Maurice Manning's "XXXV" (from "Bucolics")

Thoughts on devotion.

XXXV

is that you Boss is that
you hooting in the hollow
are you a night bird Boss
is that your face behind
the moon is that your hand
cupped to the cricket’s ear
do you tell the cricket how
to sing to you say that’s it
now softer softer now
you little bug do you
pour moonlight on the river
do you say river let
this silver ride on you
you’re up to something Boss
you’re like a treetop there
against the sky a wave
you’re like a neighbor Boss
is your favorite game a game
of peep-eye Boss are you
as sweet as you can be
you cutie-pie I can’t
keep track of you Boss you’re just
too many things at once
you’re like a lullaby
that never ends a breath
that makes the moment last
again again again


from Bucolics (Ecco, 2008)

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Oh man, if you have never read a Maurice Manning poem, and this is the first time — cherish it. Truly. And if you want to really appreciate this poem, here’s me, trying to do justice to it by reading it. You can also skip this part and read it aloud yourself. It’s a joy.

This poem is from Manning’s Bucolics, a book of these kinds of odes and prayers and questions and hymns, written from a laborer to his god, written from someone on earth to whomever he deems to be behind this grand thing we call a world. It’s a beautiful book, soulful and full of wit and music. It is humble and playful. It stumbles along, full of wonder and awe. It has soul, really.

In one of my favorite poems of his, “The Gone and the Going Away,” Manning begins:

The world I know keeps going farther
and farther away.  I cannot keep it
from going, though I love it still,
and yet, with darker joy.  The dark
because that world was soaked in sadness;
the joy because I understood
and lived there, too. 

Darker joy is such an apt way to describe the joy I feel these days. A sadness that can still smile. Laughter that holds a minor chord inside of it. Later in that same poem — which moves from this meditation on sorrow and joy to a real accounting of the lives we live and the ways in which our actions are impossibly difficult to pin down to the simplistic ideas of judgement, no matter how much we’d like to believe they are — Manning writes:

I recognize it, I see it all;
it doesn’t hide the human truth.

That human truth is at the heart of Manning’s poetry, whether in the voice he allows his poems to offer outward, or whether in the lives of the characters he inhabits and gives such voice towards. It’s a poetry of generosity: generosity of affection, generosity of witness, generosity of devotion.

And it’s devotion, I think, that has me thinking about Manning today. This poem is full of it. Here, read these lines again:

is that your face behind
the moon is that your hand
cupped to the cricket’s ear
do you tell the cricket how
to sing to you say that’s it
now softer softer now

Playful, right? And beautiful? How they look at the world and wonder, and how such wondering — about a divine hand, about some other thing at work behind the curtain — doesn’t reduce the experience of the world, but rather expands it? Because, yes — imagine that! Imagine a hand cupped to a cricket’s ear. Imagine a face behind the moon. Imagine all the things that exist at once, and how they are so many, and how they are so beautiful.

I am a lapsed Catholic, but I grew up staunchly so. I attended mass each Sunday growing up, and then, in high school’s later years, I made my own decision to attend mass each day, in a small chapel an hour or two before school started, with a handful of my teachers and barely any other students. I felt lost and lonely then, still reckoning with my parent’s broken marriage and my own confusion about how to be in the world. The tiny chapel those mornings felt more like home than my own.

I was taught during that time, luckily so, by Jesuits, these rebellious teachers within a church that, socially, can be and feel heavily conservative. In the over-a-decade since my last concerted attempt at organized religion, I have felt myself owing a debt to the discipline of reflection that the Jesuits instilled in me, while casting aside much of the doctrine I used to believe. They have a philosophy, known as cura personalis, that means care for the whole person. I think about it every day. I really do. I think about how you cannot teach someone if you don’t ask, in the same way Lucinda Williams sang, are you alright?

That being said, I found myself — as I recently told my friend George, and as my wife has seen in person — in tears multiple times these past weeks, in the wake of Pope Francis’s passing. I think this was in part due to the fact that I have been feeling emotional because of a whole host of other factors, but regardless, it is true. I have been crying a lot. I have been sitting next to my wife after dinner, with her reading a book or scrolling through her phone, only for her to look up and see me with tears silent-streaming down my face, balling my eyes out with a kind of gentle whimper at the sight of yet another news report of the late Pope washing the feet of prisoners, or letting a child steal his Pope seat, or calling, each night, a tiny church in Gaza. I shared, with my mother, a short video of the smallest nun I’ve ever seen crying at the Pope’s coffin, her backpack reminding me of the backpacks of children, her body aging and her grief transcendent. Her name was Geneviève. She lived in a camper van just outside the Vatican. I cried the moment I finished sending my mom the text.

You can say what you want about such news reports making greatness out of something less than greatness, yes, particularly in the way we often do when we make both cleaner and prettier the narrative of someone’s life in the aftermath of that same life. But what I think moved me so deeply was the simple — and grace-filled — reminder of devotion. The devotion of mourners, yes. But also the devotion of someone charged with a great deal of power. The kissing of feet. The blessing of a forehead. The way the feet are offered out. The way the forehead is bent. And the way the lips must bend to the skin. The way the hands must, still, wash the feet. Touch them, too. All of that supplication, that giving-ness. How I used to pray, truly, at the foot of my bed. Hurried, yes — because I wanted to get it over with, but also because I was in need, and I didn’t know any other position of need.

I forget often about devotion. I forget what it was like to be seventeen, depressed and anxious and worried, and finding solace in the ritual of faith, believing that something greater than myself could save me. I forget, sometimes, what it was like to want to be saved. I forget, all of the time, what it was like to believe. I forget belief, tragic as that is. I forget it all of the time. Which is the same as forgetting hope. Which is the same, though you might disagree, as forgetting trust.

In Kathryn Schulz’s memoir, Lost and Found, she writes:

If you do care about the same questions, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers.

I think this is, in part, why I found myself crying at the images of feet being washed, or at the late Pope’s insistence to be buried in a plain, wooden coffin rather than a more ornate one. These were answers, yes. They were decisions made. And regardless of how I feel now about religion, they reminded me that so many of us care about the same questions. Questions of justice and questions of power and questions of meaning and questions of grace. We are thinking about how to wrestle with the depth of these questions as we live amidst the various structures of our lives, structures that sometimes that do not give space or room for the sheer size of such questions. Maurice Manning’s poem today begins with a litany of questions: is that you? Is that you? Do you? Do you? These questions care, as I do, and as you might, about wonder. About the world and our place in it. They are questions that don’t want, ever, to be alone. I don’t want to be alone, either. I doubt you do, as well.

Earlier, I said that I felt moved by the devotion present in the images I saw: mourners, supplicants, believers. Devotion looks to us at first, I think, like action. Kneeling down is an action. As is the tongue moving against the roof of the mouth as the mouth offers out the words of prayer. But devotion is a noun. It is the noun that comes from the verb, as if it is the place we make of ourselves when we sit with our doubt. I wonder now if devotion — which owes its etymology to language that means vow and sacrifice and promise — reminds us to hold enough space to consider the question that comes before the action. Enough space that it becomes a whole place. A home. A church. A body. We build our house to make room for the questions, rather than to keep them out. It is every question that we are devoted to. It is every question that upholds our belief. Without asking anything, we believe nothing. Is that you, is that you? I believe it is.

In her beautiful, wide-ranging poem that is its own meditation on devotion, Patrycja Humienik describes devotion as:

Kneeling in recognition of one's smallness
in the vast.

I grew emotional at the sight of devotion because I had forgotten that so many of us live in the midst of real, persistent questioning. I had forgotten what it was like to witness people acknowledging, in full view of others, their own smallness in this great and vast world. In this world, often, and sadly, our doubt becomes our life. Our material doubt, our spiritual doubt, our everyday doubt. The doubt of tomorrow. The doubt of living another day like today. Devotion, a kind of display of longing and curiosity and the beautiful grace of belief, seeks companionship in doubt, I think. That’s part of what love is, I think. Two hands holding in an uncertain world. And it’s part of what prayer is, I know. Devotion gives up power for communion. It says I don’t know all of the answers. It holds out an upturned hand. It waits for someone — anyone — to hold it.

Today’s poem reminds me, too, that devotion can look a lot like a wink we give the universe. It can look like joy. It can look like saying, into the limbs of trees, you cutie-pie / I can’t keep track of you. We can be devoted to a persistent wonderment that lives, always, on the threshold of joy, this little house of questions we’ve made looking out into a field we’ve yet to figure out, and which surprises us every day. Look, one of the great abuses of empire and the powerful people who sit at the top of our current one is that they model for us a way of being that asks no questions and seeks no joy, where the pointed end of the spear is the answer for everything and the cruelty is the name of that point. Action after action after action. It is not a house the powerful are building; the noun they live in is called destruction. And so, if devotion is the noun we live in, then I’d like it to be a house of questions and open doors. And I’d like there to be laughter amidst the praying, and for the praying to look like whatever we call living, which is to say whatever we allow by whoever we allow in, which is to say everything and everyone.

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Some notes:

1. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

2. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.