John Dean ; Jack or Dean?
Should we keep Easter a time of spiritual purity? I don’t think so, but nor do I think we should ignore its spiritual significance to Britain. We have so divorced business from Easter that I cannot think of any connection between pensions and Easter’s spirituality in what I encounter on social media.
This comment, one of many complaining about yesterday’ blog, specifically asked how I could link Easter with pensions.
And this duality is at the heart of things. John Donne led a life that was pretty full on.
He was Dean of the church that I pass when I leave home and go anywhere; St Paul’s Cathedral is a statement of how London would not lie down after a fire and a plague had beaten it twice over. Donne only became interested in St Paul’s when he turned to Anglicism, for his youth he was something else.
He wrote this poem more than 50 years before we lost our first St Pauls and half our population but his poem still challenges me and I hope some of the thousand + people who have read this blog.
Dean was “Jack” the lad when he set off west and “Dean” when he returned to St Paul’s. The account of his journey is the stuff of the poem I asked readers to grapple with
Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
His blog/poem is over 400 years old and it still asks pertinent questions about whether we have a chance to look at the face of Christ without having been through death. Whether we can become a Dean or stay a Jack the lad.
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou mayest know me, and I’ll turn my face.
As a nation we have turned our back upon the harsh realities of Easter. On Friday I sat through an account by John of the death of Christ from the capture in one garden to the burial in another. On Sunday I heard of the journey of Mary to discover the whereabouts of Christ and her accidental meeting with him as she left his burial place. This was within a church and very beautiful these services were. I did not think myself corrected by Christ but I left aware of my deformities.
So why write a serious blog and distance myself from a pod I labelled “foolish”? I had tried to make Easter relative to pension people like Philip and hope that he can see that for many people , Easter brings them close to the sight of Christ and of what facing death is. I have had to lately and am less Jack than I use to be.
Serious consideration is a very large part of growing up . I suspect that many people never do turn their face to stare on Christ, I have done so very little and of course you can get the same sense of reality through other religions. Nico’s riposte shows his DE&I of religion,
“Have a wonderful Easter, Passover, Baisakhi, Wesak and Ridvan everyone!”
But it is not an understanding of different religions that counts. It’s the living of a religion, whichever one you are caught by. I was born and live a Methodist but that is only a way of understanding a deeper truth.
So Philip Hodges, I would ask you to read the Donne poem and remember that Donne turned from “Jack” to “Dean” as he grew older. This is my understanding of what the poem does to help Donne to come close to the truth of getting old.
Wit becomes the means by which the poet discovers the working of Providence in the casual traffic of the world.
A journey westward from one friend’s house to another over Easter 1613 brings home to Donne the general aberration of nature that prompts us to put pleasure before our due devotion to Christ.
We ought to be heading east at Easter so as to contemplate and share Christ’s suffering; and in summoning up that event to his mind’s eye, he recognizes the shocking paradox of the ignominious death of God upon a Cross:
“Could I behold those hands, which span the poles,
And turn all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?”
(“Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”).
An image of Christ’s degradation is directly imposed upon an image of God’s omnipotence. We see that the event itself has a double force, being at once the catastrophic consequence of our sin and the ultimate assurance of God’s saving love.
The poet’s very journey west may be providential if it brings him to a penitent recognition of his present unworthiness to gaze directly upon Christ:
This is very serious stuff from John Donne and I was asking readers of my blog to take growing old as seriously as Donne did. When we get to draw our pension, we are in our later life, I hope that Philip will understand that a pension and an understanding of Christ and Death are very much linked.
