawed coins for the
safety of ignorance.

Ignorance never has and never will make us safe.  Ignorance can be excused, patronized, even enjoyed – when a child playing hiding-go-seek by hiding under a blanket, thinks that he or she is hidden from everyone in the room.  A blanket pulled over the head “makes the world go away.”  Except that it doesn’t…

You and I will smile, play along, humoring the child.  We know that experience is a severe teacher, that the child will learn that safety is found by living with “eyes wide open.”  Ignorance is no friend.  “Not knowing” is never better.  The relentless advance of cause and effect is not deflected by my ignorance.  Republicans living in a “red” state are comforted by a habit of church attendance, Fox News rhetoric, vaccine “hesitancy,” etc. holding tenaciously to ignorance while the medical facilities are at capacity with the sick, some dying of covid.

And what of the rest of us, those of us with a different point of view?  Should we play along, find solace that we, somehow separated by distance, or class. or _________, are not involved with them, that somehow we will not be affected by their fate?  My instincts cry out, that it is reprehensible to “play along,” to dissimulate about my neighbors “right” to live and die by a lethal illusion.  It is better to do something no matter our uncertainty, the unknowns about the consequences of our actions.

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The Wendell Berry poem, Canticle is about the stakes which I described above, in the difference between life in ignorance, illusion, comfortable hocus pocus and life in the bright, hard light of day.  Priest-craft, stories spun by adept, sincere liars serve to throw a blanket over the mystery of life.  The “big reveal” they say will come subsequent to the point of death.  And they say, it is only proper that you should continue to pay with money for their services in sustaining your “Faith” in this life-denying illusion.  You must pay.

There is no big reveal.  There’s no evidence whatsoever for such expectation.  There’s abundant evidence that the deeper meaning, the “truth” about life and death can be experienced in the frail yellow of sunlight and petal sprouting in the cleft of ancient stones.

The holy is free.