Poets paying attention to prayer

I've written a lot on the theme of paying attention equating to prayer. See, for example, my series of posts entitled 'Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation' or my talk on 'Paying attention through art.'

I've recently come across W.H. Auden and David Miller saying essentially the same things:

W. H. Auden once said: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”

He also said, "I think what is important is to teach ... the technique of prayer. That is, the technique of paying attention and of forgetting oneself ..."

"To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God ..."

David Miller expands on this in the notes of his Introduction to 'The Alchemist's Mind':

'“Attentiveness is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (Simone Weil, quoted in Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, NY: Channel Press, 1964, p 251). (The phrase occurs in a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet.) If the philosopher Nicholas Malebranche said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”, Weil echoed this, consciously or not, when she wrote that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love”. (Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London/NY: Routledge, 2002, p 117. The Malebranche quotation is known to many of us, and certainly to me, from Paul Celan’s famous speech “The Meridian” (1960), in: Celan, Collected Prose, tr Rosmarie Waldrop, NY: Routledge, 2003, p 50.) (No space here for going into Weil’s fierce critique of the imagination in relation to her espousal of attention.) See my essay “Robert Lax’s 21 pages”, op cit, where I speak of attention or attentiveness in relation to a contemplative or meditative approach. Attention is what persists, obdurately, and penetrates and uncovers... disinterestedly, and by staying with its subject, rather than by some act of force. Attention is faithful to what it attends to. It aspires to a form of lucidity, no matter how complex (and without ignoring this complexity or trying to falsely simplify it). It is an absorption into things, but a thoughtful one.'

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Arvo Pärt - Annum Per Annum.

Searching for a post postmodern theology in art and literature

Interesting reflections on art and spirituality from David Jasper can be found here. Among those whose work is considered are Paul Celan, Le Corbusier, Ding Fang, Anselm Kiefer, Stanley Spencer and Bill Viola.

Some of these reflections recur in Jasper's The Sacred Community, part of a trilogy using art, literature and theology to explore themes of desert, body and community. In this book, Jasper draws upon a rich variety of texts and images from literature, art, and religious tradition to explore the liturgical community gathered around - and most fully constituted by - the moment of the Sanctus in the Eucharistic liturgy.

Jasper has written of the series that, with:

"The Sacred Desert ... my research has ranged from some of the earliest of Christian theologians - the Fathers of the desert such as St. Anthony - to writers on the 'deserts' of the modern world, both geographical and interior ... I have worked with art historians and artists including the prominent video artist Bill Viola, whose installations capture both the fertility of the desert for the human spirit, and the desolations of the desert of the modern cityscape. My work now continues this project, exploring the aesthetics of asceticism in the Christian tradition and in art and literature.

One colleague has described my work as a search for a post postmodern theology. I am concerned to ask where we might begin to find and articulate a theology as the Christian churches and their traditions in the West at least fall into decay. The canvas of my thought is therefore broad and eclectic, from medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart to contemporary radical theologians like Thomas J J Altizer. I have learnt much from the great 'desert' texts of the twentieth century in various disciplines - from Karl Barth's Römerbrief and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit to T S Eliot's Wasteland and Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron. My work is therefore deeply interdisciplinary though at the same time thoroughly theological, asking questions in the spaces and interstices between disciplines and ideas. The aim is to write a new kind of (un) systematic theology."

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Arnold Schoenberg - Moses und Aron.