Early Christians Worshipping" by William Hole
David Fagerberg believes that liturgical theology dilates (not dilutes) our understanding of both liturgy and theology. The result of a full understanding of a concept of liturgy and theology is closer to what the early Church perhaps possessed, and one we would do well to imitate and recover. An important element in that effort is what Professor Fagerberg rightly identifies as a Catholic asceticism.
Fagerberg presents us with this gem from Aidan Kavanaugh which deeply affected his thinking:
Far from being something esoteric to Christianity, asceticism is native to the Gospel and is required of all. Specifically monastic asceticism was generated, it seems, in that same process by which living the Gospel began to take on ecclesial form in the earliest Jewish-Christian churches… . One must therefore take the continuing fact of organized asceticism in Christian life as a given which provides access to whole dimensions of Christian perception and being. The existence, furthermore, of specifically monastic asceticism is a theological datum which lies close to the very nerve center of Christian origins and growth. One cannot study Christianity without taking monasticism into account. One cannot live as a Christian without practicing the Gospel asceticism which monasticism is meant to exemplify and support. A Christian need not be a monk or nun, but every monk and nun is a crucial sort of Christian…
Aidan Kavanaugh, On Liturgical Theology
Fagerberg goes on to tell us that
Christianity involves liturgy, theology, and asceticism the way a pancake involves flour, milk, and eggs: They are ingredients to the end result. Leave one out and you don’t have exactly the same thing anymore. Liturgy is a substantially theological enterprise; asceticism is a product of and prerequisite for Christian liturgy; liturgy and theology integrate by ascetical means. I do not see myself trying to coordinate two dyads (liturgical theology and liturgical asceticism), but I see myself trying to understand how the terms in one triad (liturgy-theology-asceticism) relate to each other. The horizontal base line of the triangle is liturgy. “Seek the reason why God created,” Maximus the Confessor counseled, “for that is knowledge.” This wisdom is possessed by the liturgical theologian, and liturgical asceticism is the price of its possession.
Theologia Prima is a graduate text and addresses complex issues but I think the following reading selection reveals why it should be read and the treasures it contains:
Deepening the Grammar of Liturgy
The need to deepen the grammar by which we speak about liturgy is readily evident from certain attitudes exhibited toward liturgy. Aidan Kavanagh commented on having seen an advertisement for a summer course called “Creative Worship” in which participants were to be taught how to “creatively use liturgy, liturgical robes, banners and stoles.” Even if this course is no longer on the books, it reveals an attitude that can still be found easily enough, and Kavanagh’s response remains fully applicable: “The relationship of embroidery to the driving of a diesel locomotive seems easier to demonstrate than the connection between stoles and proclaiming the Gospel. Something here seems to have been enthusiastically trivialized.”‘
We seek to join the opposition to that trivialization. It seeks to understand Alexander Schmemann when he calls liturgy the locus theologicus par excellence, and Kavanagh when he calls liturgy the place where the church transacts its faith in God under the condition of God’s real presence in both church and world, and Robert Taft when he calls liturgy nothing less than the ongoing saving work of God’s Only-begotten Son. The tradition once connected liturgy, theology, and asceticism easily and naturally and necessarily, and that is the tradition I am trying to understand. I do not want to dilute theology with liturgy, I want to dilate our grammar of liturgy until our Christian doctrine and our Christian life find their rightful home there.
I borrow the metaphor of grammar from Ludwig Wittgenstein, a linguistic philosopher for whom the analysis of language was the way into a concept. He once remarked, almost casually, that “theology is a grammar.” I take this to mean that it is one thing to know theological words, and another thing to know how to use words theologically. Wittgenstein thought it was wrong to think of words possessing meanings in themselves, and preferred to say that people mean by using words.
We use words to mean with. By our words we express meaning. Therefore a word’s meaning is found in how it is used, in its grammar, in how it plays in what Wittgenstein called a “language game.” To know the meaning of a word is not just to know its ostensive definition from the dictionary; it requires knowing how to play with the word in its language game. Wittgenstein illustrated his point by observing how different it is to know the name of a chess piece (say, a knight or a queen) from being able to move it effectively on the board during a game.
