Loving What You Really See

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

Only he who sees takes off his shoes. This line has turned over and over in my mind since reading it last week. I am a bit of an apologist for the message that, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.” One of the Faus family rules is that you are not allowed to say “ew” or “I don’t like that” about anything God has made. We aim to love what God loves, and when we don’t, we begin with acknowledging that we are disordered and in need of being transformed. Beginning with me and the heebie jeebies I recently felt while watching documentary footage of a serpentine eel slithering up, out of the ocean, and across rocks to snatch a crab for dinner. God made it, I like it. God made it, I like it. Ahem. Getting the intellectual statement right is easy. Like a catechism, our family has that much memorized. But it is that second part: to see. To see and be in awe. To take off our shoes and worship. That part is much more challenging. And it is also that second part, of having a deep enough encounter with an object to really see it, that is connected to the topic of poetic knowledge.

Like a good classicist, James Taylor’s first chapter initiates us into this new world of poetic knowledge by giving us some definitions as we try to find our bearings. Aware that our minds will jump to thinking of poetry as a written art form he begins, “Poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience of reality.” So today we will take the time to ponder these two concepts, sensory and emotional. 

Taylor’s use of the word sensory immediately points to the significance of our five senses. To know something you have to, at a minimum, begin by hearing it (or about it), seeing it, tasting it, touching it, or smelling it. This is how human beings encounter reality: we bite the apple, smell the newborn’s head, and see the sun coming up over the hills. A toddler squishes the dough and licks the dirt and smells the roses. Now, as will be progressively clearer as we go on, this is in no way limiting knowing to a materialist sense. Reading (seeing) words on a page or hearing someone talk in conversation can be just as poetic as our more physically-involved experiences of the world. But this part of our definition also compels us to avoid minimizing the importance of the material world and our bodies' participation in it. There is a very real sense in which we cannot know that the Lord is good without having tasted and seen.¹ One of the most troubling aspects of modernity is the way technology is putting distance between humanity and embodied experience. But even insomuch as a person is experiencing life through their senses, our definition reminds us that a sensuous encounter is just the beginning of what we are aiming for. Essential to poetic knowledge is the presence of our heart and a proper emotional response to what we are seeing. 

People have a physical encounter with reality everyday (thank God, we can’t totally avoid it!), but like Elizabeth Barret Browning lamented in our poem, instead of having eyes to see and worship, 

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, 
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.

Put more simply, everything seems like an endless cycle of sameness when you encounter life as one long, superficial yawn. When I was 12 years old I stood in the Sistine Chapel. “How pretty,” I thought. “When’s lunch?” Weighed down by my untrained eyes and malformed affections, my soul was unable to ascend in the presence of transcendent beauty. To understand the necessity of emotions in poetic knowledge, we need to begin with the classical understanding that there are right and wrong ways to feel about God, our neighbor, the world, and everything in it. In his book Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Poetry aims at producing something more like vision than it is like action. But vision, in this sense, includes passions. Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.” He later continues, “In poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health- the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world.” Lewis is talking about poetic writings, but I think it is safe to connect his principle to poetic knowledge broadly speaking. Many well-meaning Christians will say things like “Love is an action,” and minimize the place of our emotions in obedience to God. This is an understandable counter to a culture that has made an idol of personal feelings and constantly beckons us to bow down at the altar of following your heart. But while Christians absolutely must rule their feelings, historically this was understood as getting them in order, not ignoring them. Just sentiments (right feeling) are essential to true knowledge. Our emotions give us real information about the state of our hearts, and that includes our emotional (or lack of emotional) responses to the world around us. If you do not see something properly, and in that sight feel correctly about it, you do not properly know it. 

This is the point where we take a giant departure from modern man’s idea of knowing. While there are still people who believe in the value of  “hands on learning” in progressive education today, the idea that knowledge must transcend mere memorization of facts, that Reality exists and is owed certain responses from us, is utterly foreign to the way the average modern thinks. Nonetheless, this cosmic piety has been central to the Christian understanding of the world from the beginning and we ought not settle for a vision of spiritual health that is anything less than a human being capable of deep responsiveness as they worship God, love man, delight in creation, and hate evil. This is the monumental task before us as wives and mothers: we are the nurturers of an atmosphere, the shapers of habits, and the presenters of living ideas that will either help or hinder the members of our family in this process. We must be thoughtful and purposeful as we seek to order ourselves and our homes in a way that reflects the mind and heart of God.

As C. S. Lewis warns, “The elementary rectitude of human response… so far from being ‘given’ is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues, and our pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species. For though the human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye) the laws of causation are. When poisons become fashionable they do not cease to kill.”² Transhumanism (you do not need to be limited by your body, time, or space to live) and relativism (there is no objectively right or wrong way to feel about anything) are two of the most popular poisons we are up against. As we consider what this all means, we can cling to hope that the antidote to this poison is in being Real Humans worshiping a Real God in Real Communities in a Real World. We mothers can fight the forces of darkness on the home front by singing psalms, forming nature groups, and reading fairy tales aloud. For as Lewis says in Abolition of Man, “We may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.” And what is sanity? “Loving what we really see.”³

1. Psalm 34:8

2. C.S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost

3. John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture