John Donne- a short homily from this morning's Wednesday Eucharist
Monday was the feast of John Donne, priest, poet, and lawyer. (Not often does it go in that order…)
John Donne was a master of the vernacular. His poetry is known for its natural rhythms. He wrote the way people talked. If you know about John Donne’s life, you know he was a bit of a prodigal early on. He had a nickname: Jack the Rake, which was much raunchier then, I understand. Today we might call him Jack “the player.”
In, Elegy XIX a poem where John Donne compares his
exploring a woman’s body to the exploration of America…
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
Donne was active at the time of Shakespeare, it is possible they were even members of the same Friday drinking group of writers at the Mermaid tavern in London.
Something happens around the turn of the 17th century in the English language. The Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare and the poetry of John Donne all appear within a few years. The Christ Church Cathedral Wednesday morning congregation has been spending Lent in a study of the great spiritual traditions, Benedictine, Franciscan, Ignatian…but our own Anglicanism has a great spirituality as well, a spirituality perhaps best embodied by our poets like John Donne, poet’s we call “The Anglican Divines”. I like to think of it as a poetic spirituality, or perhaps more poetically, a spirituality of the vernacular.
Donne later became a priest and preacher, but he still wrote poetry. One of his contemporaries said, “his wit remained, but his object changed.” Donne wrote mostly about spirituality. He wrote about day to day spirituality, and especially about death. He gave us the lines, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for the.” One of his most famous poems is “Death be not proud.”
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
In the movie Wit, Emma Thompson plays a John Donne scholar who argues that the punctuation in the last line is important. “Death” comma “though shalt die.” To Donne, formed by the Christian faith, death was but a pause, a moment in a journey that continues beyond death. Death was a humble thing, had no reason to be proud.
What does all this have to do with a sermon series on spirituality? John Donne took the vernacular of the everyday. He took the day to day life, and death, and rendered them poetry. “Spirituality” is hard to define, when you think of it. I think the Anglican divines like John Donne give us a clue. Those practices which help us to take there prose of our lives and render poetry. Those practices that help us make meaning and metaphor from the commonplace of our lives, those practices are our spirituality. Poetry takes the vernacular, everyday language, and renders art, full of mystery and meaning. Spirituality does the same with our day to day lives. So today we give thanks for John Donne, poet, priest, lawyer, and spiritual teacher.
