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Timothy Murphy — a Catholic Sufi

Daniel Haar looks at Tim’s religious verse through a Muslim lens

Profession, profit, trade are what we’ve burned;
Song, poetry, and verse are what we’ve learned;
We’ve given heart and soul and sight to love
And heart and soul and sight are what we’ve earned.

— Jalal al-Din Rumi (trans. Dick Davis)

I first met Timothy Murphy through an online poetry community, Eratosphere. Tim told me flat out that my verse needed much work. But he was happy to correspond with me over email in an effort to lift my verse out of the 19th century. Around the same time, Tim experienced a spiritual crisis, and I began to explore the Muslim faith of my girlfriend and future wife. Thus, the subject of our notes moved from Yeats and Frost to St. John of the Cross and Rumi. Tim introduced me to the theology of von Balthasar, and I showed him the writings of al-Ghazali. We both began experimenting with devotional (and even spiritual) verse, though Tim had the advantage of having already mastered the lyric – Tim’s ear was attuned to the divine rhythms even when he knew it not.

Since our virtual meeting, I have met Tim in person. Two years ago Tim came to the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC to recite several of his poems and a section of the Beowulf, which he had co-translated with Alan Sullivan. With his rich, sonorous voice, he sounded just like a bard of old, or at least how I imagine one. Whether these experiences give me a unique perspective on Tim’s recent journeys or not, I will try to understand them in light of my own spiritual understanding, which I have learned through books of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam. A Sufi (which I cannot claim to be, though I am a Muslim) would be the first to say that spiritual enlightenment cannot be reached through book learning. A book is at most a map; it is the destination which matters. I live in Washington, and I hold maps of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, let’s speak of Jerusalem!

From God we come, and to Him do we return. This phrase is often on the lips of the Sufis. Sufis are those who have become aware of the vast distance separating themselves and God but strive to bridge that gap. They believe that life’s journey is circular. We are born in perfect submission to God, but drift away as we become caught up in affairs of the world. A Sufi is one who has rounded the opposite side of the circle, and has turned back toward his true home with God, which may be far off yet. Tim Murphy is akin to the Sufis. He has been, and still is, somewhat of a wanderer, physically and spiritually. In one of his most memorable verses he speaks of a life (and heart) split between farm and sea:

Elsewhere… what is its lasting charm
for a creature in misery?
A fisherman longs for the landlocked farm
its tenant would trade for the sea.

Elsewhere... perhaps neither “where” completely satisfies because the true longed-for place is more heavenly than those contemplated in the poem. But this realization has not come quickly for Tim.

Tim, not satisfied with blind belief, began his spiritual wanderings early in life, as he wrote in “The Reversion”, the third part of his poetic series “Antiphonal Responses”:

Born to go astray,
I fled the Catholic fold
when I was twelve years old,
a lamb who ran away,
prey to the wolves, the cold.

In the meantime, this “stray lamb” has been a sometimes poet, farmer, lover, businessman, drinker, and sailor. But, like the waves of the sea, his fortunes in each of these endeavors have been up and down, as many of his poems have attested to. And yet, some forty years later, he is finding his way back to the Church of his Irish forbears, and the poem finishes on an auspicious note:

My shepherd piped me home
Filing into a pew,
I learned what Caesar knew:
all roads lead to Rome
where wolves are mothers too.

Though such a religious turn requires the guidance of the shepherd’s song, it could not happen without enough awareness to differentiate that pure music from the world’s din. Essentially, this turn requires self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s heart. As al-Ghazali wrote:

Knowledge of self is the key to the knowledge of God, according to the saying: “He who knows himself knows God”…[R]eal self-knowledge consists in the following things: What are thou in thyself, and from whence hast though come? Whither art thou going, and for what purpose hast thou come to tarry here awhile, and in what does thy real happiness and misery consist? Some of thy attributes are those of animals, some of devils, and some of angels, and thou hast to find out which of these attributes are accidental and which essential. Till thou knowest this, thou canst not find out where thy real happiness lies.

