Lloyd Haft
Soundings
Poems on New Testament Texts
April 2013
[These are my own very free
English renderings of poems that originally appeared in Dutch in the magazine Liter, nos. 16, 35-38, and 40 in 2001-2005. For technical reasons,
the Introduction appears at the end of the whole series.]
Word
of a New: After St. Paul
I.
On Colossians 1:24-27 and 1:14-19
We suffer the one
becoming
letting our flesh
conceive or clasp
the rumor that is warm
about us:
one we are becoming
is within us, in us,
wider in birth than all
the wounds we were.
The one we are becoming
is the one that dies to
death
living us on and over,
on to the earth of
other, which is joy.
II.
On 2 Corinthians 12:9
Ever it is in me
the one becoming says
abundantly
you are, in me.
Abyss we saw between us
is our place Now, of
light.
Wherever I thought to
hide my face
I’m shying into sight –
every Now a clearing,
a nearing of the one
becoming.
III.
On Ephesians 4:7-13
In and out of each of
us
is given all,
all of the one
becoming,
called in our writings
Risen,
clasping who were kept
alone,
holding who were held
apart
for what is risen other
than of down and in and
with? –
reaching to the full,
the body of becoming,
tallest in its telling
of our provenance of
love,
telling all together
in the love we limn.
IV.
On 1 Corinthians 13:12
We stare into our
darkness
as a mirror, call it
Now,
not saying the name,
not knowing the name,
the later,
wider face of We –
We that we’ll be known
as
where we’re known, home
in the length of every limb.
V.
On Philippians 3:10-12
May that be where I’m known:
where all of me is
known to suffer
one becoming
coming forth,
party to a death that
brings together.
Becoming brings
together
out of death. We touch
the We
wherever we are
touched.
VI.
On Colossians 2:9-12, 14
There in the one
becoming
is the fulness of the
living
where to live is to be
known
and to be going,
be come along in every
limb
before beginnings,
after all the answers,
not departing out of
flesh
but undergoing what is
ever going,
going on and over every
word of man
that ever did forbid
us.
Soundings 1
[Mattthew 1: 1-17]
Our workings, our
wrestings
are knowings from ever.
Ours was the name, ours
the sense
the fathers, mothers
suffered.
Not in one of all the
lives
was longing not along.
The generations brought
us
this longing that
wrought us.
[Luke
1: 26-35]
A virgin longing
on beyond the ties and
bonds
in all the shames and
shadows.
Ever is longing on
beyond all shame.
Ever in shadow comes
the voice
no law has ever led:
‘Give. Give me.’
We carry through, we
hand along
a felt, a heard,
a shadowing of longing.
[Luke
9: 23-24]
We that the image falls
upon,
weighs upon –
we walk with it,
talk in its direction,
try to keep the measure
of the one we are
becoming.
Day by day we shove or
cast
God’s shadow out ahead.
[Mark 4: 30-32]
What’s in us is
a mustard seed,
of all our seed
the most invisible –
until the bird
discovers us
and roots us up.
We’re the ones whose
branches,
whose leaves the birds
of heaven come
to earth to find:
shadow that they need.
[Matthew
13: 3-7, 24-29]
Our image as a seed:
in trash along a
roadside,
on gravel,
in thorns.
But once the seed is
broken –
is opened! –
there is another in it:
an ugly one along,
a with us in becoming,
an also-comer in us, by
us, through.
[Mark
2: 1-12]
‘Am I bad, or am I mad?’
Which is lighter,
which more light?
The one we are becoming
lights,
shows us through,
knows us through,
is us through
whichever.
[Luke
12: 49-53]
‘I come to bring not
peace
but light.’
Clarity: you are the fire;
you’re also someone’s
brother, someone’s
weak sister.
Faltering father, mute
mother?
–
you are the fire.
Soundings
2
[Matthew
16: 13-19; John 2: 14-21]
Who shall we say it is
we are becoming?
a witness only?
reborn only
living again the life a
dead one did?
