Tiruvaymoli<\/em>), a long poem in the southern Indian Tamil language, generally dated from the sixth to nine centuries C.E. The point of connection between the two texts, and the point which is at the heart of Clooney\u2019s study, is the voice of an unnamed woman who pines for her absent beloved. In both cases, the respective rich commentarial Catholic and \u015ar\u012bvai\u1e63\u1e47ava traditions interpret the works analogically in theological terms of love between human and God.<\/p>\nOne<\/span> might be tempted to say that the similarities between the two selected poems end there, but Clooney invites his readers to look more closely. His project is to guide readers through a patient, careful reading of both texts as an exercise in risk-taking that promises to open one to a deepened sense of what it means to love God. This exercise is meant to happen in such a way that one is encouraged to remain grounded in one\u2019s own tradition\u2014whether Catholic, Hindu, or possibly another\u2014but the aim is to open oneself to \u201ctheopoetic\u201d experience. With the right spirit of patient and careful reading, this can happen by encountering the resonances and dissonances between these two expressions of love\u2019s unsettled nature. Such reading brings one away from the conventions of thought and practice that tend to circumscribe a religious tradition, and into the uncharted territory that the very particular love of God one pursues needs to inhabit in order to be truly a matter of love.<\/p>\nClooney<\/span> provides well-considered help along the way of such reading. First, there are three sets of selections from both poems, labeled respectively Act One, Act Two, and Act Three. Then, following each of the acts are \u201centre\u2019actes\u201d in which Clooney helps to unpack the poems more or less line-by-line, often drawing on the insights of early traditional commentators (Bernard of Clairvaux, Gilbert of Hoyland, and John of Ford, in the case of the Song; Nanjiyar and Nampillai for the Holy Word<\/em>). The Christian commentators affirm the Christian reading of the Song to be about a follower of Christ longing for his or her beloved, Jesus; the \u015ar\u012bvai\u1e63\u1e47ava commentators elaborate on how the woman longing for her beloved Krishna in the Holy Word<\/em> is the poet Nammalvar\u2019s expression of himself longing for God, identified generally as Krishna.<\/p>\nFurther,<\/span> the author draws on later writers\u2014the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and contemporary Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham. Individually and cumulatively, these artist-thinkers aid in the process of unsettling oneself, pointing implicitly to the possibility and even necessity of such an interreligious exploration as the present one, and helping to ensure that the effort does not devolve into theological reductionism. Rather, they help the reader to conduct the effort along \u201ctheodramatic\u201d registers of engagement with unpredictable divine encounter and absence that are also the basis and substance of a \u201ctheopoetics\u201d of interreligious language, meaning, and the limits of these.<\/p>\nClooney<\/span> notes several times that such an interreligious reading is fraught with risk, but it is the same risk that is intrinsic to authentic love: \u201cIf we are Christians, it is our love for Jesus that makes it so unsettling to hear of her [the woman in Holy Word<\/em>] love for Krishna; it is because we love that our love risks losing its innocence and its purity\u201d (87). Despite the risk, it will not do to retreat \u201cto the more stable theologies by which such traditions live\u201d (103). Rather, one must forge ahead, carefully: \u201cIn the face of all this, slow learning is at stake, and conceptual clarity ought not be the sole or first goal. We need also to preserve the wider imaginative and dramatic space won by our readings up to this point\u201d (105).<\/p>\nThe<\/span> wider imaginative and dramatic space that is won ultimately promises the discovery of deeper love: \u201cBut as we plunge deeper into both women\u2019s deep loves, it is also the case that the abandonment of passionate deeper truths becomes less likely than ever: we are lost, but we are caught; we are lost, because we love more, not less. Where innocence used to be, instead we find a rich and holy bewilderment, lament at the hiddenness of the beloved\u201d (63).<\/p>\nA<\/span> deep irony seems to emerge from the attempt to listen to the two women languishing for their respective lovers. In both cases, it is precisely the exclusivity of their loves that makes them what they are\u2014so intense and so fragile. And yet, the intensities and fragilities of these two loves are magnified and made more acute by the proximity created through parallel reading. Such magnification by juxtaposition inevitably brings the reader to re-examine his or her own location in terms of one\u2019s (religious\/devotional) love\u2019s exclusivity. In the case of the present author, as he declares from the outset, he is situated in the Catholic tradition. As he writes in the epilogue, this means for him that \u201cnothing matters more than Jesus, in the distinctiveness of his personhood, as the truth that is beautiful, right here; he is the beloved\u201d (140). And yet, such faith \u201cis a gentle song that does not deafen us to other such words of love, as if there are no other reports of the beloved, or as if one love defeats all others\u201d (141).