Newman's Dream

All Souls Day 2019

2019-11-02T16:00:00+11:00

It's All Souls Day for 2019 in Australia. It's also the end of a very busy time working on a number of projects. Now, it is time to reflect and to take stock. This is the beginning of a special season when we take note of the fact that life is more than what we can taste and touch with our senses. There is a certain irony that the time when we remember our dead with our prayers can renew our awareness of life.

We live in a culture that cannot see beyond its own nose. The pleasures of a moment are more significant than the substance of life. Again, it's ironic that we consume the prepackaged experiences promoted by those who are most concerned about supporting their own lifestyles. That self concern rubs off on us. Our focus narrows considerably.

But, this season affords us a new opportunity to look beyond ourselves to those who can no longer care for themselves in the most crucial of ways. There is a portion of the Communion of Saints who give praise to God continuously in heaven. They are triumphant. There is that portion that still militantly struggles to realise the Sovereignty of God in our midst. Then, there is that segment of the Communion that suffers through their purgation. They can do nothing about this for themselves. But, we can.

As a Catholic, I have a duty to pray for the dead, especially those who are members of my family. The time that I take to do this is a sacrifice in this busy world. But, our prayers reorient us towards that invisible aspect of our lives. Newman knew this well. As we will see in time, he had to deal decisively with his understanding of this part of the Catholic Faith. This will become increasingly clear as we work through the Dream of Gerontius.

For now, let's consider what the friends are doing for the Dreamer on pages 325-326 [1]. This will give us some idea about how we might pray for both the dying and the dead. The prayers of the Assistants begin with two lines requesting that mercy and grace be granted the Dreamer:

Be merciful, be gracious; spare him, Lord.

Be merciful, be gracious; Lord, deliver him.

There is an interesting affect that Newman gains for us here. We read the first line as we might a litany and begin the second expecting the same pattern. However, we are actually arrested by the change in word order: Lord, deliver him. The sounding of 'Lord' has something of an eternal quality to it. We can literally pause and dwell in this address to God before we finish with the request that the Dreamer be delivered.

This is as it should be. We are not pulling the lever of a vending machine. All true prayer is praise of God.

How is the pause effected? By the rising inflection of 'lor' and the hard 'dee' sound at the end of Lord and the beginning of deliver. It is as if we are suspended in time between two ledges that we are leaping from and towards. When we pray for the dying and the dead, we should recognise that the 'space' into which we are entering is especially God indwelled.

God is merciful and gracious. God is also just and righteous. To sin means to fall short of the glory of God that is our inheritance as His creatures, those whom He created in His image and likeness [2].

We are satisfied with possessing very little of that glory. So, we fail to see the significance of our sin. We should rectify this oversight during our lives. We may not have the grace of doing so at our deaths. And, even if we should die with our friends and family around us, it is still possible to fall to the perils of dying.

It is possible to insist that we are our own 'god'. We can rely on our own merits as tokens to gain us an entrance into paradise, thank you very much. But, is this true? Jesus told a parable about the wedding guest who insisted on wearing his own garments rather than those provided by the host. The guest was debarred from the celebration. The devil is quite good at deceiving us about this.

There is only one who lived and died to the full glory of God, Jesus Christ. That glory was revealed to Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor. The glory of Moses and Elijah faded to nothing in the light that shone from Jesus as the essence of God's glory and not its mere reflection. The second stanza of the prayer of the Assistants lays this out for us. By Christ's birth, death, burial, resurrection and rising to the Father is God's mercy manifest towards us.

As we pray in the power of the Spirit, we praise the God of our salvation and raise our dying friends and family members up to the glory of God that is in Christ Jesus. In doing so, we raise ourselves up to God as well in worship. We thankfully affirm that, in Christ, we too are members of the Communion of Saints. We can continue to raise up our loved ones after their deaths. We commend them to God's mercy in prayer. This is the great grace of this season, a month of remembrance.

[1]	You can see the poem with this pagination at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/verses/gerontius.html

[2]	Saint Irenaus claimed that the Glory of God was man fully alive.