It is possible to speak meaningfully, therefore, even if one is not a professional grammarian. One can use a grammar even if one cannot describe a grammar. Paul Holmer notes that when we acquire mastery of a language “we do not speak the grammar itself but we say everything else in accord with the rules we have already learned. The more skilled we become in writing or speaking, the more does our knowledge of grammar inform everything we say and write. The reason one can use words intelligibly and intelligently even if one cannot parse the sentence is because grammar is first of all a tool to use, and second, a subject to examine.
Grammar books are for specialists who reflect on or study the nature of language, but the grammar itself is for anyone who wishes to say something. People use grammar tacitly: They look through the grammar at the subject at hand. The subject matter of a grammar book is grammar, but the subject matter of a grammatical sentence can be anything. The profession grammarian may be of regular help to the speaker, but the speaker has a priority over the grammarian that should not be denied.
Similarly, it is possible to be an intelligent theologian even if one is not an academic theologian. The academic theologian may be of regular help to the liturgical community, but there is a priority here, too, that should not be denied. It is possible to speak theologically even if one does not have that specialized knowledge about how the deposit of faith has been parsed systematically or historically. Liturgy creates a Christian grammar in the people of God who live through the encounter with the paschal mystery, and then have something to say. But what they have to say is usually about God, and not about ritual! They may therefore be said to speak theologically, even if they have not made theology their topic of conversation. So Holmer concludes, “If theology is like a grammar, and certainly it is, then it follows that learning theology is not an end in itself…. [Theology] is the declaration of the essence of Christianity, … [its] aim is not that we repeat the words. Theology must also be absorbed, and when it is, the hearer is supposed to become Godly.”
Liturgical theology may therefore be called faith’s grammar in action — a genuine theology, but one manifested and preserved in the community’s lex orandi (law of prayer) even before it is parsed into lex credendi (law of belief). It is discovered in the structure of the liturgy, which shapes the lives of liturgists. Kavanagh was fond of calling liturgy the faith of the Church in motion. “This means that the liturgy of a church is nothing other than that church’s faith in motion on certain definite and crucial levels…. Thus a church’s worship does not merely reflect or express its repertoire of faith. It transacts the church’s faith in God under the condition of God’s real presence in both church and world.” In my language game, the structure of the liturgical lex orandi I call liturgical theology, and the process of shaping lives I call liturgical asceticism. The liturgy doesn’t just make the thinker think doxologically, or theologize prayerfully; it forms a believer whose life is theological.
There was a time in Christian tradition when liturgy interpenetrated both theology and asceticism. Absorbing theology to the point of becoming Godly was an ascetical capacitation for liturgical theology. Yves Congar’s historical survey of the word theologia reflects this evolution within the context of asceticism. Although the term had its roots in the Greek philosophers (Plato used it to point out the educational value of mythology, and Aristotle identified it with metaphysics because the divine is present in all being), Congar observes that Christians narrowed theologia to mean knowledge of divine things, beginning with Clement of Alexandria who called it a science of divinity, and Origen, for whom the term meant a doctrine about God — which for Christians meant teachings about Christ.
By the time of Eusebius of Caesarea, theologia had been so associated with the Savior that when Christians applied the term to the pagan gods they had to qualify it as “false theology.” Christians used theologia to refer to Sacred Scripture itself because it contained true theology (Dionysius recognized a mystical theology, too” ). Athanasius could use the term simply to refer to the doctrine of the Trinity. Even so, these Christian theologians worked from a concept of God’s transcendence that was even greater than that of the Neoplatonic philosophers. God cannot be explained, and God cannot be known, but by his will God has become participable. That is why theologia took on special meaning with the monks and mystical writers. Congar therefore concludes that for the fathers, theology meant a knowledge of God which is either the highest form of the gnosis or of that illumination of the soul by the Holy Spirit which is more than an effect since it is the very substance of its divinization or godlike transformation. For Evagrius Pontikus, followed by Maximus Confessor and others, theologia is the third and the most elevated of the degrees of life. In short, it is that perfect knowledge of God which is identified with the summit of prayer. Climbing to the summit of prayer is an arduous business.
