![]() ![]() If that doesn’t jolt us upright in the pews on a Sunday morning, nothing will. No, it is one that takes on board novelty and variegated theological concepts, and hurls us out into a voyage of discovery, heady with risk, but finally safe because we are sailing God’s seas. It is a vast rondure swimming in space, a cosmic whole, a glorious example of divine handiwork.Īs to the spiritual journey itself, it is not a regression to the doctrinal niceties of our individual faiths, a crystallisation of exclusivism. In ecological terms, the world is not ours to rape, pillage, and poison. We need to awaken our sense of the wholeness of humanity. Nor can we build a worthwhile world spiked with religious intolerance, racial discrimination, and over-zealous nationalism. We must spiritualise our being and creativity. We cannot live on the accolade of our materialistic achievements alone. This agonised and gifted poet has much to tell us 21st-century voyagers. ![]() No matter how fearful and disillusioning the voyage of life may be, ultimately all will be well. Then come the poem’s closing words, which I have used many times in sermons. Nevertheless, we must break free from the chains of the past and set out intrepidly in the search for God. ![]() Yes, there is joy, peace, laughter, kisses, and song, but there are doubts and fears, too, as he confronts the unknown. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of the voyage. So enticing is this dream that his soul is elated and raring to go. “ Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and Whither O mocking life?” For Whitman, the way forward lies in a unity of Nature and humankind - a fusion of the vast sweep of world history into a spiritual oneness. Two pressing questions emerge from this vision like a haunting refrain. Indeed, mankind’s ceaseless voyaging reveals a world of incredible beauty in which God’s hand is descried. “Passage to India” was a child of his tortured soul.įor Whitman, the spiritual journey incorporated not only the primal sources of Christianity, but also the core of all ancient religions. During the American Civil War, he nursed the injured, tirelessly emerging from the carnage vowing to live a “cleansed” life, epitomising the New America that was coming to birth.įROM THIS fecund mix came a poet whose radical free verse seethed with visceral images of politics, race, slavery, patriotism, love, and pantheism. In the 1970s, the gay- liberation movement adopted him as a poet and icon. He extolled homosexual love so blatantly that a number of poems were banned. Walt Whitman grew up to be of bearded and shaggy appearance, modelling himself on Christ, though wearing a rakish wide-brimmed hat and outlandish clothes. His brother was institutionalised, his sister endured a disastrous marriage, and his younger brother took to drink, married a prostitute, and died young. Walt Whitman was born on Long Island on, into a profoundly dysfunctional family, the son of an alcoholic Quaker carpenter. So the passage to India is transformed into a symbolic journey into the heart of God. The soul, “that actual me”, must venture beyond engineering feats towards a spiritual union with the divine. Overtly it is a paean to humankind’s mastery in forging the canal, laying a transatlantic cable, and completing the Union Pacific railroad.ĭig deeper, and the poem blossoms into a spiritual journey impelled forward by a surging optimism, and incandescent with religious conviction. It revolutionised the mercantile world, and fired the American poet Walt Whitman to immortalise the occasion with his poem “Passage to India”. The last DIVOT was dug and the Suez Canal opened to shipping on 17 November 1869. ![]()
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