Prayermates

2019-10-12T18:00:00+11:00

It is said that twenty-two veterans commit suicide each day in the United States of America. Many more think about it. To return to civilian life once you have done your military service is not often easy. The research is clear. Even for those who did not serve in combat theatres, military life is stressful to a degree rarely found elsewhere in western countries. The aftermath of such service is often the loss of connection with family and friends through time.

Until recently, many of these, and other, veterans died relatively unknown and alone. But, something has changed in the United States in the past few years. Funeral homes are letting the broader community know when a veteran has no family to bury them. Folks across the country are now organising to attend the funerals of these men and women. Sometimes only a few attend. At other times, there can be hundreds present.

There is something about the thought of dying alone and forgotten that touches us deeply. In his poem, Hora Novissima, or The Last Hour, the thirty-two-year-old Newman expresses such dread. He is writing while at sea in June of 1833 having recovered from serious illness. He was returning to England from his Mediterranean excursions having been separated from the Froudes, his travelling companions, when they had returned home weeks earlier. Newman accepts that in that dread last hour, it may be God's will that neither friends nor family may attend him. What he prays for is the ministering presence of the Church.

Newman specifically refers to dread three times in this poem of twenty lines. The dread command to return to dust is the first. The second is the dread presence of the Cross, that symbol of agony and death. And, finally, the dread of dying alone which God will not distain.

Less than a week later, Newman is in Marseilles where he pens all but the last twelve lines of his poem, Separation of Friends. The last lines of the earlier version speak of the speechless intercession of a man's mourning friends who send up their prayers to heaven through clear blue skies. The language becomes more tender in the last twelve lines added in 1836. These were occasioned by the death of his friend and former travelling companion, Richard Hurrell Froude, sortly after Newman's thirty-fifth birthday.

Froude was an Anglican priest and a fellow leader in the Oxford Movement. Newman addresses the mourning friends with the term, dearest. He does this as he ponders what might be known were their friend able and willing to communicate across the divide. But, then, the poet acknowledges that this would not be well met and refrains. Again, he addresses his hearers as dearest. According to Father Juan Velez, Newman often addressed his close friends with charissime, dearest, in his correspondence. He hung photos and paintings of both his patron saints and his departed friends on the walls of his private chapel. As the communion of the saints, their bonds remained strong. [1]

On pages 324 and 325 of The Dream of Gerontius, we should realise the blessed situation for what it is. Here the Dreamer's friends, his dearest, are assisting him in his dread hour. They are both present and presencing the communion of the saints to the Dreamer through their recitation of the litany. This is not a mere formulae. It is the work of earthly prayermates invoking the intercession of the saints under the banner of God's mercy towards us in our Lord Jesus Christ.

We should not hurry past this work of the Assistants. Instead, we might ask whether or not such assistance would be meaningful for us today. How familiar are we with the personages called upon? How often do we invoke their aid in our lives and praise God for theirs? Have we made friends of these, our elder brethren, and those invoked later in the poem? That Newman did so throughout his life is evidenced by the number of them about whom he wrote poems. Such communion may seem unreal at our end, if we care not to enact it now.

Still, God's grace certainly seems inscrutable at times. In his Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh captured this magnificently. Family and friends are uncertain or distainful as to whether a priest should be called to the deathbed of Lord Marchmain, a profligate. The priest is called and Lord Marchmain signals to receive the Sacrament. That grace to say yes to God's mercy results in two further unexpected affirmations of faith. First, by daughter Julia and, then, by family friend Charles Ryder in due time. We should never dispair of God's grace. On the other hand, we should never presume either.

On page 325, through the prayers of his dearest, Gerontius rallies to use well his waning time on earth. Those assisting at his dying have helped him to weather "the storm of that bewilderment" which is for "a season spent." But, Gerontius knows that at this "last hour" he still needs to prepare to meet his Maker. [2] He must use the time well. So, must we all while we may. No one of us knows the day of our ultimate demise. Now is the time to make friends for our end.

[1]	Velez, J.R. (2017) Holiness in a secular age: The witness of Cardinal Newman. New York: Scepter Publishers, pages 31-32.

[2]

With regard to the phrase to "meet his Maker", Ian Ker (2009) tells us, on page 574 of John Henry Newman, that Newman had submitted two revised poems to The Month which were about his sister Mary. He had done this to support the magazine prior to providing the editor with The Dream of Gerontius. Mary died quite suddenly in January 1828 thirty-seven years before Newman wrote his last published poem. In the year of her death, Newman wrote two poems about Mary. The first was Consolations in Bereavement in April. The second was A Picture in August of 1828. The reference I make to meeting the Maker is from the second poem: Such was she in the sudden hour | That brought her Maker's call,-- Proving her heart's self-mastering power | Blithely to part with all,--. Newman never got over Mary's death both in its suddenness and his loss of her innocence. A Picture was the first poem in the first volume of The Month (July-December 1864) and is found on pages 209 and 210. The second poem was Epiphany-Eve: A birthday offering which was written in 1830 on the anniversary of her death on the 5th of January. It is found on pages 210-212 of the same volume.

The Centre Lost

2019-10-10T19:00:00+11:00

It was the middle of January 2015 when my doctor gave me an ultimatum. Go to the hospital or be dead by tomorrow. Seeing some hesitation, for I had intended to go to work after the visit, she commanded me to go home and call my wife posthaste. My nurse wife was to leave work and drive me directly to the emergency department.

With my referal in my hand, I got into my car and drove home. I made the call and my wife responded immediately. She drove me to the hospital and accompanied me to the emergency department where I showed the staff my letter.

I have been in emergency rooms with friends and family a time or two. However, I don't remember such a short wait. The triage was fast and the paperwork was dealt with expeditiously. I was in and on my way to a room apart. Here the staff quickly got me into my hospital garb and began to prepare me for the explorations to follow.

I remember the doctor asking me a long list of questions while palpating me as my own doctor had. He quickly identified the location of the severe pain in my descending colon. It was a large abcess. I would be put on interveneous antibiotics as soon as they confirmed the preliminary diagnosis with a CT scan.

At one point, the doctor asked me how I felt. I looked at him and said, "Like I am dying." He grunted and left non-commital. I had been seriously ill a time or two before this. Indeed, I had once had dengue fever while living in Asia. I also had faced the very real possibility of death fighting forest fires and a time or two in the Navy. However, I had never felt like this.

It was more than pain. It was more than mere tiredness and lethargy. I had all of this. It was a sense that something vital was slipping away. I had never felt like this before. Even when I was the sickest, I had always felt that there was still a living core to my being. I no longer felt that way. This was different; I seemed to have lost my centre. Ultimately, I had followed my doctor's commands with alacrity because I sensed that I was on a precipice.

The Old Man of the poem felt the same way. This experience was different than those of the past. He now felt a summons. There was a command that must be obeyed. In this first section of The Dream which we find on pages 323-331, we find the dreamer on the doorstep. In this liminal situation, he weaves between a number of intentions or focal points in terms of his consciousness.

For this post, I wish to delay looking at the material relating to prayers for the dying. If you have followed up suggestions in an earlier post, you'll easily recognise the verses. The headings for the Assistants and the Priest mark out their limits. We will deal with this material in another post.

At first glance, it would seem that Gerontius engages in a series of soliloquies. That would be a misapprehension. The essence of a soliloquy is that a speaker speaks aloud or to themself their thoughts or reflections in the absence of others. The Latin literally means to speak alone. This is manifestly not the case in the first dialogue of Gerontius.

I used to say to my students, as they worked through their interview transcripts, "Slow down, take your ease with the material." When we do this, what do we see on pages 323 and 324? We observe addresses to others and short prayer aspirations. The poet has made it easy to spot the aspirations; they are in round brackets such as these (). I see four sets:

Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!
Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!
Lover of souls! great God! I look to thee,
Help, loving Lord! Thou my sole Refuge, Thou,

Aspirations are short prayers that we are taught to say throughout the day and at times of need. They help to direct our thoughts and hearts to God and His grace in our lives. We recognise the need for the aid and support of others in God's economy. I often say the 'Jesus Prayer' (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.) Two of my favourites are really summaries of the faith of the Old Testament saints (The Lord is my strenghth and my song; He has become my salvation, and Lord let not mine enemies triumph over me).