Reaching this liturgical zenith requires a disciplined training, which is just what the word askesis means. The root of the word asceticism implied a training designed to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior. Used of an athlete, it referred to the training one underwent in order to accomplish a goal. Evagrius of Pontus went to the deserts of Egypt in the fourth century to train with these athletic Monks, and he systematized their discoveries. Evagrius spoke of three stages: first, an initial ordering of basic passions (praktike,; second, a contemplation of nature (theoria physike), whereby the world is known as it truly is by reflecting on scripture’s revelation; and third, contemplation of the Holy Trinity — which is synonymous with theologia itself. Within this context, theology is less the fruit of a graduate program at university, and rather the fruit of a rightly-ordered existence. But while the ascetical capacity for theology may have been brought to perfection in the sands of the desert, it is born in the waters of the font. As Kavanagh says, “Ascetics blaze the trail all must follow, but they do not walk it alone.”
This book will speak about liturgical theology, but in order to apprehend the term adequately our ideas of liturgy and theology and asceticism must be adjusted. This first chapter explores their interconnection. It discovers that liturgy is the place of communion with God; that asceticism is the imitation of Christ by a liturgist; and that the end of liturgical asceticism is sharing God’s life, rightly called Theologia.
Being a theologian means being able to use the grammar of God. Yet even more, it means speaking with God. That’s why Evagrius of Pontus calls prayer theology (“If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian“), and why I think liturgical theology involves liturgical asceticism. Before there were universities with theology faculties, it was possible to learn and to use this theological grammar.
Asceticism was especially integrated with theology as a liturgical consequence in Eastern Christianity. In saying this, I do not imply it is absent in the West. The scholastics knew that theology was not like other human sciences. In Congar’s words, they understood theology as “an extension of faith, which is a certain communication and a certain sharing of God’s knowledge.”
Theology’s object is not only the knowledge of a generic divine subject, but also “a certain constructio ipsius subjecti, namely, the construction of God in us, or rather the construction of Christ in us.” But with the relocation of theology to the university auditorium, the harmonization of liturgy, theology, and asceticism might have become less recognizable in the West, and there may be benefit in tuning our ears to voices from the East. Tomas Spidlik’s digest of Eastern spirituality notes that the Eastern Fathers “understood the practice of theology only as a personal communion with Theos, the Father, through the Logos, Christ, in the Holy Spirit — an experience lived in a state of prayer.”
Theology was as much a practice as a cognition. Asceticism is the path to prayer; prayer in the Spirit is the Christian liturgical life in practice; this gives rise to perfect knowledge, which is the path to theology. Commenting on Maximus the Confessor, Georges Berthold defines theology as “direct communion with God in pure prayer, and ‘to theologize’ is to pray in spirit and in truth.” “”
To make sense of such remarks will require a different grammar of liturgy — a deeper grammar, one in which the word liturgical is more than just an emotional adjective. The liturgy is participation by the body of Christ in the activity of the Trinity; the Church’s ritual activity is itself theological; and asceticism is the capacitation of the baptized for that participation. I do not seek to add liturgy to asceticism or theology; rather I seek to enlarge our understanding of liturgy by discovering its very theological and ascetical dimensions. Although the phrase “liturgical theology” contains two words, only one thing is being named. The two words together reference an Organically single phenomenon, and both words are necessary for a full understanding. The task is not to glue together two heterogeneous realities, resulting in either a theological appraisal of liturgy or a doxological appraisal of theology; the task is to name the ritualized response by the body of Christ to the activity of the Trinity. This response is itself, in its ritual form, theological.
Liturgical theology is theology that is liturgically embodied. The phrase is a complex name (in the philosophical sense of being multiple) of a simple reality (in the philosophical sense of being one indivisible thing). Put colorfully, liturgical theology is not yellow liturgy marbles mixed with blue theology marbles to make ajar full of yellow and blue marbles: Liturgical theology is green marbles.
Or, to use a more dignified example, liturgical theology is simple in the way a human being is simple. The scholastics said form and matter make one substance, so that a human being, although both soul and body, is One substantial being, not two. Liturgical theology is simple in the same way a human being is simple. It is no more appropriate to speak of’ bridging liturgy with theology or asceticism than it is appropriate to speak of bridging soul and body, when the human being cannot be understood apart from soul or apart from body.
