Postlude?

My interlude has luded long enough. But it's late tonight and I procrastinated, so I'll finish my Oxford saga tomorrow, when I can use that to procrastinate from my dissertation reading. (When do I do my diss reading? When I have a report to write, of course! As some wiseacre said, you know you're a grad student when you procrastinate on one project by working on another.)

Meanwhile, something good I found over at dotCommonweal today, thanks to the IC link. (*waves* Hi, Margaret!)

"This Sunday’s Gospel, continuing the consecutive reading of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, contains the statement of Christ in response to the grumbling crowd: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” (I note in passing that the politically correct “I Am the Bread of Life” has transmogrified this into “unless the Father beckon”, apparently in order to avoid the masculine personal pronoun.)

In their commentaries on this statement, Augustine and Aquinas explored at some length how to reconcile the fact that faith must be free and the statement that no one can come to Christ (which means believe in him) unless drawn dragged, pulled by the Father. Both of the saints point out that the verb implies some degree of violence. If one has to be dragged to Christ, how can faith be free?

By pure coincidence, while thinking about my homily for this Gospel, I read an article in the London Tablet by Fr. Daniel O’Leary which ends with his quoting some lines from Denise Levertov’s poem “The Thread.” I was delighted to see how Christ’s metaphor informs the whole of what I take to be her description of her poetical and religious journey:

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven’t tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone."