Jeremiah as Writer: The Necessary Other

The Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey practice what is known as lectio continua, reading through whole books of the Bible, a section at a time, at morning and evening prayer. They read through the entire New Testament in this way every year, and during the time I’ve spent with them—eighteen months over the last three years—we also listened to Genesis, Ruth, Tobit, Esther, Job, the Song of Songs, Hosea, Jonah, and large portions of the books of Exodus, Samuel, Kings, and Isaiah. The most remarkable experience of all was plunging into the prophet Jeremiah at morning prayer in late September one year, and staying with him through mid-November. We began with chapter 1, and read straight through, ending at chapter 22:17. Listening to Jeremiah is one hell of a way to get your blood going in the morning; it puts caffeine to shame.

The monastic discipline of listening aims to still body and soul so that the words of a reading may sink in. Such silence tends to open a person, and opening oneself to a prophet as anguished as Jeremiah is painful. On some mornings, I found it impossible. Like one of my monk friends, who had the duty of reading the prophet aloud through some particularly grim passages, I felt like shouting, “Have a Nice Day!” to the assembly. Easier to mock a prophet than to listen to him.

On other days, I became angry, or was reduced to tears, perhaps a promising sign that something of Jeremiah’s grief had broken through my defenses. The command in chapter 4:3, “Break up your fallow ground,” stayed with me long enough to elicit a response in my journal. The ancient monastics recognized that a life of prayer must “work the earth of the heart,” and with their acceptance of the painful, and even violent nature of this process in mind, I wrote, “And as I take my spade in hand, as far as I can see, great clods of earth are waiting, heavy and dark, a hopeless task. First weeds will come, then whatever it is I’ve planted. I feel the struggle in my knees and back.”

One beneficial effect of lectio continua is that it enables a person to hear the human voices of biblical authors. It becomes obvious, for instance, that Paul’s letters are actual letters, meant to be read aloud, and in their entirety, to church congregations. The monks, in keeping that tradition alive, are also helping Paul’s words to live in the present. Paul’s theological wheel-turning can lose me—Oscar Wilde once described Paul’s prose style as one of the principal arguments against Christianity—but hearing Paul read aloud in the monk’s choir allowed me to take an unaccustomed pleasure in the complex play Paul makes of even his deepest theology. To hear the joke working its way through 1 Corinthians 1:21 is to get the point: “For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.” Hearing the passage read slowly one night at vespers, I suddenly grasped the exasperation there, and God’s good humor, and it made me laugh.

Listening to the Bible read aloud is not only an invaluable immersion in religion as an oral tradition, it allows even the scripture scholars of a monastic community to hear with fresh ears. A human voice is speaking, that of an apostle, or a prophet, and the concerns critical to biblical interpretation—authorship of texts, interpolation of material, redaction of manuscript sources—recede into the background. One doesn’t forget what one knows, and the process of listening may well inform one’s scholarship. But in communal lectio, the fact that the Book of Jeremiah has several authors matters far less than that a human voice is speaking, and speaking to you. Even whether or not you believe that this voice speaks the word of God is less important than the sense of being sought out, personally engaged, making it possible, even necessary, to respond personally, to take the scriptures to heart.

Taking Jeremiah to heart, day in day out, I got much more than I bargained for. I found it brave of these Benedictines, in late-twentieth-century America, in a culture of denial, to try to listen to a prophet at all. The response of the monks was illuminating, and sometimes comical. “Know what you have done,” Jeremiah shouted at us one morning (2:23), but before we could get over the ferocity of that command—it’s so much easier to live not knowing what we’ve done—the prophet had gone on to a vivid depiction of Israel as a frenzied camel in heat, loudly sniffing the wind, making directionless tracks in the sand. This was imagery we could smell; the poetry of scripture at its earthy best.

Monks are not used to being compared to camels in heat, but they took it pretty well. I noticed eyebrows going up around the choir, and then a kind of quiet assent: well, there are days. Monks know very well how easy it is to lose track of one’s purpose in life, how hard to maintain the discipline that keeps (in St. Benedict’s words) “our minds in harmony with our voices” in prayer, the ease with which aimless desire can disturb our hearts. “Stop wearing out your shoes” (2:25), Jeremiah said, and we sat up straight. This was something a crusty desert father might have said to a recalcitrant young monk who thought that some other monastery might suit him better, or whose restlessness was preventing prayer: get hold of yourself, settle down. Stop wearing out your shoes. Good advice for us in America, in a society grown alarmingly mobile, where retreats and spirituality workshops have become such a hot consumer item one wonders if seeking the holy has become an end in itself.

