Some years ago I was privileged to translate the diaries of 20th-century Italian mystic Blessed Maria Crocifissa Curcio. In her writing, Curcio often refers to the “lights” given to her in prayer. This word, “lights,” seems to be a way of describing an experience of receiving God’s wisdom and love. While we often pray with our eyes shut tight, and receive no vivid message from our creator, just sometimes our prayer is illuminated. We receive a flash of what God intends, or sense the fire of his love. These lights can illuminate our lives and days far beyond the experience of one prayer.
We can also find such lights in this sonnet by the Victorian poet Lionel Johnson. The speaker of the poem is in Bagley Wood, an ancient woodland near Oxford — somewhere we might think of as a metaphor for the quiet darkness of prayer. Reading the poem, we feel as if we were in the wood with him. He asks us to listen to the birdsong and to breathe the smell of frankincense, which is surely meant to conjure a mystical experience rather than real forest smells! And there are also those mystical lights — “fires august” and “lights eternal” — that might represent a glimmer of personal revelation, a flash of the Lord’s wisdom. The father of the faith, Abraham, springs to the speaker’s mind: He’s gripped with the sense of that patriarch’s mighty nearness to God. But the speaker knows that the passion of his own peace will dissolve as soon as he leaves the wood.
Lost purity
It’s a relatable experience: The peacefulness and coherence of feeling connected to God don’t necessarily stay with us. The lights, in some way, fade. Our desires and preoccupations often ruin us. The poet knows that the purity of the natural world and the purity of Edenic prayer have been taken from us by our fallen nature, that, somehow, we lack the spiritual maturity to really enter into the beauty of Bagley Wood. Our desires, he is saying, so often strain against the calm order of holiness and the natural world. We disrupt. We pollute.
An appeal to heaven
The second stanza of the poem is like a prayer — a petition to live within God’s light. It alludes to heaven and to the purification we have to go through to stand before the face of God. As the poet rightly says in the penultimate line, having the holiness to stand in that light is about divinization, about becoming more and more like that light.
What strikes me about both the mystic Maria Crocifissa Curcio and this Victorian poet is how they bring their experience of God’s light into the world. Blessed Maria worked with the poor, and the religious order that she founded evangelizes all over the world to this day. And Catholic convert Lionel Johnson gave us his own testimony of illumination through his writing.
Poet and mystic both, in different ways, take the fire of God in their hands and go out into the world to illuminate it.
Bagley Wood, by Lionel Johnson
The night is full of stars, full of magnificence:
Nightingales hold the wood, and fragrance loads the dark.
Behold, what fires august, what lights eternal! Hark,
What passionate music poured in passionate love’s defence!
Breathe but the wafting wind’s nocturnal frankincense!
Only to feel this night’s great heart, only to mark
The splendours and the glooms, brings back the patriarch,
Who on Chaldean wastes found God through reverence.
Could we but live at will upon this perfect height,
Could we but always keep the passion of this peace,
Could we but face unshamed the look of this pure light,
Could we but win earth’s heart, and give desire release:
Then were we all divine, and then were ours by right
These stars, these nightingales, these scents: then shame would cease.
