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Bonebound Spirituality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Peter Phillips
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Extract

The hall-mark of a genuine spirituality must lie in the honest recognition of our rootedness in the world of matter. It is the theme of poets as various as John Donne and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps in Donne we find its chief expression in the Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sickness of 1624, but it is present as the background of many of his poems:

To our bodies tume we then, that so Weake men on love reveal’d may look;

Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,

But yet the body is his booke.

Dylan Thomas refers to Donne with approval and comments in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson in similar vein:

Through my small bonebound island I have learnt all that I know, experienced all and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart.

This rootedness is our greatest glory. It must drive us towards engagement with the stuff of creation, in contrast to a spirituality which offers us ways of putting up with things as they are.

This suggests a spirituality which must face up to the concrete particularity of our daily life. As Jon Sobrino has remarked recently:

The ‘being human-with-spirit’ that will measure up to reality’s cargo of crisis and promise, that will unify the various dements of reality in such wise that reality be, in the event, more promise than crisis, is what I call spirituality.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 839 , June 1990, pp. 297 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 John Donne, ‘The Extasie’.

2 A letter of October 1933, cited in Poet in the Making, The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, ed. Ralph Maud, Dent 1968, p. 27.

3 Sobrino, Jon, Spirituality of Liberation, Orbis 1988, p. 46Google Scholar.

4 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, vol 2, SCM, p. 42Google Scholar.

5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘God's Grandeur’, Poems, Oxford, 1967Google Scholar.

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13 See Morran, Elda & Schlemmer, Laurence, Faith for the Fearful, Durban, 1984Google Scholar.

14 See Chikane, Frank, No Life of My Own, CIIR, 1988, p. 114Google Scholar.

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18 Yeats, W.B., ‘The Second Coming’, Collected Poems, Macmillan, 1982Google Scholar.