One day, not long after we’d begun to read Jeremiah, and it was dawning on us that we had a long, rough road ahead, a monk said to me: “We haven’t read a prophet for a while, and we need to hear it. It’s good for us.” Another said he was glad to be reading Jeremiah in the morning, and not at evening prayer, when there are more likely to be guests. “The monks can take it,” he said, ‘but most people have no idea what’s in the Bible, and they come unglued.”

Coming unglued came to seem the point of listening to Jeremiah. The prophet, after all, is witness to a time in which his world, the society surrounding the temple in Jerusalem, meets a violent end, and Israel is taken captive to Babylon. Hearing Jeremiah’s words every morning, I soon felt challenged to reflect on the upheavals in our own society, and in my life. A prophet’s task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.

The voice of Jeremiah is compelling, often on an overwhelmingly personal level. One morning, I was so worn out by the emotional roller coaster of chapter 20 that after prayers I walked to my apartment and went back to bed. This passionate soliloquy, which begins with a bitter outburst on the nature of the prophet’s calling (“You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed”), moves quickly into denial (“I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones”). Jeremiah’s anger at the way his enemies deride him rears up, and also fear and sorrow (“All my close friends are watching for me to stumble”). His statement of confidence in God (“The Lord is with me like a dread warrior”) seems forced under the circumstances, and a brief doxology (“Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers”) feels more ironic than not, being followed by a bitter cry: “Cursed be the day that I was born.” The chapter concludes with an anguished question: “Why did I come forth from the womb, to see sorrow and pain, to end my days in shame?”

Listening to that dazzling convergence of the prophet’s call with his pain and his hope, I realized suddenly that the prophet Jeremiah had become part of a remarkable convergence in my own life, a synchronicity of blessings and curses that had shattered certain boundaries that had long held me secure. For much of that fall, I experienced the most intense and prolonged writing period of my life. Poems were coming almost every morning and, unlike my earlier work, they came out whole, and nearly finished. As I hadn’t written any poetry for several years, I was extremely grateful.

But at the same time that I was experiencing this rush of poetic energy, I was also experiencing bitter failure in my attempts to fit in with the rest of the “resident scholars” at the Institute. That was our official title, although I’m not a scholar in the conventional sense, and often find myself ill at ease in the academic environment. Denise Levertov once said that “the substance, the means of art, is incarnation, not reference but phenomena,” and like many poets, I’d much rather read a poem out loud than discuss it. Having to talk about what I do, what poets do, tends to make me stupid.

Two years before at the Institute, my attempts to explain myself and what I was doing there had been received by the group with a bemused toleration. One exchange I will never forget took place at a seminar that I’d been dreading because I had no idea how to conduct a seminar. I spoke on the topic of “Incarnational Language” in such a manner that one man fell asleep; maybe he, at least, had found me suitably academic. I hadn’t given much thought to a precise definition of “incarnational language”; examples and stories attract me so much more, but they didn’t seem to be what people wanted to hear. “You said the liturgy is like a living poem. What makes it like a poem?” one woman asked, and I replied, “Did I say that?” Apparently, I’d blurted it out during my so-called lecture, and had to try to remember what in the world I’d meant, while suppressing the sudden emergence of Emily Dickinson into my consciousness, whispering, “All men say, ‘What’ to me.”

During the discussion period, one colleague, clearly frustrated with my response to a comment he’d made, said, “Kathleen, you could have come back at me much harder on that.” He then proceeded to list several points I might have made, and I nodded my assent to most of them. Finally, I said, “You know, Bill, I might have come up with all that, if I had more time, maybe two or three weeks. A month. I’m no good on my feet, I’m a slow thinker.” At least we all left that seminar wide awake. Uneasy, but awake.

During my second residency at the Institute, however, simple unease became a mean spirit. I suspect that I made a gravely wrong move early in the term, something I’ve not been able to identify, which led to distrust, misapprehensions, a tangle of unfortunate presumptions and graceless gestures that soon became impossible to unravel. None of us seemed capable of acting our best. A clique formed, which of course divided us into those within and those without. Discussions bristled with unspoken tensions, and no one had the good sense to bring them to light so that we might identify and defuse them. It was pure folly, a sorry accumulation of human failures, my own as much as anyone else’s.

Scholars speak with authority, and they must, as they are trying to convince the reader that they have a worthwhile point of view. On the other hand, poets speak with no authority but that which the reader is willing to grant them. Our task is not to convince but to suggest, evoke, explore. And to be a poet, which at its root means “maker,” to be a maker of phenomena, speaking without reference to authority but simply because the words are given you, is not necessarily welcome in the academic world. That fall, the Institute became my crucible. I found myself deeply, helplessly engaged in the writing of a body of poems, even as I was experiencing, full-blast, the scorn of academics for a poet in their midst. It was the monks and their liturgy that kept me sane.

Ironically, it was a desire for liturgy that had led me to risk entering an academic environment in the first place. And now I found that liturgy was saving me. Writers become extremely vulnerable when a prolonged writing spell takes hold; sustaining such intensity has driven more than one poet to nervous breakdown, and even suicide. But the powerful rhythms of Benedictine life gave me balance, a routine. And the liturgy became a place where the prophet Jeremiah could help me understand my own life, my vocation as a poet. I am not making a facile comparison between myself and a prophet. I relate the tale only because I believe it illuminates the workings of lectio. The monastic liturgy plunges you into scripture in such a way that, over time, the texts invite you to commune with them, and can come to serve as a mirror. All of us, I suspect, have times when we’re made to suffer simply for being who and what we are, and we become adept at inventing means of escape. My means of escape that fall happened to be few—my husband was traveling halfway around the world, I was physically unwell. But Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through. He led me into the heart of pain, forcing me to recognize that to answer a call as a prophet, or a poet for that matter, is to reject the authority of credentials, of human valuation of any kind, accepting only the authority of the call itself. It was as a writer that Jeremiah spoke to me, and it was as a writer I listened. I couldn’t have asked for a better companion.

It was the prophet who helped me understand that there wasn’t much I could do about my situation, except to wait it out. I watched ice form on the river outside my window one Sunday afternoon and felt a loneliness more intense than any I could remember since childhood. The day had grown incredibly still—I spent much of that fall in solitude—and the silence was so deep it seemed poised at the edge of eternity. When it became too much to bear, words came to me: “the necessary other, a reminder and reproach; the ground of winter, watchful and chill, no longer looking for what is not there.”

I found this image of winter’s encroachment curiously hopeful. Nearly empty, I could not hope to fill myself—certainly not with human companionship, although when it did come that fall even small acts of kindness and hospitality were resplendent—and I began to sense that this was exactly as it should be. God wanted me empty, alone, silent, and watchful. I was suffering from both severe laryngitis and a lame leg, and had to laugh at myself, wondering if I really were so dense that God had to resort to these extremes in order to get me to shut up and be still.

I spent fruitful hours meditating on what it might mean to be a “necessary other.” The phrase seemed to define Jeremiah, and the prophetic role. I also wondered if it might not help to serve to define the otherness of the poet, an otherness that typically emerges in childhood. Jeremiah 13:16—“When you look for light, he turns it into gloom,/and makes it deep darkness”—brought back to me a childhood image of God, which had led to nothing but trouble in my cheery, 1950s Protestant Sunday school. We’d been asked to paint a picture of heaven, and my effort, an image of God’s throne surrounded by clouds, was a dismal failure. The newsprint cracked under all the layers of paint I had applied, in an attempt to get the image dark enough. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Gregory of Nyssa in my mid-thirties that I discovered that my childhood image had a place within the Christian tradition.

Many people experience such otherness in childhood, but those who find their otherness integral to a calling—to religious life, to ministry, to the arts—learn to adjust to it as a permanent condition. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, quotes novelist Alphonse Daudet on the death of his brother: “My father cried out so dramatically: ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old . . . Oh, this terrible second me . . . how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”

When artists discover as children that they have inappropriate responses to events around them, they also find, as they learn to trust those responses, that these oddities are what constitute their value to others. They can make people laugh, or move them to tears. Under such circumstances, the second, mocking self can make the journey to adulthood extremely difficult and lonely, and artists are notorious for not making it, for becoming monsters of ego instead of human beings.

It doesn’t help that others often encourage artists to think of themselves as somehow more special, sensitive, “creative” than other mortals. This is false doctrine. There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do. The gifts of the human imagination that artists employ operate equally in science and scholarship, teaching and philosophy, business and mathematics, ranching, preaching, engineering, mothering and fathering. Still, it can’t be denied that artists interact strongly with their world, and that there is a measure of suffering involved as they come to a mature understanding of their communal role.

