This passage from John’s Gospel is deeply familiar but begs the question: how can any of us ever love another in the way that Jesus loves? It is not possible. We are flawed, we are broken, we are completely unworthy … and that’s on a good day!
And yet a contemporary disciple of Jesus, a believer and a profound thinker, Seamus Heaney, taught me that even in all our flaws when we love one another the impact is transformative.
You probably know of Heaney, the Northern Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry is so deeply personal and intimate that whenever I read him, I feel his words reaching right into my heart.
I want to show you this sonnet and how it reiterates this request from Jesus, to love one another as he has loved us.
In this sonnet, Heaney writes about two people who come together in the mundane daily tasks of life; yet there is something tremendously beautiful about that act of arms wide openness to another.
The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
I love the way Heaney writes about the cool that comes off the sheet and how it morphs into “a dried out undulating thwack”. Thus, the tactility transforms into the auditory, in this ordinary act of coming together. I love how what we think we are holding, changes shape, reminding us that our first perceptions can often be wrong. In other words, the unremarkable “sheet” is, in fact, something suggestive of grandeur and adventure: “a sail in a cross-wind.”
Look closer, this 14-line sonnet has only two sentences. The first is riddled with verbs and busyness: coolness coming off the sheets, dampness making me think, taking sheets by the corners, and pulling, flapping and eventually shaking. Heaney then offers us a second sentence that transforms us to a different place, entirely.
Love for one another is like that.
Initially you come to another person thinking that it is all about the verbs: the doing and wanting and longing and pursuing and speaking and demanding.
Heaney knows that even in our flawed ordinary limited way this interaction, this connection, this intimacy has the capacity to be transformed into love.
Heaney shows us that loving one another can often be touch and go, it can often be about coming close and holding back. You are x and I am o. Ordinary love is a type of tic-tac-toe. This sonnet explores how love between ordinary flawed human beings can, in fact, be unsure, flawed, prosaic but also playful, delightful and an opportunity to wonder about the possibility of the other.
Finally at the end of the sonnet we are told that these sheets are “sewn from ripped flour sacks”. Why does Heaney offer up this detail? Heaney wants to remind me that it was never ever about sheets; it might be the reason we came together but it’s not really about sheets. It is about context, emotional talismans, and the desire, every single one of us has, to know real love, real connection.
This sonnet is made up of two sentences, imitative of the two people in a moment of ordinary human interaction being transformed by our extraordinary capacity to love.
Dr Elizabeth Guy’s scholarship is in Literature. She is a published author: The Alchemy of Poetry, Take Ink & Weep and Abandoned by God. Elizabeth currently teaches at Monte Sant Angelo, North Sydney.