That Small Moth, Oh Those Birds

Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950

Life just seems to bump along most of the time, sort of staying the same a lot. We get up in the morning, maybe too late, maybe too early, splash cold water on our faces, and step into another day. So often we don’t expect much will be new, as we rush forward, checking our to-do lists, checking our calendars. It can get pretty routine.

People can get depressed about life. It can seem boring, the same old, same old. The ancient monastics worried a lot about this. They called it acedia, the noonday demon, when, after getting up, eager to plunge into their morning practices of prayer and reading, they would be hit with that midday flatness, sometimes losing hope and purpose, feeling more disconnected than ever from the God they so much want to bring close. Some people think we may have entered an age of acedia.  

The twentieth-century poet John Berryman, in his “Dream Song 14,” sums up this spiritual flatness.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy   

(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   

means you have no

 Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that the way we view the world determines how susceptible we are to flatness. If we assume, as most moderns do, that the world is flat, all surface, no surprises, no other dimension, nothing extraordinary, then this boredom can easily seep into our daily lives.

I don’t buy this view of life. I suppose it could be a sign of growing older, but I’ve been consciously remembering, sometimes vividly, those moments along the way when the ordinary breaks into something extraordinary. The biblical prophets, consummate poets as they are, often talk about the world simply bursting into song.

Let the wilderness and the parched land be glad,
let the desert rejoice and burst into flower.
Let it flower with fields of asphodel,
let it rejoice and shout for joy. . . . Isaiah 35

C. S. Lewis felt, at any moment, out of nowhere, when we least expect it, we can be surprised by joy? That’s been my experience too.

Christian Wiman is a contemporary poet and writer I have followed for a long time. He is a Christian. He’s been inflicted for many years with a deadly form of cancer, always aware that death could be just around the corner. He knows suffering. And yet he’s written and edited, along with many other books, one of the most luminous books you will ever find. It’s called Joy: 100 Poems.

In the book, for example, you will find Sarah Lindsay’s “Small Moth”:

She's slicing ripe white peaches

into the Tony the Tiger bowl

and dropping slivers for the dog

poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall

when she spots it, camouflaged,

a glimmer and then full on—

happiness, plashing blunt soft wings

inside her as if it wants

to escape again.

This poem takes my breath away. I want to be this woman spotting the glimmer within things, “plashing” about, yearning to break free. So that I might find joy? Yes, if we look at the world this way, there’s no chance of being bored.

I listened to Christian Wiman this morning read his own poem “From a Window.” A huge flock of birds have landed on an old familiar tree out his window. Suddenly, as if hearing a call, in unison, they lift up from the tree with a “strange cohesion / beyond the limits of my vision.” They lift off “over the house heavenwards.” The poet is lifted out of himself too, out of the grieving that is his life, lifted into “some excess / of life” that fills him with unutterable joy.

With Christian Wiman I want to press my face close to the window pane. With Sarah Lindsay I want to watch expectantly for the plash of that small moth.

In these unexpected moments, we remember that God finds great joy in visiting us, giving us a glimpse of his luminous presence, if only for an instant, lavishly sharing his consummate joy.

I want to live this way, with eyes wide open for the unexpected, when God opens his world to show me the joy he wants eagerly to share.