Review: Poetry of the seeking soul
(iStock)The results of any search for tourist destinations will likely include lists that offer beauty, culture and attractions for a top-tier vacation. Tourists, after all, travel for pleasure, usually in a foreign place, to experience living in a different locale. A tourist who is out of time, though, approaches the end of his trip and must return home soon.
This is how the Rev. David May describes himself through his poems, choosing this description—a tourist out of time—for the title of his collection. Containing 50 poems that span 50 years, May’s collection mines the moments and memories of his time as a member of the Madonna House apostolate and what he saw, did and experienced as a tourist seeking more than simple attractions.
Before reading May’s poems, it is necessary to know about the “backdrop” of his poetry, which he describes as the liturgy, nature’s seasons and community life as a member of the Madonna House Apostolate. Being a member of this apostolate is the way May has lived, or the path he has walked, since he entered in 1974. A Catholic community of laymen, laywomen and priests who live out promises of poverty, chastity and obedience, its members seek to live a “hidden life” like that of the Holy Family of Nazareth.
Servant of God Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896-1985), the community’s founder, established the “Little Mandate” that guides members of Madonna House, entreating members to “Love, never counting the cost” and to “Be hidden.” De Hueck Doherty was raised Orthodox in Russia, married as a teenager, worked as a nurse during the First World War and then was exiled after the Communist revolution of 1917. In 1919 she was received into the Roman Catholic Church.
She became a mother after she and her husband fled to Toronto, but the emotionally abusive marriage was later annulled. At this point, de Hueck Doherty felt a deeper call to live the Gospel more radically, which she did first in Toronto’s slums, then in an interracial apostolate in Harlem. Eventually, in 1955, she and her second husband, Eddie Doherty, moved to Combermere, Ontario, where Madonna House (as it is still known today) began.
No matter where she was, she attracted others who wanted to emulate her in living a more radical form of the Gospel. David May was one of those people who joined Catherine and Eddie in Combermere. After his first visit to Madonna House in 1972, May later returned to become a full member.
His collection of poems traces the early days of his life as a poet and seeker. In his preface to the book, May says that “before I ever wrote my first poem I was already a poet by nature.” He adds that “writing [poetry] has become a means of coming home not only to God but to myself.” The preface also explains that, for some, a spiritual autobiography like St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul, or a novel like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or a journal or another form of artwork might be the way a person tries to express how the hand of God has guided their lives; for May, writing poetry is his attempt at this.
The collection starts with two early poems from May’s high school days. The next section follows the “inward journey” of May’s first years at Madonna House, working as a cheesemaker on the community farm. His first stop as a tourist, then, was to learn how to be away from home and the comfort of his previous life. In the poem “Jesus in Nazareth” from this section, he observes, “Nazareth affords so few distractions.[…] We falter here, fail, strain, collapse.” He must become littler, like a child, he sees. As with Dante, the first step must be a descent, in a sense.
During these years, May began to hear a call to the priesthood, and was ordained in 1981. While in seminary, he served in Madonna House communities in the Canadian province of Alberta and in Arizona. Continuing his journey as a tourist and seeker, his poems from this time present what he saw, especially in the poor he was serving.
One poem, “To the Morning Star,” is directed to the Virgin Mary, imploring her as a mother to help her children struggling with addiction or difficult home lives. The poem’s middle section shifts its focus from specific stories of despair to statements: “We cannot give hope but only hope./ We cannot give love but only love./ We cannot give faith but only believe.” Then, turning toward Mary and including himself as one in need, the speaker begs: “Behold your children journeying still./ Pray for us at the crucial hour./ Mother, mantle us till we reach home.” This recognition of one’s own poverty persists in the poems throughout the rest of the collection.
Dealing with burnout after 15 years of priesthood, May was sent to the community’s mission in England. In the poem “English Night,” there is a sense of surrender and admission of poverty. The speaker says to God, “No more resolutions, Lord” and says he won’t even offer his heart because he has seen it for what it is. All that he has left is “a cry now/ rising from parched places.” What he has seen and experienced during these years leads him to seek refuge in Christ’s wounds.
In a poem titled “The Open Wound,” this is even more poignantly expressed. The speaker claims:
I keep to my duties still,
But underneath I am savage and naked,
Like a man torn to shreds on a beam,
Every fiber soaked crimson,
His life given freely to every taker
So great the thirst for union.
Just a few pages later (though two years later, according to the dates provided with each poem), this desire to love and to give oneself away is not less urgent but embraces a wider view. In “The Price of Sparrows,” the speaker “walk[s] with Christ down country lanes” and “hike[s] with Christ in the woods,” wondering about who will receive the “baby sparrows” of the next generation. He heads home as evening comes on, as “Dusky arms hold [him] now.” No longer seeking to be embraced, he is the one offering embrace to others.
Yet the poems, like the spiritual life, do not settle for easy answers and recognize the seasons of desolation and consolation that are natural and necessary. A more recent poem from 2018, “Bankrupt,” for example, asks, “How go deeper unless you deepen me?/ How give greater unless you greater be?/ How be poured out, new wine perpetually/ If, Eternal Love, you be not drink for me?” Again, the poems present humility and poverty that recognize the need for God so that God can “pour out” through individuals to be bread for the world.
And yet, “Daily Bread,” one of the collection’s final poems, meditates on lines from the Our Father and implores:
Why is your bread so subtle, so simple and so light?
For such a hunger as we bear, plaguing us without end,
Like animals we cry out in fierce desperation,
And you give us dissolving wafers and a few token drops to drink....
The soul’s hunger does not go away, even with age and experience. May has learned this from his years of “so few distractions” in the Nazareth life of Madonna House.
The tourist in these poems acutely feels that hunger and is still seeking—for what will get him through each day in a foreign land, but most of all to return home. These poems of longing, of prayer and devotion, might remind us of Job or the Psalms of David. More than that, they remind us that we are all travelers here, seeking home. And as May writes in one of his “Unclaimed Verses,” which were written during years of intense work: “Poetry is no escape,/ But magnifies the real—/ Mercy for the blind.”
May’s poems certainly magnify the cry of every seeking soul—for home and for the Father.
The latest from america
