Michael Centore“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?
Filed under Articles / Essays, Featured Essays · Tagged with aesthetics, art, catholicism, Christian poetry, contemplative life, Czeslaw Milosz, Desert Fathers, Diadochos of Photiki, Divine Name, Gerard Manley Hopkins, God, Herman Melville, hesychasm, iconography, imagination, Jesus Prayer, Joan Acocella, John Bryant, John Climacus, Joseph Brodsky, Kallistos Ware, Leonid Ouspensky, Lorenzo Scupoli, monasticism, monks, moral imagination, mysticism, Nikitas Stithatos, Olivier Clement, Orthodoxy, Patristics, phantasia, Philip Sherrard, Philokalia, pneumatology, poesis, poetry, Pope Francis, sacred art, Stanley Kunitz, Theophan the Recluse, Thomas Merton, Wordsworth
Bishoy Dawood
Many of us tend to look at prayer life as a mental thing: we praise, we thank, we confess to, and we confide in God – with words. And yet, while we think or pronounce our prayers, our bodies, too, are at work expressing and shaping our souls. In the Coptic tradition, liturgical postures and gestures involve the whole person, proclaiming and realizing the union of body and soul. It is in just this unity that God creates and saves the human person.
Filed under Featured Essays, Theology, Uncategorized · Tagged with Agpeya, asceticism, Body, body-soul unity, Coptic Christianity, corporeal prayer, dualism, Egypt, Freud, liturgy, Matta El-Meskeen, Matthew the Poor, mental prayer, monasticism, prostration, soul, tropology, typology
