“Exploration into God”
[Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872-1958), Towards the Unknown Region (1907) & A Sea Symphony (1910); each is an orchestral/choral setting of text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (“Darest Thou Now O Soul” & “Passage to India,”resp.).]
[Christopher Fry (1907-2005), A Sleep of Prisoners (poetic play).]
O Lover,
Amid the intimations of You that I bump into from time to time, those variously involving music and/or poetry are probably foremost. Thus a very important part of my life as a spiritual being is when I am nurtured by score and text in artful collaboration. While one of my favorite musical genera is the liturgical (e.g., choral symphonies, masses, requiems), I am equally moved by other such partnerships (inadequately) dubbed “secular.”
In this post I am particularly focusing on several collaborations which point me through and beyond every “this or that” to Your Grunt /Depth/Abyss transcending any paradigm. I cite here two artists, both 20th C Englishmen, whose choral/poetic offerings have thus impacted me. The first is Ralph Vaughan Williams (RVW) yoked with muse Walt Whitman of whom I offer a pair of nautical examples. The “Towards the Unknown Region” text which RVW set begins with these words: “Darest thou now O soul, / Walk out with me toward the unknown region, / Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow? / No map there, nor guide, / Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, / Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land. / I know it not O soul, / Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us, / All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.”
A second RVW example is his A Sea Symphony which concludes with these words from Whitman’s Passage to India: “Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me; / For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go. / And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. / O my brave soul! / O farther, farther sail! / O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God? / O farther, farther, farther sail!”
More recently I have come upon a second English cross-artist, Christopher Fry, and his 1951 poetic play entitled A Sleep of Prisoners. This work includes the following astonishingly prescient and pithy lines: “Thank God our time is now / When wrong comes up to face us everywhere / Never to leave us till we take / The longest stride of soul we ever took. / Affairs are now soul size. / The enterprise is exploration into God.”
While I do not pretend to divine what all the unorthodox RVW and Whitman, or the Quaker Fry, meant in their interdisciplinary forays of the previous century, what the efforts of all three immediately seized upon within me was the journey, the last and the greatest, into You, O Lover, the voyage into “the seas of God.” As I write this sentence the image of the exploratory trek into You, O Lover, reminds fresh and vital. And especially with RVW, that seemingly undeniable impulse is both powerfully borne along, and transformed by, music.
Much has changed since the first half of the previous century: the “farther, farther, farther” has become increasingly incarnational and thus ubiquitous; the “out there” is morphing into “everywhere”; the very metaphor of distance has been chastened by nondualism. At the same time, in many settings religiosity has been increasingly dogmatized and ideologized rather than as rooted in humans’ most incontrovertible thirst. However, despite the separation implicit in images such as “the seas of God,” the region “unknown” and “inaccessible,” and the “exploration into God,” all are seemingly being absorbed by You into an indistinctiónis which 13th C Hadewijch of Brabant called Your “Totality.”
Thus gently goaded by the years, the urgency of the planet’s protracted crisis, and the freshet of mystical resurgence, I continue to seek to take “the longest stride of soul,” the last and inexhaustible frontier which is You, O Incarnator of all having being. Employing the active mode as does Fry: “The enterprise is exploration into [You].”
