LOOK: the heavens wept with me by Caitlin Connolly
Caitlin Connolly (American, 1986–), the heavens wept with me, 2018. Oil on canvas.
LISTEN: “A Dream / On Another’s Sorrow”| Words by William Blake, from Songs of Innocence, 1789, adapt. | Music by David Benjamin Blower, on Innocence & Experience, 2022
Once a dream did weave a shade O’er my Angel-guarded bed, That an Emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, ’wildered, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangled spray, All heart-broke I heard her say:
“O my children! do they cry? Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see: Now return and weep for me.”
Pitying, I dropped a tear; But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied: “What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night?
“I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle’s hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home.”
*
Can I see another’s woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief, And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow’s share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!
And can They who smile on all Hear the wren with sorrows small, Hear the small bird’s grief and care, Hear the woes that infants bear,
And not sit beside the nest, Pouring pity in their breast; And not sit the cradle near, Weeping tear on infant’s tear;
And not sit both night and day, Wiping all our tears away? O no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!
They do give Their joy to all; They become an infant small; They become a one of woe; They do feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by; Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near.
The lyrics of this song comprise two poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence: “A Dream” and “On Another’s Sorrow.”
In “A Dream,” the poetic speaker dreams about a lost ant (an emmet) who is trying to find her way back to her children and husband. The speaker is moved by the ant’s distress and weeps for her. But then a glowworm (“the watchman of the night,” as he’s lit like a lantern) graciously intervenes, telling the ant to listen to the sound of the beetle walking and to follow that sound home while he lights the way.
“Told from a trusting, childlike perspective, the poem”—a fable—“suggests that those who ask for help will get it: the world is a naturally compassionate place, and guidance and protection are always at hand, even in difficult times.” (LitCharts)
Aren’t we all “little wanderers”? Many of us troubled, bewildered, lonely, and worn by our seeking and striving?
There is empathy for us not only from fellow travelers but also from the Divine.
“On Another’s Sorrow” is about how God lovingly enters into our woes through the Incarnation. He becomes a participant in the project of being human, experiencing firsthand the many trials, hurts, and vulnerabilities that come with the territory.
In the first three stanzas, the speaker expresses how keenly he feels the sorrows of others. In the fourth stanza, he reflects on how God does the same—only God is perfectly present to all, weeping with those who weep, sighing with those who sigh. Having “become an infant small,” the Creator has demonstrated solidarity with his creation. It is a comfort to know that God is so intimately acquainted with the griefs that afflict us and is keen to companion us through them.
In his creative visioning, British singer-songwriter David Benjamin Blower brought together Blake’s “A Dream” and “On Another’s Sorrow” with a single, spare musical setting, linking the two poems with an instrumental interlude but keeping the same tune throughout. The first poem is about the feeling of weariness or lostness; the second, grief. Both have to do with compassion—we owe it to one another and often receive it from others, and it is always available to us in Christ, who is God brought near.
In “On Another’s Sorrow,” Blower changed the pronouns for God in the fourth and seventh stanzas from “He/His” to “They/Their,” since God is neither male nor female. He also omitted the final stanza in Blake’s original:
O! He gives to us His joy That our grief He may destroy: Till our grief is fled and gone, He doth sit by us and moan.
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
Fernando Peña Defilló (Dominican, 1928–2016), La ofrenda (The Offering), 1993. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 126 × 166 cm. Private collection. Source: Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. Edward J. Sullivan (Phaidon, 1996), p. 110.
May those whose hell it is To hate and hurt Be turned into lovers Bringing flowers.
—Shantideva, eighth century
These lines are from chapter 10, stanza 9, of the Bodhicharyavatara (Way of the Bodhisattva), a Mahayana Buddhist text by the eighth-century Indian monk Shantideva. I first encountered this religious classic, originally written in Sanskrit, while working at Shambhala Publications. The excerpt above was adapted by author David Richo from a translation by the Padmakara Translation Group. Here’s 10.9 in full, as translated by PTG:
May the hail of lava, fiery stones, and weapons Henceforth become a rain of blossom. May those whose hell it is to fight and wound Be turned to lovers offering their flowers. [source]
Other translations include those by Stephen Batchelor—
May the rains of lava, blazing stones, and weapons From now on become a rain of flowers, And may all battling with weapons From now on be a playful exchange of flowers. [source]
—and Fedor Stracke:
May the rain of leafs, embers, and weapons Become forthwith a rain of flowers. May those cutting each other with knives Forthwith throw flowers for fun. [source]
I am so struck by this short benediction that prays our hate be transformed into love, our hardness into softness, our cold, sterile weaponry into delicately petaled, fragrant blooms. Shantideva recognized that when we lash out in physical or verbal violence, we create a hell that’s all our own. We may intend to inflict suffering on another, but in doing so, we often wound ourselves—psychologically, spiritually. When we dehumanize others, we become less human.
Instead of hurling rocks, punches, bullets, or insults, what if we were to completely confound our enemies by offering them words or tokens of love? Love is the way of the bodhisattva, the “enlightened being.” It’s the way of Jesus—he who said, “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27–28).
Loving people doesn’t mean we can’t be angry at them—but we cannot allow our anger to fester into bitterness and ill will or to explode in harmful outbursts. It should be a productive anger.
How might we use an ethic of love to direct our anger or somebody else’s toward a good end, to defuse a contentious situation? Not taking the easy way out by simply ignoring or retreating from a problem, but confronting our opponent in peaceful, creative, and potentially transformative ways?
I’m reminded of the historic Pulitzer Prize–nominated photograph Flower Power, taken by Washington Star photojournalist Bernie Boston on October 21, 1967, when he was covering an antiwar march on the Pentagon. As the 503rd Military Police Battalion formed a semicircle around demonstrators to prevent them from climbing the Pentagon steps, Boston captured eighteen-year-old George Edgerly Harris III, aka Hibiscus, placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by one of the soldiers. What a powerful image!
Bernie Boston (American, 1933–2008), Flower Power, Arlington, Virginia, 1967
Two years earlier in his essay “How to Make a March/Spectacle,” Allen Ginsberg was the first to expound on the potency of flowers as a spectacle to simultaneously disarm opponents and influence thought. He said “masses of flowers” should be handed out on the front lines of protests to police, the press, and onlookers as a symbol of nonviolent advocacy. He also suggested candy bars and toys.
Artist Scott Erickson seems to have drawn on Boston’s Flower Power photograph in his visual interpretation of Isaiah 2:4, Swords into Plowshares, which shows a sprig of foliage growing out of the barrel of a pistol, oriented upward like a vase. Its deadly power mocked and reversed, the gun releases a benign projectile that attracts and nourishes rather than strikes fear.
The evocative Bible verse on which this painting is based prophesies a day when all the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”—a poetic way of describing the cessation of violence, as tools of destruction are transformed into gardening tools.
Christian activist Shane Claiborne has been instrumental in helping me see the immense beauty of Isaiah’s visions of the eschaton—he has worked with RAWtools to decommission firearms and literally forge them into shovels, spades, and other life-giving implements!—along with the holy foolishness of the gospel and all that implies. Before becoming a leader of the new monasticism movement, Claiborne went to circus school, and he has often put that training to use on the streets of Philadelphia where he lives. In his first book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (2006), he writes,
Whenever there is a fight on our block, my first instinct is to run inside and grab our torches and begin juggling them, to upstage the drama of violent conflicts in our neighborhood. Perhaps the kids will lose interest in the noise of a good fight and move toward the other end of the block to watch the circus. I truly believe we can overwhelm the darkness of this world by shining something brighter and more beautiful. (285)
He has also written about Jesus’s “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem as a theatrical parody of power: he rode in on a dinky donkey instead of a warhorse, showing a much different alternative to the military might of empires. (“Imagine the president riding a unicycle in the Fourth of July parade”! Jesus for President, p. 122) And then on the cross, Jesus made a spectacle of human violence. In exchange for taunts and blows, he gave forgiveness, a metaphorical bouquet.