Can flesh and blood
believe they are
the longed-for, still
awaited?
And after all the years
the temple’s waited –
who can see the body
standing here
and resurrected –
that sold itself so
long,
paraded here in hoofs
and wrinkled wings?
[Luke
10: 17-20; Matthew 18: 12-14]
Better than scaring
devils out of heaven,
stronger than stamping
poison bugs to earth
is knowing our
becoming,
even if it’s devils,
beetles we’ve become.
Slowly as the ugliest
of what’s along with
us, we go.
Far. Nothing stays
beyond us
where that mountain’s
under us.
Soundings 3
[Matthew 23: 37-39]
Not in the stony shadows
of a peace that will
not move, cannot lengthen
comes the one we are
becoming.
We come in longing’s
name –
the only one that still
will sound
where walls are all
long gone.
[Luke
17:23; Matthew 24: 26; Luke 17: 24]
Not here, not there,
not back in the desert,
not up front of all.
Nowhere is the bearer
of the light
except in coming,
the ever coming human
ever child.
[Luke 7: 34-35 and 15:
2-7]
Not with the ninety
highest wisest
counting all their
sands and selves away –
it’s in the inn of all
the lost
the one we are becoming
sups.
Joy is not a hideout in
the mountains;
it’s a winding of the
way:
every. And on the road
in every one of us
that search is found.
[Matthew 26: 26-29; I
Corinthians 11: 26]
The one we are becoming
takes us, holds us up
and broken as we are,
feeds us through all
falling,
all becoming:
all becoming body.
One becoming breathes
with us,
brimming, breaking over
into heart on heart that
cups the blood,
eye on eye that sees,
knows,
bodies one becoming.
Soundings
4
[Matthew 16:21]
Joined, bound to know,
to carry and to bear.
Held to the death that
brings together
into the wider knowing
we become.
[Matthew 27: 51-53]
Out of the graves we
stride
wherever the veil of
the holy of holies
holds no more,
holds no more together.
It holds together or it
is no hold.
Together where they
told us we were dead.
Where the one becoming
breathes with us,
leaves the sky behind
and falls,
falling in with us,
arisers
into the wider, deeper
vault
that is our Now.
[Mark 16: 9-11; Luke
24: 13-39 and 50-53]
Say you’ve stood it
all,
even death withstanding
–
who would understand?
Say you’ve changed your
form –
who here knows those
forms?
It’s where we long
together
we are seen,
seen to stay becoming.
Ours is the road the
one we are
appears if ever on,
speaking meager words
of ours,
asking who we’ll be.
Ours is the heart that
carries,
bears out warmth,
bids being.
More than in our
becoming
who’ll be known?
Soundings
5
[Matthew 11:12; Luke
16:16]
Joy so long was cloaked
–
hulked in laws,
hangings,
hung about in texts and
quotes,
debts and don’ts.
Where could lips still
open
where so much was to
recite,
rehearse,
renounce?
Lips that are before
all laws,
saying not restraining.
Joy is not a not,
it is our Now.
Joy is not thou must;
it is we meet.
[Mark
16: 1-3; Luke 24: 2-6 and 10-11]
Where we
come together,
we hesitate to see.
We stay behind,
expecting gates,
stones still standing
out in front
between us and our
other,
our joy, our one and
all-awaiting.
The one arising now
beyond
the places where we
waited.
On beyond all ways we
might have been.
Ever and on beyond is
longing,
never standing,
never waiting,
leaving ever all the
stones,
all the knowns behind.
[Luke 21: 32-33; Luke
12:40]
Nor shall our
generation pass away
before we see,
know there is a promise
here
aliver still than all
the heavens,
all the skies of all
the generations –
on beyond the last of
all surmises:
the longing reaching of
the human child.
