Roosted faith

  

"Cathedrals," Anne Pierson Wiese says in "Everything but God," can be seen, can be noticed, rising above the townscapes of many European--and American--communities long before you make out anything, "roosted," she says, on the land, an odd word, suggesting hens. 

Everything but God
by Anne Pierson Wiese

In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible—stony
and roosted on the land—even before the towns
that surround them. 

Then again, in cities, like New York, where she grew up, she claims cathedrals sneak up on you, surrounded as they are by other outsized buildings. 

In New York you come
upon them with no warning, turn a corner
and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,
spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; 

And there are more, she says, then names them for readers who know their way around New York, and others, like me, who don't--

                                                                        dark
St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing
projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.

That cathedrals are notable, whether or not they rise above the landscape, is clear simply by her familiarity and references. Anne Pierson Wiese notices them anyway. Cathedrals aren't just any other monster building. In her mind and soul, cathedrals distinguish themselves even if and when they don't.  

By the time a second stanza begins in "Everything but God," I'm in, walking along with her. I love cathedrals. I could return to Rome in a heartbeat, cathedrals everywhere, spacious houses of heavenly worship so rich and evocative in silence that they make some museums feel like dime stores. 

She can't pass them by "lately," she says, in part because they're full of "anonymous wishes" that "waver and flame" with votive candles.

Lately I have found myself unable

to pass by. The candles' anonymous
wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright
numerous, transitory and eternal
as a migration: the birds that fly away
are never exactly the same as those that return.

Havens for doves, like one in Honduras we couldn't pass by.

The gray, flowering arches' ribs rise

until they fade, the bones so large and old
they belong to an undetected time
on earth. 

That, methinks, is as beautiful an image as there is in the poem, an image cathedral-worthy. She's right: cathedrals in all sizes and shapes, churches too, not just the magnificent cathedrals, but every place of worship documents faith that's forever present in the human condition, as real as sin, as redemptive as grace. Wherever humankind has roosts, a place of worship likewise roosts. 

"Here and there people's small backs/in prayer," she says. 

And then the difficult end of the poem, requiring the kind of contemplation cathedrals seem to elicit from most everyone I know.

                     the windowed saints' robes' orchid
glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal
snow from a sky below when we did not yet
exist, with our questions tender as burns.

Stained glass saints color the silent world within, ghosts, she says, of "a long nocturnal snow," a difficult phrase that suggests paradox (dark and light) of a "sky below," yet another suggestion of paradox.  But then, the grim necessity of faith seems forever paradoxical--to continue to believe when all else makes claims against belief, to beg attention from a God of love when the world suggests there's no reason to confess it's true. 

When I took the picture of that man praying, I was trespassing whatever grief or heartache he brought in, or the darkness of whatever sin he might have been confessing. That sense of violation is still in me--I'm embarrassed by the photograph. I caught him at his most vulnerable. I had or have no sense of what brought him, no recognition of his burden. I know nothing about whether or not he found whatever solitary grace he might have thought he could secure at the kneeling bench. 

I don't know anything about him, but I know--we all do--something of his heartache because human frailty empties us of spirit and makes us all reach for spirits more holy than anything we can possibly raise on our own. We all know emptiness we yearn to fill. We all have questions "tender as burns." We've all been he has. 

Yesterday--you may have heard her--a woman broke into tears when translating the words of President of Ukraine.  A professional, I'm sure, she was at a mike somewhere far away from wherever Zelensky was speaking, probably in no danger whatsoever, not close to that 40-mile line of armaments creeping up the highway to the nation's capital. 

But when she heard Zelensky's pleading, tears were rung from her heart. She isn't even Ukrainian. She's German. You could hear her on the kneeling bench.

What Anne Pierson Wiese suggests--no, what she claims--is a love for cathedrals that's almost instinctive, not for their embellishments, their richness of the images all around, but because they're as ancient as they are familiar to all of us, no matter what our system of belief. At one time or another, we've all been hunched over like the man in the picture I should not have taken. We've all been "small backs/in prayer."

"Everything but God" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City. © Louisiana State University Press, 2007.