The UK-based street artist Banksy draws on the association of flowers with love and peace and their playful ability to disrupt violence in his mural Rage, Flower Thrower, which debuted on the West Bank wall in Israel-Palestine. Nathan Mladin, a researcher for Theos think tank, wrote about this artwork for the Visual Commentary on Scripture’s Logics of Reversals exhibition:
With a balaclava drawn over his face, the young protester is shown leaning back, as though braced to hurl a Molotov cocktail. But instead of a weapon, he wields a flower bouquet, the only coloured element in this otherwise monochrome work. We expect an act of aggression—all other elements of the mural suggest imminent violence—but instead we are offered a call to peace. . . . Theologically construed, the mural hints at the eschatological terminus of violence.
The absurd juxtaposition of flowers and violence is employed too by Lithuanian artist Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė, who embroiders floral patterns onto antique soldiers’ helmets sourced from various countries, and Natalie Baxter of Lexington, Kentucky, whose Warm Gun series comprises over one hundred quilted stuffed guns, “droopy caricatures of assault weapons,” she says, “bringing ‘macho’ objects into a traditionally feminine sphere and questioning their potency.”
Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė (Lituanian, 1977–), from the series Kill(ed) for Peace, 2016. Antique soldier’s helmet, cotton, cross-stitch embroidery, drilling, and industrial needle punching, 30 × 22 × 21 cm. Private collection, Latvia.Natalie Baxter (American, 1985–), Rose to the Occasion, from the Warm Gun series, 2016. Fabric and polyfill, 15 × 42 × 3 in.
Another artistic example of overcoming brutality with gentleness can be found in the climactic battle sequence from Disney’s animated classic Sleeping Beauty (1959). As Prince Phillip escapes from Maleficent’s dungeon with the aid of the three good fairies, Maleficent’s goons shoot arrows at him—but Flora transforms them by magic into flowers, which fall innocuously about his booted feet. (The animation is by Dan McManus.)
Flora’s other enchantments include turning launched boulders into soap bubbles and a curtain of boiling water, tipped from a cauldron over a doorway, into a rainbow. Each of these deflective maneuvers involves the transformation of something threatening into something whimsical. While they do not ultimately deter the villain from her murderous rampage, and alas, Phillip conquers evil with a sword (albeit the Sword of Truth—there’s metaphor at play here), Flora’s few creative interventions at the outset of the battle assert an attractive counterethic that we would do well to embrace.
I need the dreams of Isaiah and the prayers of Shantideva, I need the ridiculous street theater of Hibiscus and Shane Claiborne and the activist blacksmithing of RAWtools, I need Banksy’s murals in zones of conflict and other subversive art, I need fairy tales from writers and animation studios, to help me relinquish my hate and imagine wholesome new ways of engaging my enemies. Most of all, I need Christ’s vibrant, upending gospel embedded more deeply in my heart, and the Holy Spirit—renewer, transformer—to melt the disdain and loathing I feel for certain figures in the current US political landscape and reshape it into loving regard.
While I do not have an urge to enact physical violence on anyone, I often seethe and think unkindly thoughts toward those I deem morally odious. Sometimes I pray they get what’s coming to them. But then I am convicted by that un-Christlike posture. I crave the eyes and mind of Christ, who sees everyone as redeemable and worthy of love, bearers of the divine image, and who moves toward them with open arms instead of clenched fists.
“May those whose hell it is to hate and hurt be turned into lovers bringing flowers.”
I pray this, sincerely, for others (I have a few particular names in mind), and also for myself.
The song “Compassionate and Wise,” which appears on an album of the same name recorded by Father Cyprian Consiglio in 2006, represents a cross-pollination of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
An earlier version, simply called “Dedication of Merit,” was first sung at a Buddhist-Christian conference at a Benedictine convent in Indiana the week after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The Rev. Dr. Heng Sure, an American Chan Buddhist monk, was asked to offer a dedication of merit (similar to what Christians would call an intercessory prayer, though it’s phrased more like a benediction). For this he and a colleague translated a passage from the Mettā Sutta, the Buddha’s discourse on developing and sustaining loving-kindness. Their translation reads:
May every living being, Our minds as one and radiant with light, Share the fruits of peace With hearts of goodness, luminous and bright.
If people hear and see How hands and hearts can find in giving, unity, May their minds awake, To Great Compassion, wisdom, and to joy.
May kindness find reward; May all who sorrow leave their grief and pain; May this boundless light Break the darkness of their endless night.
