If you had a crucial—potentially life-changing— message to relay to a large number of people, how would you do it?
Usually, the more important the content, the more straightforward we tend to be in our speech and in our approach, right? Many of us would not take the time for elaborate stories and abstract connections. And yet, this is exactly the route Jesus took. He appealed to our hearts directly and intimately; he relied on his hearers latching on and emotionally investing in his message through connections to nature, their livelihoods, their frustrations, and their sense of justice.
In his newly released book of poetry, Tourist out of Time: Fifty poems from fifty years, Father David May of the Madonna House Apostolate bears his heart open wide: a shepherd’s heart that is rife with compassion and a gut-deep faith in God’s hand in the everyday. Sprinkled throughout his poetry, the reader sees also the vulnerability that is our mutual lot, along with the hunger that perpetually stalks the human heart in search of God.
“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…
Then one day its fire consumed me,
And I became your bread for many,
And you my red wine.” -Daily Bread, 2022
Tourist out of Time is brought to us by the poet’s habitual, acute attention to that which many of us overlook, including subtle emotions and ennui. His poems evoke familiarity; in them we acknowledge the freedom found in doing the duty of the moment despite grief, loneliness, or even fleeting glimpses of glory.
We all sometimes pass up the holiness at hand for the holiness we seek. Becoming a saint is closer than we think, Father May insists. In fact, it’s as close as a brother across the table.
“Sometimes I want to break out.
I dream, casually, of those dramatic shores
Bathed in sea mists concealing everything
In a blanket of silver solitude…
But a voice snaps me out of it: “Your deal!”
So I pick up the deck and start shuffling.
Where brothers abide, so does blessing.” -Leaving Poustinia, 2001
Since 2016, Father May has lived out his priesthood as a poustinik, which is a Russian type of hermit. The community’s foundress, Servant of God Catherine Doherty, was Russian herself. Madonna House currently has 14 houses globally, among these are “listening house” apostolates wherein the chief mission is listening to whomever comes their way as an offering of radical hospitality and presence to one’s neighbour. In Father May’s poetry, we can hear the heart of this apostolate. We can hear him grasping to live out the Father’s longing to accompany his children in their anguish and suffering:
“Dusky arms now hold me— evening,
Time to head home.
There the children are all waiting,
Struggling, striving to stand up,
Then falling again to the floor.
Perhaps I will pick one up
And say, “It will be alright.”
I mostly believe it myself,
Having watched sparrows in woods.” -The Price of Sparrows, 2003
Jesus, the Lord of time, took on flesh and subjected himself to the passage of time and its fleetingness. With so much to say and such a short time to say it, he allowed his words to meander into the realm of contemplation, the intimately familiar, and the seemingly mundane.
This tells us so much about the “efficiency” of love. The Lord has not made loving efficient. To enter into the heart of another and to truly attempt to accompany them, we must be willing to be childlike. Stories and poems are like cool breezes on a hot day; without them how do we find refreshment for the journey? How do we breathe life into those heart-places that are dead from lives of productivity and efficiency?
Listening is the single most impressive and life-changing action of the Christian. When we listen to the other, we discover the strength of the human need to be heard and beheld by loving eyes. We will learn, too, the complete devastation that ensues where there is no one to listen. In service to the emotional needs of others, we come to realize that we are all very poor and hungry before God, although some of us are able to hide it a bit better than others for a time. To become a Christian worth his stripes, we must know hunger.
“Now I am only these—
Hunger gaping and thirst unquenched,
An inconsolable child—cold, so cold.
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 freely given to every taker
So great the thirst for union.” -The Open Wound, 2001
Tourist Out of Time can be purchased online at the Madonna House Publications website publications.madonnahouse.org. Father David May is also a regular columnist in Restoration, the Madonna House newspaper: madonnahouse.org/tag/fr-david-may.
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