Respect for the Holy

“There has been no greater loss to modern Western civilization than the loss of access to the sense of the numinous, the holy, which necessarily results from the loss of access to the inner worlds and [also results from] the exclusive concentration on the external, natural world” (Kathleen Raine, The Inner Journey of the Poet, p. 142).

     After finding its way onto one of my bookshelves almost five years ago, this treasure from Kathleen Raine somehow about a week ago found its way into my hands. Perhaps the time lapse was because readiness to take it in took awhile to develop. During the reading, the text has been resonating, radiating through to the heart, and generating almost as much heat as the hundred-degree temperatures outside. 

     Raine’s work features the reclaiming of the tossed-out holy land. Her expertise on Yeats and Blake provides the scaffolding for building an increased consciousness that might be strong enough to struggle through today’s dominant culture which neglects the holy resulting in the Waste Land. Raine references the harsh portrayal in T.S. Eliot's poem and contrasts its dystopian view with works and vision of selected poets and artists. 

     She elaborates the foundation offered in the art of Blake and Yeats especially through interweaving with works by David Jones’ (Anathemata and Parenthesis), the art of Cecil Collins, and poetry, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Edwin Muir. This structure affirms the unique selfhood of each person, individually bearing the mark of the divine, and still integrating with nature and with tradition. 

“There is a curious convergence between Hopkins and Blake, both of whom opposed to the materialist view of nature the more ancient—and also more modern—view of each creature as an unique and distinct impulse of life; ‘their habitations/And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joys’—as Blake says” (p. 109).

The divine mark, the implanted image finds vital nurturance through the imagination. Considering the work of Cecil Collins, Raine asserts that the world of Imagination is 

“not imaginary—on the contrary, since the world of Imagination is the supremely, specifically human universe, the ‘kingdom’ proper and peculiar to humankind, which we alone inhabit, it is the most real of all worlds. The human world is above all an invisible world of thoughts, feelings and imaginings, experienced not by the body but by the soul. That world does not belong to nature, nor can it be known or measured in natural terms, being of another order, differing from the natural order not in degree but in kind. The inner kingdom has laws of its own, forms of its own, communicated only through the reflected images of painting, music and poetry. . . It is of the very nature of human art to make perceptible the invisible world of the Imagination…the expression of that inner order, of the structures, the energies, the living presences within the psyche” (Kathleen Raine, The Inner Journey of the Poet, p. 137).

     While the gift from the Source resides in each individual, access to it is not automatic. The structure needed for nurturing imagination includes developing intimate relationships among nature, knowledge, and love. The dominant culture of today (certainly in my experience) highlights the scientific, the rational, and the material. My academic program and professional survival depended (at least to the .01 level of significance) on learning quantitative statistics and empirical research. How in the world can we expect any less dedication and rigor if we wish for capacity in spiritual regions, in soul space, in heart land?

     My plans are to explore possible ways for such development in coming days.