Such aspirations are communal and become personal through time. Saint Augustine thought highly of them. They create a habit of heart and mind focused on God. They presence a sphere of actions and relations that might otherwise stay somewhat out of our purview.

Is there more evidence of the perceived presence of others in this segment of the first section? Yes, there is. There are three, or four, depending how your divide the text, appeals to friends who are present:

Pray for me, O my friends; a visitant...
'Tis death,--O loving friends, your prayers!--'tis he!...
Oh, horror! this it is, my dearest, this;
So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray.

I am dividing the text such that there are four calls to friends. Three are direct requests for prayer. The first two of these report the 'presence' of another reality. The third describes the Dreamer's reaction to this 'presence'; it is a thing of horror. A fuller discription of the horror will come later in the first section. The final appeal is a request based on the loss of capacity to pray in this 'presence' that announces an imminent absence:

Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss,

That utter nothingness, of which I came.

Read those two lines and the one that follows slowly and carefully aloud to yourself. You can hear the steady drum tattoo (from the Dutch, doe den tap toe, google it!) that marches the Dreamer off to his doom. This is the horrible 'presence' of absence. The Dreamer calls to his dearest, his loving friends for their aid in the light of this dread visitor.

I have not forgotten the first two names with which the poem opens, JESU, MARIA. Both of these names are often used as one word aspirations. However, I think they are forms of address here. We have seen that the poet has placed the other aspirations in round brackets. They are missing here. Additionally, there is a statement of acknowledgment and understanding, "I am near to death, and Thou art calling me; I know it now." The Thou may seem strange given the fact that both Jesus and Mary are addressed. However, it would not be so strange to someone who prayed the Angelus three times a day every day:

Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy Word.

The Dreamer knows that these two hearts will the same thing. It is time for Gerontius to lay down to rest in death. [1] As Newman, the former Anglican priest, once wrote on 7 March 1848:

Therefore I will trust Him. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perpelxity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, he may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me--still He knows what he is about. [Hope in God--Creator #2, Mediations and Devotions]

In the next post, we'll begin to look at the response of The Dreamer's friends.

[1]

Please see Newman's Prayer for the faithful departed at the Newman Reader by clicking on this link. Scroll to the end to gain a sense both Newman's address to Jesu and his understanding of the state of the faithful departed. You will also recognise some of the material that Newman will place in the mouths of his friends shortly.

Litany, Prayers and Dying

2019-10-08T19:00:00+11:00

My second brother died within days of his birth. I was quite young, but it affected me greatly. When my third brother came along two years later, I insisted upon seeing him immediately. Of course, in those days, children were not allowed on the ward with newborns. Try explaining that to a determined six-year-old. My father arranged for my mother to be at a ground-floor window with a flyscreen at the back of the annex. I could not see my brother, but I could hear him crying and my mother soothing him.

I never forgot the brother who died and often prayed for him. My youngest aunt gave me a brass plaque with a prayer on it: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." I really wasn't worried about dying at that time. I had a child's faith in God and a real sense of my Guardian Angel. However, I did feel that the family had unfinished business with my brother.

Years later, after I left the Navy, my wife and I travelled down the Eastern seaboard of the United States to visit my brother in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was stationed there in the Air Force. From Biloxi we decided to drive across Texas to El Paso on the way to visiting with my grandparents in Phoenix. As my father was an officer at the time of my brother's death, he was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Bliss near El Paso.

We arrived an hour before the cemetery closed and there was no one to help us look up the burial record. For that hour, I walked around praying and looking for the headstone. Sadly, I was unable to find my brother's plot. Years later, I found a picture of the headstone online. It was good to be able to see it virtually. Someday, I'll see it face-to-face.

