Anecdote of a Jar

“Genuine poetry can communicate

before it is understood.” 

 T. S. Eliot

It was not until college that I discovered the poetry of Wallace Steven and afterward I wondered why it took me so long to find him. Regardless, I learned of him and was hooked. Why? Because the ‘innerland’ he projects was mine, and, in his poems I saw reflections of my pre-salvation moral relativism. And I, like Stevens, had actually convinced myself that the chaos of relativism was preferable to order.

Recently I was talking with a young man who was struggling with an epistemological crisis. He had encountered the “evil scientist” argument or some version thereof, and he was deeply troubled. (You know the thinking. It goes something like this: Q: How do you know you weren’t created a few moments ago by an evil scientist who implanted memories in your head of a past? A: You can’t. Therefore, in a similar way, it is impossible for you to “know” anything.) The logical problem in this argument, of course, is that the implied requirement of ‘knowing’ is beyond the attainment of any mortal and ignores the realities of discerning between reasonable and unreasonable ‘knowings’. Regardless, the young man was struggling, and as I listened, I realized that he was afloat in a sea of moral relativism. Without belief in an absolute truth, he was being flung from ethical stance to ethical stance, teetering between hedonistic pragmatism and the despair of nihilism.

As I thought about our conversation, I was reminded of Stevens’ Anecdote of a Jar. It’s a short poem:

 I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Steven’s jar represents order brought into chaos from outside a present system. But ‘system’, in this case, is probably not the best word to use. For Stevens, nature is a wilderness, untamed and surprising. It is a not a system, but a non-system. And Stevens, using words such as ‘gray’ and ‘bare’, makes clear his disdain for the jar. The jar takes ‘dominion’ and crushes the life of the wilderness, ‘not giving’ either flora or fauna.

As a believer, I agree with Stevens and also, in some ways, disagree. I agree that the placement of an absolute from without can bring order. In that I agree. But I disagree with him if he is positing that an absolute placed must always crush life. I also disagree with him that an untamed wilderness is necessarily better than a tamed one.

For me, it boils down to the first word of the poem – “I”. Stevens said he is the one who placed the jar. Thus it does not surprise me that the order it brings is ultimately crushing and deadly. Man-made, man-placed absolutes are crushing. If Stevens places a man-made jar, and if he is the one who placed, I am not surprised it robbed the wilderness of spontaneity and life.

But, imagine, for a moment, that God was the One who placed the jar, not Stevens. Imagine that God Himself placed a Vessel in the midst of man’s spiritual wilderness, a Vessel that established an Absolute immoveable and sublime, One that gave Life as it gave Order. Would such a Vessel be detestable? No. It would be laudable, desirable – indeed, it would prove to be the Desire of all.

God the Father, of course, has done precisely this in the giving of His Son, Jesus, the Christ. And in that pivotal historic event – the Crucifixion, Burial, and Resurrection – He placed eternal order in humanity’s wilderness of relativism. He placed the Cross on Calvary and established order and life.

I know this has taken a philosophical turn today, but I believe it is important. The great apologetic reality, the one which defeats all moral relativism and epistemological uncertainty, is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That He lives, and that there is evidence sufficient to convince any sincere investigator beyond a reasonable doubt of that life, is the great historic reality that witnesses eternally to Him Who is the Great Epistemological Reality, the One upon whom we can build our lives. And He is a good and life-giving foundation that will never be shaken.

What do you think?

“and the rain descended, the floods came,

 and the winds blew and beat on that house;

and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock”

Matthew 7:25

-- Christian Pilet

Lumps in Faeryland

Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist,

but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

G. K. Chesterton

Nicole and I have been attending Geneva Library’s adult book club once a month, and one of the books to be discussed this month is Michael Gruber’s The Witch’s Boy. It is a marvelous book, and this is the second reading of it for both Nicole and me.

In one scene of that book, the protagonist, a young man named Lump, and his mother travel through Faeryland and are confronted with a dance by the Faery Folk. Lump’s mother, experienced in these matters, warns her son to take precautions against hearing the music or seeing the dance. She says, “Now, as for you, you must not on any account see it. Go now into the wagon, and on my shelf of simples you will find a red clay jar, and in it you will find soft beeswax. Use bits of it to stop up your ears.”