Introduction[1]
‘Jesus Christ is always the same, yesterday,
to-day, and for ever.’[2] So we
read in chapter 13, verse 8 of the Epistle to the Hebrews which was
traditionally supposed to have been written by St. Paul Damascus
According
to the Epistle to the Hebrews (5:8-10), Jesus’ own life was also marked by a
process of development: ‘Thus, Son though he was, he learned by all he suffered
how to obey, and by being thus perfected he became the source of eternal
salvation...’[3]
Paul
never knew Jesus in ‘the days of his flesh.’ But he knew him thereafter, both
as an inner reality (‘...it is no longer I who live, Christ lives in me’ –
Galatians 2:20[4])
and in the incisive and transforming experience of fellowship. He described
this latter aspect – congregation or community – in outspoken bodily terms. In
various passages, he refers to the congregation as ‘Christ’s body,’ of which
the individual believers are ‘limbs’ or ‘members’ – in Ephesians 5:30,
according to the King James translation they are ‘members of his body, of his
flesh, and of his bones.’ In Ephesians 5:31-32, Paul quotes the words ‘and they
shall be one flesh,’ which in Genesis 2:24 referred to the relationship of
husband and wife, as a ‘great mystery’ which actually is applicable to the bond
between Christ and his church.
Here,
Paul was using a different definition of Christ’s ‘body’ from what would have
been normal in Jesus’ lifetime. But the new, communal definition did accord
very well with various things which, according to the Gospels, Jesus had said
about himself. We may recall Matthew 18:20, ‘where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,’[5] or John
17:20-23, in which Jesus prays to God the Father: ‘As thou, Father, art in me
and I in thee, so may they be in us...’[6]
According
to St. Paul
But
although St. Paul
What
if we did read the New Testament in that light? Then our ‘sharing his
sufferings’ (Romans 8:17) would turn out to be something in which we had always
already been involved. Then we could read 1 Corinthians 2:16, ‘we have the mind
of Christ,’[9]
in a radically concrete way, as indeed seems to be suggested by the
translations by Knox (‘Christ’s mind is ours’) and Moffatt (‘our thoughts are
Christ’s thoughts’). We would be taking seriously possible echoes or resonances
between our own inner life and Christ’s, even at the level of individual
thoughts and maybe even memories. Could this be a mode of fulfillment of Jesus’
prayer in John 17:23 – ‘that while thou art in me, I may be in them’[10] ?
This
is the line of thought that has inspired my versions, which I call ‘soundings.’
They are not intended to replace or compete with traditional translations –
only to make explicit certain possibilities which the New Testament clearly
raises but which mainline religion has in effect taught us to ignore.
In
my versions, the name ‘Jesus’ is not explicitly present. It is replaced by such
expressions as ‘the one becoming,’ ‘the one we are becoming,’ or ‘the
longed-for.’
Surely it is not disrespectful or
sacrilegious to regard our biblical tradition as a beloved yet perplexing heirloom,
which we as moderns may well have to struggle to feel at home with. The very
fact that we still trouble to do so (rather than, for example, to dismiss the
whole Bible as an ‘anthology of Ancient Middle Eastern literature’) proves that
to us its significance still goes beyond the ordinary. As far as I am
concerned, that significance remains a religious one, and I fully embrace the
words of the famous Bible translator James Moffatt in the preface (1913) to the
revised version of his translation: ‘...I hope...that the translation may fall
into the hands of some who know how to freshen their religious interest in the
meaning of the New Testament by reading it occasionally in some unauthorized
English or foreign version...’
[1] This introduction is a shortened adaptation of a version originally
published in Dutch as ‘Het Nieuwe Testament beluisterd’ in Liter 35, dec. 2004, pp. 6-8.
[2] Moffatt translation.
[3] Moffatt.
[4] Moffatt.
[5] King James translation.
[6] Moffatt.
[7] Knox translation.
[8] Moffatt.
[9] King James, also the New American Bible (1995).
[10] Knox.
