Alan Jones was Dean of Grace Cathedral from 1985-2009. He died last year at 84. In his obituary from the church the present dean wrote:
For nearly a quarter of a century, Alan served as Dean of Grace Cathedral. He was one of the most powerful preachers of his generation and helped make the cathedral one of the global centers of Christianity. During his tenure, we constructed Chapter House, the Great Steps, and our parking garage. With Lauren Artress, Alan helped to make walking the labyrinth into a religious practice observed by millions of people. Alan inaugurated our Forum series and represented the cathedral admirably in the community.
His legacy is better represented in his books. One has become a spiritual classic: Passion for Pilgrimage: Notes for the Journey Home (1989). One of the aspects of the book which impressed me most was the amazing depth of reading he displays! I often pass over quotes in a book as if they did not come from somewhere. But the people Jones knew or knew about intrigued me so much I began to look into their lives, as well.
In 2021 I peeled back the cover of Jones’ work for my church and highlighted a few of the people he referenced. As Jones listened to each of them, he was also attuned to the Holy Spirit at work in them and told us what he heard. They all demonstrated different ways we die and rise along our pilgrimage home. That’s the theme of his book: “God has fallen in love with you and wants you to come home.”
Anne Sexton
One of the people I highlighted was Anne Sexton.
I did not know a lot about this poet, apart from some of her poems, until Jones drew me into relationship with her. Her life is a tortuous story of mental illness and award-winning creation. Although she died in her forties by suicide, the depth of her work still moves us and teaches us. If you are chronically depressed, she speaks your language beautifully. The Poetry Foundation has a nice biography and a selection of works.
Jones draws us to meditate with Anne Sexton as she moves through one of her own last meditations on “eating the Bread” in John 6:
Jesus said to them, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise [them] up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood resides in me, and I in [them]. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who consumes me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven; it is not like the bread your ancestors ate, but then later died. The one who eats this bread will live forever.” – John 6:53-8 NET
Uncomfortable in faith might be normal
Anne Sexton never got to a comfortable faith, but she wrote about it a lot. And she had a long correspondence with a “monk,” right up to the point where she sent off her last work: The Awful Rowing toward God. Once it was sent, she put on her mother’s old mink coat, went to the garage, started the car and made the exhaust that killed her at age 45. One poem in her last self-collected book was titled after one of Soren Kierkegaard’s works which you can read here:
The Sickness Unto Death
God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper,
as if the sun became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
Someone brought me oranges in my despair
but I could not eat a one
for God was in that orange.
I could not touch what did not belong to me.
The priest came,
he said God was even in Hitler.
I did not believe him
for if God were in Hitler
then God would be in me.
I did not hear the bird sounds.
They had left.
I did not see the speechless clouds,
I saw only the little white dish of my faith
breaking in the crater.
I kept saying:
I’ve got to have something to hold on to.
People gave me Bibles, crucifixes,
a yellow daisy,
but I could not touch them,
I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.
So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air.
My kindred, my brother, I said
and gave the yellow daisy
to the crazy woman in the next bed.
Her last book was dedicated to the monk. Sexton drafted her final book in two and half weeks during January of 1973. Two of those days were spent in a mental hospital, where she spoke with a priest. She told him she wasn’t sure if she believed in God. “I can’t go to church,” she said. “I can’t pray.” She wished to take communion but knew that she could not. She feared formal conversion: “It would ruin, it would formulate, my thinking: I’d want Him to be my God, anyway. I don’t want to be taught about Him; I want to make him up.”
The priest read Sexton’s drafts aloud to her. “Your typewriter is your altar,” he said.
Meditations from Alan Jones
What follows is Alan Jones meditating with Anne Sexton and giving us all a chance to do our dying and rising. All last week I ran into people who can’t help but think the whole country is dying and about to rise again. I thank God for people who can carry others who are sunk in depression. Enjoy Jones.
“Ironically, the Virgin Birth was insisted upon in the early years because there were those who said that Jesus wasn’t really human. He was some heavenly being. Mary was the guarantee that Jesus was really one of us. This crude insistence on the material is emphasized in the Gospel [as in the quote from John above]…
Think for a moment of Mary. She has just said Yes! To the baby, to the longed-for unknown. She contemplates the future stretching from her belly, and her own stretching by the child that will be born. It is a common experience for mothers. It is a metaphor that others in our culture need to appropriate – both men and women. Giving birth is an ordeal, and we, pregnant with God, are to give birth to a new understanding of ourselves. We are called to assist at our own birth. I know of no greater adventure. I know of no other way to describe it but as an ongoing drama of resurrection. The love letters never cease to amaze me.
George Emery, an old friend and expert in Christian mythology, sent us a Christmas poem not long ago about Mary as a sign and promise of new life breaking out in us.
To understand ordeals underground
Following the footsteps of the Lord
Into our own identity
Is difficult. As a new baby
Finds his mother to be another,
And she is a new person,
Mary saw God in her son,
Beholds him still for us
Both there and on the cross.
This describes our inner pilgrimage. It is an underground ordeal into the mystery of who we are. Through the agency of others we become new persons. Anne Sexton contributed to the bundle of love letters when she wrote,
Oh, Mary
Gentle Mother,
open the door and let me in.
A bee has stung your belly with faith.
Let me float in it like a fish.
Let me in! Let me in!
I have been born many times, a false Messiah;
but let me be born again
into something true. (From The Awful Rowing Toward God)
We follow the footsteps of our Lord into our own identity…to be born again and again and again. What freedom there is in my not having to be my own messiah!”
It may embarrass some people to hear the poet say: “in the spoon and the chair that cry ‘hello there, Anne’ each morning.” It is so something, so immediate, so heartfelt! So many of us have our faith stuck in a mental construct; we’re arguing about principles in our head and fearing we don’t have it all right yet so we better not commit. Our silverware is certainly not talking to us! Others of us are trapped in a “worldview” that is a bit more human, but is still a philosophical construct by which we compare and contrast who we are with others and from which we draw a politically sanctioned identity, so we think sorting that out is about all the meaning we get — and all we do is sort. We would certainly think twice before we announced to the public that we were overcome with joy this morning at breakfast! It just wouldn’t fit the self-concept.