Liturgy and asceticism and theologia cannot be understood apart from each other. This means liturgy is not ritual cliche in need of theological additives and supplemental spiritualities. But so long as liturgy is misperceived in this manner, the widespread mistake will continue to spread even more widely that liturgical renewal has more to do with relocating furniture in the sanctuary than with reallocating hearts to God. Liturgical asceticism capacitates the liturgist. Christian asceticism is a substantially liturgical activity.
A Reading Selection from The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser
May 18, 2011Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls)
Margaret Visser chose a little church in Rome, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, to write about. A church, after all, is the most intentionally meaningful structure in all of architecture and she helps us learn how to “read” its universal language of space. A great idea, a wonderful book.
The word “remember” comes from the same Indo-European root as “mind.” And the English word “mind” is both a noun (“what is in the brain”) and a verb (“pay attention to,” “care”). When one has forgotten, to remember is to call back into the “attention span,” to recall. Attention is thought of here as having a span — an extension in space. Forgetting, on the other hand, is like dropping something off a plate, falling off an edge, not “getting” it, but having to do, instead, without it. Remembering is recapturing something that happened in the past; it is an encounter of now with then — a matter of time. Buildings — constructions in space — may last through time as this church has lasted. Such structures can cause us to remember. Their endurance, as well as their taking up space, may counter time and keep memory alive.
This particular church reminds us of Agnes, who was killed by having her throat cut almost — 1,700 years ago. But like any church, it recalls a great deal more. One of a church’s main purposes is to call to mind, to make people remember. To begin with, a church sets out to cause self-recollection. Every church does its best (some of them are good at this, others less so, but every church is trying) to help each person recall the mystical experience that he or she has known.
Everyone has had some such experience. There are moments in life when — to use the language of a building — the door swings open. The door shuts again, sooner rather than later. But we have seen, even if only through a crack, the light behind it. There has been a moment, for example, when every person realizes that one is oneself, and no one else. This is probably a very early memory, this taking a grip on one’s own absolutely unique identity, this irrevocable beginning.
I remember myself, walking along a narrow path in the Zambian bush. The grass was brown and stiff, more than waist-high. I was wearing a green-and-white-checked dress with buttons down the front. I was alone. I said aloud, stunned, “Tomorrow I’m going to be five! Tomorrow I’m going to be five!” I stopped still with amazement: fiveness was about to be mine! I had already had four. The whole world seemed to point to me in that instant. The world and I looked at each other. It was huge and I was me. I was filled with indescribable delight. I took another step, and the vision was gone. But it’s still there, even now, even when I am not recalling it.
This was a mystical experience. As such, one of its characteristics was that in it my mind embraced a vast contradiction: both terms of it at once. I was me and the world contained me, but I was not the world. I was a person, but I wasn’t “a person” — I was me. A mystical experience is before all else an experience, and beyond logic. It is concrete, and therefore unique. It is bigger than the person who experiences it; it is something one “enters.”
People have always, apparently in all cultures, conceptualized the world as participating in, or expressing, or actually being a tension between a series of opposites: big and small, high and low, same and different, hot and cold, one and many, male and female, and so on. Societies of people can have very idiosyncratic ideas about what is opposite to what: a culture can find squirrels “opposite” to water rats, oblongs “opposite” to squares, bronze vessels “the opposite” of clay ones. Anthropologists dedicate themselves to finding out what such classifications could mean; the answers they give us usually show how social arrangements are reflected outward upon the world, and determine human perceptions of how nature is ordered. One result of a mystical experience, therefore, can be a profound demystification.
For no sooner has a culture organized its system of contradictions than the mystics arise. They steadfastly, and often in the face of great danger, assure their fellow human beings that they are wrong: what appears to be a contradiction in terms is merely a convention, a point of view, a facon de parler, no matter how self-evident it may appear. These are people who believe and convince others that they have been lifted out of this world and have seen a greater truth: the opposites are, in fact, one. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus can say, “The way up and the way down are the same.” Or: “Step into the same river twice, and its waters will be different.”
Such mystic realizations (up and down are one, sameness and difference coincide) have to keep occurring, both for the sake of truth and for the necessity of realizing that neither our senses nor our thinking faculties have access to, or are capable of encompassing, everything. (“The last proceeding of reason,” wrote Pascal, “is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it.”) For all the outrage and bafflement with which the pronouncements of the mystics are greeted, we remember their words; in time we learn to appreciate and value them. In our own day, physicists have been talking like mystics for some time: expressing physical reality, for example, as conflating space and time or declaring that waves and particles (lines and dots) can be perceived to be “the same.” The rest of us are only beginning to take in what they are saying.