The romanticizing of the artist, of course, has a flip side, a culture that often demeans, ridicules, or dismisses them, and artists soon learn that a strong ego is necessary if they are to practice their art. They learn that they must invent themselves, and in boldly appropriating for their art the raw material of their own lives, they are well served by a level of self-assurance and self-confidence that others find daunting, and often misread as self-satisfaction, or the annoying self-aggrandizement of the artist manqué. I suspect that this was part of my trouble at the Institute that fall. When I spoke as an artist, I was being heard as an artiste, a throwback to what Louise Bogan once termed “the disease of Shelleyism.”

The popular, nineteenth-century image of the poet-as-Romantic; the lone rebel, free of restraint, seized by holy imagination, has proved dangerous for poets in this century. It has overshadowed the poet’s ancient communal role as historian, prophet, storyteller, and has mystified and idealized the writing process. But although poetry is taught notoriously badly in our schools and is no longer at the center of popular culture as it was even as recently as Tennyson’s time, the culture still has need of the poet-as-other. In fact, expectations of artists can run very high. The biologist Lewis Thomas has said that “poets, on whose shoulders the future rests,” are needed to help us make our way through “a wilderness of mystery . . . in the centuries to come.” The theologian John Cobb, in commenting on the history of art from the Byzantine age to the present, says that “the power that can transform, redeem, unify and order has moved in a continuous process from a transcendent world into the inner being of artists themselves.”

This is dangerous for artists to contemplate, that the culture that trivializes and spurns them would also, paradoxically, look to them for hope of transformation. Walter Brueggeman, in a book on the prophets entitled Hopeful Imagination, suggests that “a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural,” and notes that the ideology of our time is that we can live ‘an uncalled life,’ one not referred to any purpose beyond one’s self.” I suspect that this idol of the autonomous, uncalled life has a shadow side that demands that we resist the notion that another might be different, might indeed experience a call. Our idol of the autonomous individual is a sham; the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation. It may be that our culture so fears the necessary other that it has grown unable to identify and name real differences without becoming defensive about them.

I think this explains our mania for credentials, which allow us a measure of objectivity in assessing differences. Credentials measure what is quantifiable; they represent results. A call, on the other hand, is pure process; it cannot be measured, quantified, or controlled by institutions. People who are called tend to violate the rules in annoying ways. Young professors clinging to the tenure track do not like to hear that Denise Levertov has taught at Stanford, despite having little formal education. It offended several of my Institute colleagues that a university had invited me for a weeklong residency as a “poet and theologian.” My last formal course on the Bible was in eighth grade. How could I be a theologian? What good are the rules, the boundaries of our precious categories—“theologian,” “scholar”—if poets can violate them at will? Ironically, while the Institute’s director, Patrick Henry, has a deep commitment to breaking down the barriers between artists and academics, during that semester he found himself contending with personality clashes that made such bridge-building extremely difficult.

The poet, as a “necessary other,” is free to speak, and indeed must speak, in ways that scholars cannot. But that freedom comes at a considerable price. During that fall at the Ecumenical Institute, I began to suspect that just as monastic discipline looks to many people like restriction but ends in freedom, so what looks like the untrammeled freedom of the artist is, in fact, an exacting form of discipline. To employ yet another analogy, I’ll use Robert Frost’s famous comment that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. What he meant by that is that it’s damned difficult. Imagine playing tennis well without a net. And doing it not only with your writing, but your very life.

The danger of going out of bounds is real. Poetry is a vocation without many guidelines for formation, and poets are often people who lack the religious underpinnings that might help them to take in stride both the intense seclusion of the writing process and the safe return to “the world.” Without such underpinnings, they’ve often turned to drugs or alcohol to help them manage the highs and lows; many poets’ lives, since the late nineteenth century, have been demonstrations of William Blake’s axiom: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” aptly titled one of the Proverbs of Hell.

When I was beginning to write poetry in college, in the 1960s, it seemed as if, for contemporary poets, madness and suicide were the primary occupational hazards. Religion itself was dangerous for some, a goad to the manic-depressive roller coaster. (John Berryman and Anne Sexton are tragic examples.) It seemed that the best one could do was to take what one of my teachers called “the artist’s road to redemption,” and find salvation through writing. This worked for me for years.

That it worked so well for so long is a credit to the nature of the poetic call. Art is a lonely calling, and yet paradoxically communal. If artists invent themselves, it is in the service of others. The work of my life is given to others; in fact, the reader completes it. I say the words I need to say, knowing that most people will ignore me, some will say, “You have no right,” and a few will tell me that I’ve expressed the things they’ve long desired to articulate but lacked the words to do so.