— from The Alchemy of Happiness, (trans. Claud Field)

Timothy Murphy has begun this difficult, and truly heart-wrenching, struggle of discerning what is essential within him, and what must finally be cast off. To this end, he has become a confessional poet. In his terse and pointed poem “Case Notes” a psychiatrist observes of his patient (presumably the author):

Allured by verse and drink
when he was just sixteen,
turned to drugs at Yale,
patient began to think
people would see a ‘queen’—
scrawny, friendless, frail—
a “queer” condemned to fail.

The doctor here has singled out verse, drugs, and sexuality as possible sources of the patient’s woe. So which, if any, of these are essential to Tim? Poetry, especially in the hands of a confessional poet, can be used a vehicle for despair. But Tim does not display his sins to no end. In “How Shall I Drink” Tim writes:

When you are sick and drunk,
the ones to whom you lie
are those who love you most

By acknowledging his sins, he can move past them. The craft of poetry, properly pursued, is thus no sin at all, but rather part of the cure. Intoxicants, on the other hand, such as alcohol are considered sinful by Muslims, because they destroy the mind, which is humanity’s essential attribute. An alcoholic, Tim is now courageously battling the demon of addiction. In keeping with this sober purpose of these verses, Tim often employs a lean trimeter, almost completely bare of rhythmic and linguistic ornament, much less playful than the characteristic Murphy style of his previous books. There is hardly a metaphor in sight in these lines, and the only metric variations are the occasional initial headless iambs or trochee substitution. This leaves sexuality; but whatever traditional religious teachings might say, I cannot condemn Tim’s profound and committed love for another man, fellow poet and seafarer Alan Sullivan. God sends human love into the world as a sign of His all-encompassing love, as Tim has come to realize, having written of himself as an adolescent in scout camp in “Cross-lashed”:

Summits would loom above
the stony trails I trod.
Sex led me to love;
love bound me to God.

Tim Murphy’s religious poetry is by no means limited to the confessional mode. It is commonly said that the heart is the spiritual eye, the locus of one’s sixth sense. But truly the heart contains the sixth through tenth senses, as each sense has an outward and inward dimension. The journey back to God requires the occasional “shutting off” of the five outward senses, to allow cultivation of the next five, especially the “inner” ear in the case of a mystic poet. God is thought to have created the world through his Word, Be! This pure, creative music of God’s Word is that shepherd’s song we all seek. In “Prayer for Sobriety,” part II of “Antiphonal Responses”, I detect echoes of this beautiful music that Tim is starting to hear himself:

Here is the sacramental cup we drink,
here the unleavened loaf on which we dine,
deliverance from the sins to which I sink.
Here is the book, the work of my Divine
Redeemer at whose Word the worlds revolve.
Let me return His passion with resolve.

And Tim is perfecting his inner vision too. Sufis differentiate between spiritual states and stations. The former are brief bursts of clarity freely given by God, while the latter are permanent advancements of the soul, achieved after devoted effort on the part of the spiritual aspirant. Toward the beginning of spiritual quests, mystics will often experience the former, as God wishes to foreshadow the beauty to come. In “Cross and Veil,” Tim describes a childhood experience he now recognizes to be a vision of the divine:

I grew up with Aurora Borealis,
though in Walhalla they were “Northern Lights”
that flickered through the brief summer nights.

Here Tim has returned to the light-footed, dancing mode of many of his lyric gems, yet with a spiritual gravity lately learned. But whatever he has seen, he recognizes there is much experience left to be gained:

Some sights my love and I have never seen—
the Southern Cross beyond the shimmer-screen
mariners named Aurora Australis.
I doubt Le Dieu Soleil will ever fail us
but dread the day the Son of God shall call us.

Perhaps you realize I have skirted a pretty large issue. How can a Muslim praise one returning to the Catholic faith? In the Qur’an, the holy book of the Muslims, it is written,

And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus the son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing. So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein.

— Qur’an 5:46 (trans. A.J. Arberry)

So to me, Muslims and Christians and Jews are truly brothers before God. Though separated by some doctrinal disputes, we all follow books graven with the pen of prophesy. The paths to God are many: To you be your way, and to me mine, as it is also written in the Qur’an, (109:6, trans. Yusuf Ali). Keep to your path, Tim. Insha’allah, you will reach your journey’s end.