“Have mercy on me, a poet!” To many, the vocations of the poet and the monk seem incompatible. The young Thomas Merton, having had a taste of each, considered the former immanent, worldly, and vain, whereas the latter was “transcendent”, sacred, concerned with the “reality of God”. But there are many poets, even of a secular cast, whose ethos bears striking similarities to the ancient mystical practice of hesychia, or stillness. If these similarities are more than coincidental, why are there so few hesychast-poets? Could there be such a thing as a deliberate hesychastic poetics? If so, what would its praxis look like? If not, is that all the worse for poetry, or for monasticism?

The Resurrection of the Body

The Christian religion has at its center the Resurrection of the Christ, without which, St. Paul says, the faith is in vain, and through which we, too, are to rise. To what sort of life? It is not that of an abstracted, disembodied spirit, but that of an entire person, body and soul, whole again, and transfigured. In this sermon from his days as Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, preaching to a society drawn to materialism on the one hand and 'angelism' on the other, John Henry Newman meditates on Christ's invocation of the burning bush as a sign that we – our bodies included – "die but to appearance", a sign of the incarnate eternity that awaits us on the far side of the grave.

The Hook of Truth