By what authority does the poet, or prophet, speak? How dare the poet say “I” and not mean the self? How dare the prophet say “Thus says the Lord”? It is the authority of experience, but by this I do not mean experience used as an idol, as if an individual’s experience of the world were its true measure. I mean experience tested in isolation, as by the desert fathers and mothers, and also tried in the crucible of community. I mean a “call” taken to heart, and over years of apprenticeship to an artistic discipline, developed into something that speaks to others.

The Oxford Companion to the Bible suggests that the emotional power of Jeremiah 20, and several other chapters in the book that evoke the tensions of a prophet’s calling, comes from the fact that “behind the apparently untroubled certainty of ‘Thus says the Lord,’ there may lie a host of unresolved questions and deep inner turmoil.” It’s no wonder. Jeremiah grieves—“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the stain of my poor people!” (8-22; 9:1)—but if he grieves, he must also speak words of unspeakable violence “[your friends] shall fall to the sword of their enemies while you look on” (20:4)—to the very people he loves; he must plead to God on their behalf—“We look for peace, but find no good; for a time of healing, but there is terror instead” (14:19).

In our own time we look for peace and healing, but our newspapers are filled with pages of violence and rage. And Jeremiah holds this world up to us, as a mirror. Hearing his words every morning, as personal as my response to Jeremiah sometimes was, I also recognized, in the months that we took his body blows at morning prayer, the public dimension of his prophecy and of our response. Jeremiah’s lament over a land so ravaged that even the birds and animals have fled has a powerful resonance in an age in which species are rapidly disappearing, and the threat of nuclear warfare remains. His bleak image of death “cutting down the children in the street, young people in the squares, the corpses of the slain like dung on a field, like sheaves behind the harvester, with no one to harvest them” (9:20-21) could have come from a Newsweek story on Bosnia, or Rwanda, or inner-city America. Much as the people of Judah who worshipped at the temple, Americans tend to think of themselves as good, religious people, and their nation as morally superior. Yet child prostitution thrives, hunger and homelessness plague us, in many of our cities death by gunshot is the number-one cause of death for young men, and violent crime is such that people of all ages do not feel safe in their homes, or on neighborhood streets.

The contemporaneity of Jeremiah made me reflect on our need for prophets; I’d sit in the monks’ choir and let the naïve thoughts come: it really is this bad, and if people heard it they would want to change; they’d have to change. Of course it was Jeremiah himself who’d bring me back to earth, to the bitterness of his call, when God tells him: “You shall speak to them and they will not listen; you shall call and they shall not answer” (7:27). Yet a prophet speaks out of hope and, like all the prophets, Jeremiah’s ultimate hope is for justice, a people made holy by “doing what is right and just in the land” (33:15). As the carriers of hope through disastrous times, prophets are a necessary other. And we reject them because they make us look at the way things really are; they don’t allow us to deny our pain.

In the Book of Jeremiah we encounter a very human prophet, and a God who is alarmingly alive. Jeremiah makes it clear that no one chooses to fall into the hands of such a God. You are chosen, you resist, you resort to rage and bitterness and, finally, you succumb to the God who has given you your identity in the first place. All that fall, when Jeremiah’s grief and my own impossible situation cast me into deep loneliness, I was grateful to be sustained by the liturgy that had brought me to Jeremiah and insisted that I listen to him.

And on the feast of St. John Lateran, in early November, a feast commemorating the dedication of a Roman basilica erected by the Emperor Constantine, and traditionally referred to as “the mother church of Christendom,” the words of Psalm 46—“God is within, it cannot be shaken”—suddenly revealed God to me as a place, both without and within. In my notebook I wrote: “In naming myself as a ‘necessary other’ I finally accept the cross of myself, a burden I’ve carried ever since childhood, and felt so acutely in my teens. The cross of difference, of being outside, always other. But now, I am free to take it on. It seems appropriate, on this feast.”

At morning prayer, we heard these words from Ephesians 2: “So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.” The altar gleamed, bone-white, before the dark wood of the monks’ choir, and I could dare to conceive of the Church as refuge, a place to find the divided self made whole, the voice of the mocker overcome by the voice of the advocate. It is still a sinful Church—how could it be otherwise?—but the words of its prophets and apostles had led me to this sanctuary, and I could dare to imagine it as home, a place where there is no “other.”

Source: Norris, Kathleen. “Jeremiah as Writer: The Necessary Other.” The Cloister Walk. New York: Riverhead, 1996. 31–46.