The bonds between persons are strong. When something like death intervenes, we need ways of negotiating the transitions. Within the Catholic Tradition, we have the Litany and Prayers for the Dying to aid us. Sadly, these are largely forgotten by most. Our culture works against their use. We have trivialised death with hidden corridors to whisk away the newly deceased who die in casinos and other public venues. We sensationalise death by accident or misadventure. We sanitise death in the hospital or nursing home. We restrict opportunities to die among our friends and family by limiting funds for home hospice care.

The Litany and Prayers for the Dying are yet another context to explore before engaging The Dream of Gerontius. Without being familiar with them, we are at risk of misunderstanding Newman's work. In fact, scholars who misattribute segments of The Dream as liturgy relating to the Mass miss the salience of the Litany said by friends and family who surround the dying. [1] While the priest may be present and take some leadership, these prayers are not part of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. Apart from the Kyrie, they are also not found in the Mass of Newman's day nor, indeed, our own. Additionally, the Kyrie is found in many prayers of the faithful.

Again, I would encourage folks to first prayerfully read through the Litany and Prayers for the Dying before heading to The Dream. They can be found at Saint Annes Helper dot com. Just follow this link.

[1]

Rebecca Rainof (2013) makes this mistake and other misapprehensions in her "Victorians in purgatory: Newman's poetics of conciliation and the afterlife of the Oxford Movement" in Victorian Poetry, 51(2):227-247. While I would hold that her major thesis is weakened considerably by her failure to properly identify the textual source material of much of Newman's poem, she makes interesting points and provides useful background information in her paper. Here is but one of her more egregious errors: "Newman invokes ritual in ways more explicit and potentially off-putting than other popular devotional poets of the time, notably Anglo-Catholic devotional poets like Christina Rossetti, for Newman quotes directly and at length from rites performed in the Roman Catholic mass." This snippet can be found on page 229.

Who Was Gerontius?

2019-10-06T18:00:00+11:00

There is a central question to be discussed as part of clarifying the context of The Dream of Gerontius. Who was Gerontius? Does the dreamer refer to a historical figure or is it a figment of the poet's imagination? In one sense, Gerontius is Everyman as we shall see. But, was there a model for Gerontius? Or, was someone more than a model?

The Presbyterian Doctor of Divinity, Alexander Whyte, wrote of The Dream that it was "...a poem that every man should have by heart who has it before him to die." [1] Indeed, Wilfrid Ward, Newman's early biographer, wrote that the poem "had a strong attraction for uneducated as well as educated persons." He went on to testify that he knew of a poor weaver who had his wife read it to him frequently while he was on his death bed. [2]

The educated were edified by the poem in their dying as well. The sometime Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, also found comfort in the poem in his last hours. So did the Reverend H. N. Oxenham who, as the end hove into view, had The Dream read to him. [3] General Gordon, who died defending Khartoum from the Mahdi, had underlined his copy of a standalone version of the poem throughout the text. He gave the book to his friend, Frank Power, for his comfort. Before he died, Power had sent the book to his sister in Ireland. As an admirer of Gordon, whose campaigns he had followed, Newman was deeply touched to know that Gordon had prized the volume. [4]

The the final stanza underlined by Gordon were the last words of the poem. They are words that have always touched me and are spoken by the guardian angel:

Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
   Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
   And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.

Yes, Everyman. But, was there any man who was Gerontius? There are several reasons to believe that Newman was the geron, the old man. Tidy provides us with several contemporaneous instances of Newman refering to himself in this manner in his correspondence with Sir Frederick Rogers, Dean Church and Father Ambrose St. John, Newman's dear friend. In April 1865, Newman declined to take on proposed literary engagements because "It is killing work for an old man." [5] This was the same month that the first installment of The Dream was published in The Month. This poem would be Newman's last. However, he did accede to the poem being published on its own as a small book in 1866.

