A Sabbath Meditation

I’ve grown old without ever meaning to. The years have slipped by, and now in this new passage of life, companionship has become precious. Perhaps I’m brought to these thoughts because an old friend recently died, a companion from childhood. At his graveside service, I read and reflected on Psalm 23.  The middle lines of the psalm can be read as a prayer as much as an affirmation:

Even if I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,
for you walk with me; your crook and staff comfort me.

These are lines of old age, the psalmist seeking, no, claiming the companionship of the good shepherd as he takes his last steps. 

Companionship can be found in many places. Recently at a used bookstore I happened on Second Space, the last book of the late, Nobel prize-winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz. The slender volume contains poems written in his nineties, translated from the Polish by Milosz himself and Robert Hass. It appeared in English in the year of his death, 2004. 

I have a shorthand way of evaluating poetry I happen upon in bookstores: I read three poems: the first poem, the last poem, and the poem for which the book is named. For Second Space, the first poem is the poem for which the book is named, so I paid it careful attention. As I read, the companionable voice of the poet pulled me in.

The poem, “Second Space,” is a fetching, ironic disquisition on what we have lost in contemporary culture, focused on the concepts of heaven and hell, though I’m sure he has in mind much more. Milosz, a deeply religious skeptic, is not proposing that heaven and hell in their medieval glory be brought back, but that nevertheless he laments their loss:

Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.

Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.

Perhaps that “second space” is not just heaven and hell but enchantment itself—a world filled with wonder, a world of second chances.

As I moved on to the next poem and to the next, it was as if I had gone for a walk with a companion my age or—in the case of Milosz—older then me, whose conversation is deep and wide and gently humorous, always wise, always insightful, always enjoyable. You don’t know quite what he will say next. In “Late Ripeness,” he talks about the surprise of new insights suddenly opening up to him in old age:

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

Insight is not the exclusive province of the young. New things come to us late. One that occurred to Milosz is that the division we mark between the living and the dead takes is less important that we think.  

I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

What once seemed certain to Milosz seems less so:

The priests taught us about salvation and damnation.
Now I have not the slightest notion of these things.

Having felt the touch of the divine:

I have felt on my shoulder the hand of my Guide,
Yet He didn’t mention punishment, didn’t promise a reward.

Old age is a walk in the way of unknowing: the older one gets, the less one knows. It’s those in the middle passages of life who seem to need certainty and who want to impose their certainty on others, lest they lose their own. In “Advantage,” Milosz entertains revenge on those who judged him strange in his youth, who considered him a dreamy failure. He would like to say, as many of us would about our long lost critics, “See, look at me now.” But even for these companions of his past, he cannot sustain anger. He says at the end of the poem, “Perhaps I was right/Yet in truth, this wasn’t what I wanted.”

As we walk along together through this companionable book, Milosz reflects on his faith and his lack of it. After beginning a poem (“To Spite Nature”) with “Many misfortunes resulted from my belief in God. . .,” he ends with “Yet I repeat, ‘I believe in God,’ and I know/that my belief has no justification.” He has just the right appreciation for and skepticism about his Roman Catholic faith.

His is the faith of doing rather than believing, of liturgy rather than theology. He says of it:

. . . I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and propitiatory song.

He adds, “Hear me, Lord, for I am a sinner, which means I have nothing except prayer.” And what many of us could say with him, “I loved God with all my strength on the sandy roads that wound through the forest.” 

Through the pages of Second Space we walk sandy roads together through the forest of life. Together we lament the losses of age. Of his eyes, he says, “You were a pack of royal greyhounds once,” “wondrously quick,” but now his sight has turned to memory:

Now what you have seen is hidden inside me
And changed into memories or dreams.

Walking with Milosz drew me to another companionable presence, the Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry. I had made a promise to myself to read daily Berry’s Sabbath poems, a promise I have failed to keep, but after reading Second Space I went back to Berry’s Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 (2024). I found his thoughts in his old age ranging over the same territory as Milosz’s. He says of our habit of dividing the living from the dead:

Only we humans, we the poor
suffer the ancient mistake, dividing
the living from the dead, confusing life
with time. 

Berry, though, can’t resist an application, turning his poem into a sermon:

                  We divide life from death
for the purpose of killing each other, killing
ourselves, or we confuse living bodies
with machines, the truly dead, to increase
happiness and ‘create wealth,’ Hell
fills the difference.

Berry does entirely too much of this, losing the thread of the poetry and running off in the direction of a rant, but we invite him along nevertheless for often his conversation turns sweet:

You don’t know the day until
You’ve seen the last light
Reddening the hill
And rising into night.

Lines worthy of the psalmist.

With that I’ll leave you for now to your own companions. Thanks for allowing me to wander through these lines with you. And allow me to take this as an opportunity to say what I too seldom say to you, my readers: thank you for being companions on my way.

Clay