From the point of view of the person experiencing them, privileged moments — those that allow us to see something not normally offered to our understanding — do not last. Regretfully, necessarily, we cannot remain in such an experience. We move on, into the practical, the sensible, the logical and provable, the mundane. But after one such glimpse of possibility, we henceforth know better. We know what it is to experience two or more incompatible, mutually exclusive categories as constituting in fact one whole. We have seen both sides of the coin, at one and the same time. An impossibility — but it has happened. We may bury this experience, deny it, explain it away — but at any moment something could trigger it, raise it up, recall it. Because it has happened, and cannot unhappen.
One of the consequences of having had a mystical experience is a sense of loss. If only it could have gone on and on, and never had to stop; if only the door would open again! One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life is that we cannot bring about such an experience, any more than we can make it last. Sex can remind us of it because, like a mystical experience, sex is ecstatic, overwhelming, and delightful; it feels bigger than we are. Drugs can also make us feel as if we’re “there” again. So people pursue sex and drugs — experiences they can get, they can have. This other thing, this greater and unforgettable thing, this insight, is not anyone’s for the asking. It comes (it always comes, to everyone, at different times and in different ways), and there is no telling what it will be or when or where, let alone how. You can’t buy it or demand it or keep it. It is not a chemical reaction, and there is nothing automatic about it.
A mystical experience is something perceived, and it calls forth a response. But you are free to turn away from the vision, to behave as though it never happened; you are free not to respond. (This is something I have had to learn: when I was almost five there was no question of not responding.) The invitation cannot be made to anyone else but you — and not even to you at any moment in your life other than the one in which it is made. I shall never be five again, so no other mystical experience I have will ever again be that one. I shall never again wear that green-and-white-checked dress; it is very likely that the path through the brown grass has disappeared. What I have left is the enormous memory, and the fact that it has enlarged all of my experience ever since.
Now a church (or a temple or a synagogue or a mosque — any religious building) knows perfectly well that it cannot induce in anyone a mystical experience. What it does is acknowledge such experience as any of its visitors has had, as explicitly as it can. A church is a recognition, in stone and wood and brick, of spiritual awakenings. It nods, to each individual person. If the building has been created within a cultural and religious tradition, it constitutes a collective memory of spiritual insights, of thousands of mystical moments. A church reminds us of what we have known. And it tells us that the possibility of the door swinging open again remains.
The staircase takes you down into the catacombs and the main church.
The church, built at the level of the catacombs, is accessed via a dramatic wide marble staircase decorated with sculptures and inscriptions from the catacombs. It’s an exquisite church, built on a basilical plan, with three aisles; marble pillars in the nave support the seating for the nuns in a lovely frescoed gallery, below a richly-decorated, wooden ceiling. The apse is marble with a Byzantine-like mosaic in the upper part depicting Sant’Agnese receiving the crown of martyrdom from the hand of God.
Memory, in a church, is not only individual, but also collective: the building is a meeting house for a group of people who agree with each other in certain important respects. They come together to express solidarity, and they do this by participating in an intensely meaningful performance known as a rituals
The closest relative of a church is a theatre, where people also come together to witness a scripted performance. There is a stage in a church, and seats for the audience; in both theatre and church, people come in order to live together through a trajectory of the soul. They come to be led by the performance to achieve contact with transcendence, to experience delight or recognition, to understand something they never understood before, to feel relief, to stare in amazement, or to cry. They want something that shakes them up — or gives them peace. Successful drama, like a well-performed ritual, can provoke an experience of transcendence: through feeling, for example, two contradictory emotions at once. Aristotle spoke of catharsis — “purification” — as the aim of tragedy. Catharsis, he said, is achieved by undergoing two opposing movements of the soul — pity (feeling for, and therefore drawing close) and fear (longing to move out of the danger’s range) — at the same time.