Lump answers, “But why? Why must I not see the dance nor hear the music of the fay?”

And she explains, “Oh, child,… should you but once see this dance, no sight of common earth would ever again give you pleasure – not the face of a beloved, nor that of your own dear child, but you would lust after a lost perfection. And as for the music: once in a rare while a person of the common earth hears, as from a great distance, the horns of Faery, and then they run mad or become great poets or both together. To hear them at this slight remove and so clear would be the end of you, from the pure deadly joy of it.”

Now, it’s the nature of such things, in our fallen world and in this version of Faeryland, that protagonists are susceptible to temptation. Lump scurries into the wagon and stops his ears and sits on his cot. But as he sits there, the thought of being denied even one look at the dance grows intolerable to him. And he creeps to the front of the wagon and pulls aside the leather curtain that separates the cabin from the driving seat. And…

 “He saw the fay dancing. Their wings were spread wide as they trod a measure in the air. As he was not a great musician, he was never able to describe what he saw, for no human words can comprehend that concentrated essence of loveliness – beauty as terrible as a bomb. All we know of beauty on earth is but its muddy shadow; music alone can remind us of its glory. And his heart twisted in his bosom, and he fell back in a faint, as if shot by a poisoned arrow.”

The tale continues, and Lump and his mother return to the ‘real’ world. But the vision of the Faeries’ dance and music lingers in Lump. He is unable to shake away the memories, and all earthly joys are now tainted by the inevitable comparisons he makes to the real joys of Faeryland. Dissatisfaction is now Lump’s constant companion.

Gruber’s book is not meant to be an allegory of the Christian life, but I see reflected in this story vivid realities we Christians experience.

The temptation Lump encounters is reminiscent of the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed and to which you and I have fallen prey. A clear command is issued, a command given for the well-being of the one receiving it, but the urge to transgress its boundaries and sample some forbidden ‘delights’ proves overwhelming, and the command is disobeyed. Lump gave in, and, similarly, Adam and Eve did, and we did also. This transgression occasions a penalty, the natural outgrowth of the violation. This is what the Bible refers to as “the wages.” For Adam, Eve, you and me, this meant death, both spiritual and physical.

In the story, Lump is forced out of Faeryland and must return to a world that proves, at best, a sad shadow of what he had glimpsed. In a similar way, Adam and Eve were forced from Eden into a fallen world, a world characterized by struggles and sufferings, a mere shadow of the ‘good’ world which God had created.

But there is more. The inner ache Lump experiences is similar to the ache we humans experience from birth. Our consciences bear witness from infancy that there is more to this life than we see. We sense that we were created for greater, nobler things, and we experience an inner frustration as we realize that, even at its best, this life’s joys are incomplete and temporal.

Now, I’m not trying to posit a one-to-one correlation, so, I’ll go ahead and mix the metaphor.

There is another way to think of this picture. When we first came to Christ, we received a glimpse of glory. We were given a foretaste of ‘glory divine.’ It’s as if we had a chance, for just a moment, to watch the heavenly dance. And then, immediately, we were forced to reckon with the reality that we were not in heaven yet, dancing in the dance, but were still consigned physically to a fallen world. We had glimpsed the heavenly and returned to the earthly. We became aware that our citizenship had transferred from the latter to the former, but we were compelled to wait for the moment of physical relocation.

And how hard that was! When we came to Christ, we realized the reality of Paul’s words, that to depart and be with Christ is far better than to live on in the flesh. But, of course, we recognized also that God had a purpose for us here, and so we determined to please Him by pressing on in the flesh. And, accordingly, we look forward eagerly to the day when He will call us home. And, in this, we have become like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, dwelling as in a foreign country, waiting for the city which has foundations, “whose builder and maker is God.” As we look forward to our inheritance in heaven, we affirm that we are strangers and pilgrims on the earth, a people who desire a better, heavenly country.

These thoughts have been helpful to me as I have tried to understand the constant ache of my heart, that ‘almost, but not yet’ desire that lurks deep within me. That ache is my spirit’s craving to realize full reconciliation with its Creator, spiritually and physically. It is my spirit’s desire to join fully in the heavenly dance. It is my spirit’s yearning to be transformed from a lump of clay into a vessel for honor.

What literary tales speak to your spiritual realities?