On Reading Jeremiah

And the Brothers Karamazov

In teenage years I sought a golden word
by which to live, an easy compact phrase.
Beset with doubts about myself and life,
I thought that if I only found one truth
and hung to it as to a golden ring,
I’d never fall; I’d know just what to do.

At seventeen, it came one heightened night:
”Be conscious!” Those two words, that’s all, no more.
Don’t ask me why, I can’t remember much,
I only know that Heinlein did the trick.
His hero, name of Valentine, from Mars,
had some odd knack of living in the now.
(We have that knack to thank for the verb grok.)
This so impressed a friend and me that we
determined to pay mind only to this.
Be conscious! It’s the key to everything!
One need but hold to this, remember this.
Be conscious, be alert, look all around.
Look—now—and in that looking feel such peace.

How simple that old maxim, and how dry;
how self-absorbed it’s come to seem to me.
What I saw was all life within my glance.
What I grasped, that was really all there was.
Be conscious? Yes, and let all gods go hang,
pay them no mind. Be Buddhist in a void.
Beyond my bubble there is nothing here.

Then I read Lamenations in the night,
though also, true, I had been reading deep
in Dostoevsky’s Karamazov tale—
The elder dead, dear Alyosha cries
for nothing but an onion given free,
then falls and kisses ground and weeps for life
and leaves his monastery for the world.
My heart was lifted far above its cage.
You know the passage if you’ve read the book.

Then picking up my lectionary page
I read what Jeremiah said to do
and instantly it seemed the rest of life
was stretching from this moment to its end.
I saw the path I’ve been on for some time
and saw that it is good and leads me true:
a path of friendships lived in common faith,
a clutch of mentorships, this way and that,
a search for service in each moment and
abandonment to each day’s daily bread—
and always to remember that the Lord
infuses, energizes every now,
that He and neither you nor I’s in charge,
that what we have is only in his gift
and what we do is give Him back again.

And with these thoughts I read the prophet’s words
and felt I’d found my golden phrase at last
that sixty years ago I’d sought and thought
I’d found. “Be conscious”? Better now, I think.
These words are what I read: “Pour out your heart
like water in the presence of the Lord.”

In sixty years, my heart has opened some,
and He and you have places in its hold.

(To be continued, maybe)

The words are from Lamentations 2, as found in the Catholic missal for Saturday, June 26. It is widely thought that the prophet Jeremiah wrote this Old Testament book.

I was not the only adolescent for whom Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land sang its siren song. My friend Gil and I read it some weeks before graduation and, after a star-drenched night on the shed roof outside his dorm room, we took to whispering between us what we believed to be its magic message, like some holy secret: Be conscious! Doing so did help assuage my adolescent angst, but I’m not sure it saved.

About the neologism grok Google’s AI overview told me, “While the literal translation is ‘to drink,’ Heinlein used it to represent the ultimate, empathic form of understanding. It describes absorbing reality so completely—like liquid sustaining a person—that the observer and the observed merge. To grok something goes beyond basic memorization or rational comprehension; it involves an intuitive, holistic merging of subject and object.”

It’s interesting to read this now, especially the business about “liquid sustaining a person,” given Jeremiah’s “pouring the heart, like water.” There may be depths here still to plumb. That’s why a sequel, maybe. God knows.

As for The Brothers K, I’m only reading it now in my seventies, after so many years and so many books. I think it’s an old man’s book. It was written at the end of Dostoevsky’s life.