<\/p>\nThis<\/span> affirmation of Jesus leads me, reading the book from a Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava Hindu perspective, to reflect on how the book\u2019s exercise might best \u201cwork\u201d for a careful reading by a Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava, for whom it is likely to be Krishna who is the all-in-all\u2014not just as Bhagav\u0101n, the absolute Lord, but as the embodiment of ever-expanding love that is ever surprisingly (and often playfully) enacted and just as painfully hidden from view. Suffice it to say here that one challenge for the Hindu might be to resist the temptation to settle for easy parallels as some sort of confirmation that \u201cit is actually the same thing.\u201d For the Hindu to experience a similar opening of space to the Catholic tradition of loving Jesus would require a similar readiness to be unsettled and to suspend a broadly Hindu (or neo-Hindu) tendency to enfold the other into the self. Rather, a Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava, true to Vai\u1e63\u1e47avism\u2019s insistence on the distinction between self and God that preserves relationship in bhakti <\/em>(devotion), would be called to extend the distinction to honor the different yet equally intense relationality between Jesus and those who regard him as their only beloved. To this end, a Hindu might want to search for Hindu (or more broadly Indic) resources\u2014serving in similar ways as Hopkins, von Balthasar, and Graham\u2014for thinking through the ramifications, or the possibilities and opportunities, that the reading together of the Song and Holy Word<\/em> could bring. To this end, the premodern north Indian bhakti<\/em> poets come to mind, especially Kabir, with his sharp words against sectarianism and religious pretensions. Also, as a possible counterpart to von Balthasar, one might look at the sixteenth-century Gau\u1e0d\u012bya Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava theologian and poet-playwright R\u016bpa Gosv\u0101min, with his extensive development of theopoetics rooted in classical Sanskrit rasa <\/em>(emotional relish) theory, as an aid to further appreciating the Song of Songs in juxtaposition with the Holy Word of Mouth<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe<\/span> author\u2019s purpose is, namely, to open up a space for the possibility of deepening love of God in the contemporary world, with its pluralistic forces for privatization or negation of specific religious sensibilities. As one would reasonably expect, however, His Hiding Place Is Darkness <\/em>seems to address mainly a Christian\u2014especially Catholic\u2014readership, which is surely well served by this careful reading of two similar yet disparate poems of sacred love. Yet, whether one identifies as Catholic, as Hindu, or as neither, readers are well challenged by this book to reflect deeply on the nature of love as such. Even from a purely secular perspective\u2014as Clooney hints in his discussion of Graham\u2019s poetry\u2014attentive readers may be enriched by such nuanced reflection on the nature of love in the juxtaposition of two theistic traditions. Indeed, one may well conclude that this work points the way to a practice of scriptural reading that is vital to the future well-being of a pluralistic society such as we live in today.<\/p>\nNotes<\/strong><\/p>\n[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology among the \u015ar\u012b<\/em>vai<\/em>\u1e63\u1e47avas of South India <\/em>(Albany: SUNY Press,1996); Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and \u015ar\u012b <\/em>Ved<\/em>\u0101<\/em>nta De<\/em>\u015bika on Loving Surrender to God <\/em>(Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Hare](\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/-2FiMhXcrr68\/WtHANEmIcBI\/AAAAAAAAjo0\/maykcocOvAcs4tIEdokwssRpVEu5nEoNQCHMYCw\/s0\/2018-04-14_11-40-58.jpg\")
By Krishna Kshetra Swami<\/strong><\/p>\n This affirmation of Jesus leads me, reading the book from a Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava Hindu perspective, to reflect on how the book\u2019s exercise might best \u201cwork\u201d for a careful reading by a Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava, for whom it is likely to be Krishna who is the all-in-all\u2014not just as Bhagav\u0101n, the absolute Lord, but as the embodiment of ever-expanding love that is ever surprisingly (and often playfully) enacted and just as painfully hidden from view. Suffice it to say here that one challenge for the Hindu might be to resist the temptation to settle for easy parallels as some sort of confirmation that \u201cit is actually the same thing.\u201d For the Hindu to experience a similar opening of space to the Catholic tradition of loving Jesus would require a similar readiness to be unsettled and to suspend a broadly Hindu (or neo-Hindu) tendency to enfold the other into the self. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61160,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61158\/revisions\/61160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n