Because our hearts are one, This world of pain turns into paradise. May all become compassionate and wise, May all become compassionate and wise.
In reciting the dedication, Sure spontaneously matched it with a melody by Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt, which she had written in 1994 for the song “Dark Night of the Soul,” a setting of verse by the sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. Conference attendees, their hearts full of grief over the falling of the Twin Towers, joined in singing, lifting up their collective longing for light to break through the darkness.
A few years later at a different Buddhist-Christian gathering, Sure met Father Cyprian Consiglio, a Camaldolese Benedictine monk, author, and musician from California. He shared the song with him, struck by its similarity to some of the prayers Consiglio had offered that week.
With the blessing of Sure and McKennitt, Consiglio and his regular collaborator John Pennington, a percussionist, recorded a new arrangement of the song in 2006 under the title “Compassionate and Wise.” Here they are performing it with friends on June 28, 2018, at the “Arise, My Love” concert in Santa Cruz to raise money for New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, where Consiglio has been the prior since 2013:
(The song starts at 2:43, following Consiglio’s spoken introduction.)
Their version has slight lyrical alterations and opens with two Sanskrit chants that Consiglio learned from the monks and nuns at Saccidananda Ashram (nicknamed Shantivanam, “Forest of Peace”), a Camaldolese Benedictine monastery in Tannirpalli, South India. The first chant, which is from the Rig Veda but also appears in the Yajur Veda, is known as the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra (Great Mantra for Conquering Death). The second is a svasti pāṭhaḥ, an invocation for the welfare of all.
The following Sanskrit and its English translation were provided to me by Consiglio:
We worship the true God who is the Supreme Being Who is fragrant and nourishes all beings May he liberate us from death for the sake of immortality Like a cucumber is severed from its bondage to the creeper
May all be happy May all be free from disease May all realize what is good May none be in misery May the nonvirtuous be virtuous May the virtuous attain tranquility May the tranquil be freed from the bonds of death May the freed make others free Peace, peace, peace
And here is the sung English that follows:
May every living being, Our minds as one and radiant with light, Share the fruits of peace, Our hearts of goodness luminous and bright.
If people hear and see, Our hands and hearts can find, in giving, unity. May their minds awake To Great Compassion, wisdom, and to joy.
May goodness find reward; May all who sorrow leave their grief and pain; May this boundless light Dispel the darkness of their endless night.
Because our hearts are one, This world of pain turns into paradise. May all become compassionate and wise, May all become compassionate and wise.
This song is full of interfaith exchanges. A melody written to set the text of a Carmelite Christian friar was adapted to fit a Buddhist dedication of merit and is introduced by a Benedictine Christian monk with a passage from the Hindu scriptures! For more information on the song’s history, see urbandharma.org.
Explaining the significance of a dedication of merit (and metta practice) to his Christian readers, Consiglio writes on the hermitage blog, “We can dedicate whatever closeness to God we have to the good of someone else.” I myself wouldn’t use the phrase “dedication of merit” or its derivatives to describe what I’m doing when I intercede to God for others, but I see what Consiglio means, and I think it’s this: “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective” (James 5:16). Through Christ, God hears our prayers, and it is our duty in prayer to think more widely than just our own needs or the needs of those in our immediate circles—though that can be a good starting point. As the apostle Paul says, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone” (1 Tim. 2:1, emphasis mine).
What if our prayers extended to enfold all living beings? I was always taught to avoid genericisms in prayer, and while there is value in direct naming, there is also a beauty to those kinds of broad prayers often heard on the lips of children—for “the whole world,” for “peace everywhere.”
Perhaps you are uncomfortable by the lack of doctrinal specificity in “Compassionate and Wise,” or by what you might call “syncretism” (the mixing of belief systems). But as Consiglio says, there is nothing in the song that contradicts Christianity. The song arose out of an interreligious context, so it’s meant to invite the participation of people of various faith backgrounds.
“Because our hearts are one” refers to a unity of intention or desire. The singers may not be united in theological particulars, nor even around the deity they’re addressing, but they are one in their wish for universal well-being, for liberation from the bonds of death and a walking together in friendship across boundaries of difference.
Art & Theology 