Readings

by Rick Dietrich

Up and Out

When I am down and out, which doesn't happen often, though too often, I read Revelation and the seventeenth-century English poets. I read the poets for their wit and John of Patmos for his comedy. I've written before in these pages that I believe the world to be "an ultimately friendly place." It is, finally, a place where confusion will be sorted out in a way that will make us laugh. I learned that in part from Revelation: we live in a comic universe. The world will end, as all great comedies do, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a wedding: the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, "prepared as a bride for her bridegroom," the Lamb of God. Things don't always go so well in the meantime, but at the end of time, "all will be well and all manner of thing will be well," as Dame Julian of Norwich puts it.

John actually offers a catalogue of how things can go both well and less than well in the church—in the letters to the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3. We probably know best of those little letters, the one to the church in Laodicea, if only because it contains that wonderful verse we memorized in fourth-grade Sunday school, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (3:20, KJV).

It was only later that we learned that "the Amen" isn't entirely happy with the Laodicean Christians: "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. So, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth" (3:15-16, NRSV). I suspect that's an experience most of us have had; we've taken a sip of water expecting it to be cold or a sip of coffee expecting it to be hot, and when we found it decaying somewhere in between, we've wanted to "spew" it out (as the King James version has it).

But that's a momentary reaction. John is writing of something more, both broader and deeper. "God is a distant— stately Lover" begins one of Emily Dickinson's better-known poems. She's wrong.
God is a near and passionate lover, and passion seeks passion in return. The seventeenth-century poet Thomas Carew knew that. And he actually has Revelation 3 in mind in the song, "Mediocrity in Love Rejected," even if he turns it to secular use. The lover laments:

Give me more love or more disdain:
The torrid or the frozen zone
Bring equal ease unto my pain,
The temperate afford me none;
Either extreme, of love or hate,
Is sweeter than a calm estate.

Love me, or leave me. But don't just hang around for the sake of hanging around. I am reminded, oddly, at just this point, of Elijah's asking God's people in Israel, "How long will you go limping along with two different opinions. If the Lord is God, follow him . . . " (1 Kings 18:21). If the Lord is God, love him, "with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deuteronomy 6:5).

In the second verse of this short poem, Carew calls on his mistress to give him "a storm; if it be love" or let him go. Indeed, he goes even further (with the Laodiceans still in mind): if you cannot love me stormily, I'd rather have your "disdain." The stanza ends with that cruel word repeated:

Then crown my joys, or cure my pain:
Give me more love or more disdain.

This is the picture of God I find in the "love letter" to the Laodiceans. They have become fat and lazy like Carew's mistress—or, at least, as I see her, lying on her couch, thinking, "I've got it all. I've got it all." (See 3:17a: "For you say, 'I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.") No, you don't, the poet answers: You haven't got it all, because you haven't got passion. "You do not realize," the Laodiceans are told, "that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked" (3:17b). Get up off your couch, put on your jewels, and your best dress; and open your eyes, my dear (3:18). And open your ears, "Listen! I am standing at the door" (3:20a, NRSV).

So, when I am down and out . . . and tepid, I read the seven­teenth-century poets—the love poetry in particular—and I read Revelation. And I warm up. And laugh.