An Interview with Paul Hooker

You begin with Peter Matthiessen’s quest to see a snow leopard. He never sees it. Was his quest a failure?

In the strict sense, yes. But “no,” because he learned the elusiveness of the Holy, and that suggests to me something about the freedom of the Holy. The Holy chooses when to reveal itself, and does so quite apart from our searching. Indeed, the Holy appears most often to people who are not searching for it, but are hip deep in quotidian tasks.

You cite Beldon Lane, who says the “Holy is seldom captured … where we seek it most.” Are we looking in the wrong places? Are we not supposed to look? Is the Holy ever “captured”?

I suspect seeking the Holy is not only proper but innate with us. Annie Dillard asks, “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying ‘hello?’” What is problematic is our expectation that we can control the revelation. If I attend worship expecting revelation, I am almost always disappointed. But if I simply engage in the business of living, who knows what might jump out of the bushes?

You say holiness darts for cover like trout. Why do you think it hides?

I think the Holy resists manipulation and capture. If there is anything I’ve learned from fly fishing, it is that the artful presentation of a fly does not determine whether a fish will strike. Whether the Holy makes its appearance is completely up to the Holy.

What’s the relationship between the Holy and God?

I resist the term “God” because I don’t like thinking of God in personal terms, as someone I could get to know, as though we went through sixth grade together. I am also squeamish about the notion that the Ultimate Reality Meister Eckart called Grund (the Ground) or Jewish esoterica calls ’Ein Sof (the Infinite) can be dichotomized into “God” and “not God.” From Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius to Annie Dillard and Beldon Lane, the mystics all think that at the heart of all things is a fundamental Singularity, a Oneness. I’m looking for language that’s impersonal and helps me get at that underlying Singularity. “The Holy” does that for me, and I particularly like it because of its history in the biblical narrative.

Your reticence to use “God” and move into poetry seems to be rooted in a profound sense that what we are gesturing toward transcends all understanding …

Yes. The mystics remind us that the Holy resists all knowing, that certainty about the Holy is not available to us. They also insist that all language about the Holy is metaphorical, and all metaphors are simultaneously both true and untrue. So, anything we say about the Holy we must also and immediately “unsay.” The “No” must always go along with the “Yes.” I’m fascinated by that constant tension between the kataphatic and the apophatic.

You cite the Heart Sutra, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” How is that meaningful?

It suggests that at the heart of all reality there is an emptiness that takes the form of whatever we are considering. I love the idea that at the core of things there is an emptiness that invites us to fill it with meaning. I think poems are a frame for emptiness, and readers fill them with their own meaning.

In “Annunciation” you envision Mary as choosing to believe the proclamation of her Magnificat with “ferocious power,” and invite us to do the same …

The Mary of my imagination fascinates me. I imagine Mary carrying a child whose origins she does not understand, and yet she somehow trusts those origins with ferocious power. I think I’m like that. Increasingly, I’m aware of how much of the Holy I don’t understand, and yet in spite of all my suspicions I trust the Holy ferociously. Even if Mary has no idea what is going on, she exhibits a fierce determination to birth this child. She trusts in whatever new reality will ensue, even if that reality will cost her everything. Mary intrigues me and beckons me to follow her to Bethlehem, and beyond.

Where did inspiration for “Annunciation” come from?

I remember one afternoon in my study watching dust motes float in rays of sunshine coming through the blinds. I found myself wondering whether the “angel” Mary saw was really dust motes in sunlight. Would that make the story less true, less compelling? In the end, what’s compelling about the story is the power of Mary’s faith and trust, not the details of angelic anatomy. And if Mary trusted, can I? Can we? Are we any less bewildered about where the life of faith is taking us, and any less called to follow nonetheless? Does the Holy encounter us in the intersection of bewilderment and trust?

How do “beauty and terror together comprise the Holy”?

Have you ever watched a sunrise set fire to the clouds, or been reduced to tears by a passage of music so exquisite as to seem ineffable? Facing true, ultimate beauty is a liminal experience: you peer into something beyond your ability to comprehend, let alone control. To experience something beyond your control is to confront your own finitude, your mortality. Beauty in this sense is the beginning of terror because when we confront our finitude, we confront the darkness at the edge of existence. For me, encounter with that mystery is encounter with the Holy.

So, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” …

Yes. Yir’ah in Hebrew means “fear,” “terror,” not “worship” or “reverence.” To know that the Author of ultimate beauty can also snuff out your existence seems to me to be the beginning of wisdom. Something like that is what I mean in saying that beauty and terror together may comprise the Holy.

Can you explain how hopelessness could be the purest form of hope in relation to the Holy?

When I talk about hope in a theological sense, I’m talking about yearning for the Infinite, about what I hope about the end of existence, mine and others.’ But if the mystics are right, one only approaches the Holy by stripping away, forgetting even one’s dreams about Ultimate Reality. That forgetting seems to me a synonym for hopelessness. If one can attain that hopelessness, one might just be in the presence of the Holy … if the Holy so chooses.

What are the three stages of the via negativa?

The first stage is the stripping away, purgation. The second stage is illumination, learning what one must come to understand. And the third stage is union with the divine. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is built on these three stages. Inferno is purgation, and so is the first half of Purgatorio. But then Dante begins to be illumined about what he must lay aside to move toward union in Paradiso. I like Purgatorio best, because purgatory is the only place with movement. Everybody in Inferno stays in Hell. Everybody in Paradisio stays in Heaven. Only in purgatory does anyone make progress. I almost wish Dante had stopped at the end of Purgatorio, at the moment when he finally understands something about the limitations of all life, including the limitations of love itself. Having understood that, Paradiso can only be a disappointment. That’s the “desolation of success” Matthiessen was talking about. It’s the reason my poetry stays in the realm of negation. Union with the Holy (what the Reformers call “glorification”) is unavailable to me in this life.

Your constant caution against closure connects to “Not the Point,” about your visit to the little star in that grotto in Bethlehem …

I suppose this poem is about symbols. After waiting two hours in the Church of the Nativity, I had only a brief moment at the place I had traveled so far to see. When I at last reached the grotto, I was, to put it mildly, disappointed. Perhaps in an effort to secure something from the experience, I bought my wife, Pat, a necklace from a nearby souvenir shop. And now, every time I see it on her dresser or when she wears it, that necklace stands for me as sort of icon, through which I see the grotto and the church and ultimately the Incarnation, which the necklace and grotto and church all symbolize. Symbols have strange powers.

Your next poem is “Hagar’s Prayer” …

I wrote this poem to feel what it’s like to watch your child die. It was an assigned piece for an Advent booklet, and that fact led me to connect Hagar to Mary. It’s not an obvious connection, I suppose, but now thinking about Hagar beside the bush in the wilderness always makes me think of Mary at the foot of the cross.

You say in your comment on this poem that “the Holy is death, but also life …”

The mystics, especially Jewish mysticism, understand that ultimately, all things are one thing, and that there is no distinction or separation within ’Ein Sof, the Infinite. Increasingly I think things we experience as opposites are ultimately one. What if at the liminal edge of our existence, light and dark, good and evil, life and death are one thing, not separate realities? I wonder whether, within the Holy, life and death are in truth one, and if the progression of time is ultimately one eternal moment. It’s that wonderment I am pointing to in this sentence.

Your final poem is “The Magi Recall the Star”

I owe inspiration here to T.S. Eliot’s classic, “The Journey of the Magi,” which I read every Epiphany. In Eliot’s poem, the magus who speaks is present at the birth of the child; he says, “this birth/ Was hard and bitter agony, like Death.” He returns to his palace, but he’s no longer at ease, and he concludes by saying, “I should be glad of another death.” That line intrigues me. What about the Holy incarnate in this child alters one’s interior landscape to such an extent that the life of honor and power is drained of meaning, leaving one wishing for “another death.” What is this death and this birth? And if I stand in the place of the poet, how is my life altered by the sight of the light in the dark eyes of the child?

Near the end you mention Gerard Manley Hopkins …

Hopkins’s wonderful poem “God’s Grandeur” ends with the awareness that the Holy Ghost broods over this whole bent world with “bright wings.” Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who taught and preached to people caught in horrendous industrial poverty, a poverty which eventually caused his own death from typhoid fever. And yet he could say in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” that “Christ plays in ten thousand places/Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his.” I wanted to situate this essay in the context of Matthiessen’s gritty realism—in the arthritic limbs of that monk, cold scientific rationalism and grinding poverty—and at the same time, with Hopkins, to see those bright wings, to remain constantly aware of the possibility that the Holy just might peek out at us through “eyes not his.”