In a theatre the audience is the receiver of a play, and essential to a play. At an ancient Greek drama the audience was indeed part of the spectacle. The form of the theatre, a huge horseshoe shape, ensured that this was so. The Greek theatres that survive today allow us to imagine what it must have been like, sitting in a vast crowd of fellow citizens with everyone spread out in full view, in broad daylight, fanning out to embrace the round dancing-floor below them. Actors say that an audience can draw out of them their best performances, just through the quality of its attention, its intentness.
A theatre is like a church – not the other way around. “Church” or “temple” is the main category, and “theatre” a division of it. Historically, drama grew out of religious performance (and never entirely left it) in a process wherein the play gradually separated itself from the crowd watching. The distance between watcher and watched is essential to theatrical experience. (“Theatre” comes from Greek theatron, a place for viewing.) People come together in a church, however, not to view but to take part. The word “church” comes from Greek kyriakon, “house of the Lord”; it is a place of encounter between people and God.
It is perfectly possible to be moved at a spiritual level at the theatre; one can open oneself and be brought to mystical insight, as Aristotle showed us, through attentive watching. (Such experiences, however, can occur anywhere, at any time — indeed, they seem to prefer arriving when we are least expecting them, at times and places we would be least inclined to call “appropriate.”) But a performance in a church is permitted to involve people to an extent that the theatre traditionally avoids.
People come to participate in it, to join in, and then allow the realization to enter them and work upon them. The whole point of the proceedings is to help them change the orientation of their souls, even though they are also confirming the foundation of their beliefs. They have come to meet, to make the ceremony, and to respond, at a level that may include but goes well beyond the aesthetic. But a church can go on “working” even when there is no performance and no crowd. A person can come into a silent church in order to respond to the building and its meaning. This can produce an experience as profoundly moving as that of attending a performance. The same thing cannot be said of visiting an empty theatre.
A church like Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls) vibrates with intentionality. It is meaningful — absolutely nothing in it is without significance. Even if something is inadvertently included that has no meaning to start with, a meaning for it will be found, inevitably. A church stands in total opposition to the narrowing and flattening of human experience, the deviation into the trivial that follow from antipathy towards meaning, and especially meaning held in common. Meaning is intentional: this building has been made in order to communicate with the people in it. A church is no place to practice aesthetic distance, to erase content and simply appreciate form. The building is trying to speak; not listening to what it has to say is a form of barbarous inattention, like admiring a musical instrument while caring nothing for music.
The building “refers” to things beyond itself, and it deliberately intends to be a setting where spiritual knowledge receives explicit recognition and focal attention. Sometimes the meanings are highly specific and complex; for the sake of clarity they may even be explained in inscriptions. Other meanings are more general: the nave is “like a ship” (which is what “nave” means), or windows let in light (a symbol of God). But these meanings also engage in intricate play among themselves, arouse further associations, and end up offering some of the most complex meanings of all. And always — silently, intently — the building points at once both to the individual’s own inner being and to the things commonly done in the company of other people in the church: the place where “the Word” is read, for example, and the site of baptism, or Christian initiation. The altar table is usually given centre stage, for at the heart of Christianity is a shared meal, together with everything meant by sharing a meal.
Contemplating all these meanings, even when you are alone in a church and there is no performance going on, is intended to help focus your mind and soul. You go into a church to exclude the extraneous, to get away from noise and distractions, to go back into yourself and take a good look at what is there. You go because you want to restore and enrich your relationship with God, by participating in a religious ceremony, by praying, or by just sitting alone in silence. All of the church’s “language” exists to help you do this, to get your mind humming and to make you receptive.
It is also supposed to help you keep in good spiritual shape. For one of the central tenets of Christianity is that belief and love and trust and insight, like mystical experience, are given to you. You can’t cause a gift such as belief or trust or love — whether felt or received — to be given, although a longing for what is called “grace” will surely be satisfied. Only, when the gift comes, you have to be ready. (Longing for it is part of being ready; Christians say even that to long is already to have received.) It is entirely possible to be so distracted that you don’t notice the gift at your doorstep, or to be in such poor shape spiritually that you do not recognize or cannot accept what is being offered. God comes “like a thief in the night.” (Notice that in this biblical simile, when God “breaks in” the person is thought of as like a house, a building.) All that a human being can do is be vigilant, notice what is happening, and then respond. A church is there to remind you, to teach you to pay attention, and to awaken the poetry in your soul. It gives you exercise in responding.
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