Newman's biographer, Wilfrid Ward, provides us with more specific evidence. In the midst of his controversy with Charles Kingsley, Newman had a "very vivid apprehension of immediately impending death, apparently derived from a medical opinion." Ward states that the event was so portentious that Newman wrote out a memorandum headed with the words 'written in prospect of death.' It was dated Passion Sunday, 1864, 7 o'clock a.m.. [6]

Newman had been fearful of the effects of stroke, particularly paralysis. He had mentioned this fear to Ward's father seven years previously. It was brought to the fore again when Newman heard that his dear friend, John Keble, had suffered a stroke. Newman wrote to Father Coleridge on 30 December 1864 indicating that he was still dwelling on the possibility of his own death. He noted that many literary men, including Sir Walter Scott, had died of paralysis. [7]

Many were curious about The Dream and wanted to know more about this vision of purgatory. You can almost hear the exasperation of Newman when he responds to the Reverend John Telford, the priest at Ryde. But, Newman lets slip a clue about who the dreamer was.

You do me too much honour if you think I am to see in a dream everything that is to be seen in the subject dreamed about. I have said what I saw. Various spiritual writers see various aspects of it; and under their protection and pattern I have set down the dream as it came before the sleeper. It is not my fault if the sleeper did not dream more. Perhaps something woke him. Dreams are generally fragmentary. I have nothing more to tell. [8]

I would hold that the dreamer was Newman who set down what he saw in poetic verse. Communicating the dream in this form came to him as a sudden inspiration in January 1865. It took two weeks to produce the fair copy. [9] Frederic Chapman opined that Newman "shows us, in a sudden blaze of almost intolerable light, the high and awful thoughts that devout meditation and self-suppression have stored up in a mind compounded of reverence and imagination, for which poetic expression is the only outlet." [10]

I'll close with one final observation. I have already mentioned that Newman's apprehension occurred during the conflict with Charles Kingsley. That controversy obviously caused Newman profound anguish. However, the fruit of that agony was prodigious. On 2 May 1868, Newman's nemesis wrote the following to the Reverend Sir W.E. Cope:

I have read Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius' with awe and admiration...I am thankful to any man, who under any parabolic, or even questionably true forms, will teach that to a generation which is losing more and more the sense of reverence, and beginning confessedly to hate excellence for its own sake, as the Greek ostracized Aristides, because he was tired of hearing him called the Just. [11]

[1]	Whyte, A. (1901) Newman an appreciation in two lectures. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, page 135.

[2]	Ward, W. (1912) The life of John Henry Cardinal Newman: Based on his private journals and correspondence, Volume 2. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., page 356.

[3]	Tidy, G. (1916) Introduction. In, Newman, J.H. The Dream of Gerontius. London: John Lane the Bodley Head, page 42.

[4]	Axon, W.E.A. (1890) On General Gordon's copy of Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius'. Longman's Magazine. 16(6):632-639.

[5]	Tidy, page 12.

[6]	Ward, page 76.

[7]	Ward, page 77.

[8]	Ward, page 78, emphasis added.

[9]

Ibid.

[10]	Chapman, F. (1905) Introduction. In, Newman, J.H. The poems of John Henry Newman afterwards Cardinal. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, page xvii.

[11]	Kingsley, C. (1899) The works of Charles Kingsley, Volume 7. Philadelphia: J.D. Morris, page 239.

Locating the Dream

2019-10-05T18:00:00+10:00

Perhaps it is best to first locate The Dream textually and in time before responding to the poem. Contextualising the time may be the easiest of the two tasks. As we shall see, Newman was hesitant to locate his poems textually. [1] This is not a research paper, but much can be gained with a little patient effort. If you have read the About Newman page, some of what follows may make a little more sense.

Before me is a copy of Prayers, Verses and Devotions published by Ignatius Press in 1989. The Dream begins on page 691 and ends on page 725. It is composed of various stanza forms and metres set in seven sections. There are many voices articulating throughout the poem. They tell the tale of an old man's journey from life into a death that is the beginning of a fuller life. An angel rather than Virgil guides the pilgrim who, unlike Dante, does not return to this world.

If you follow the link in the sidebar to the Newman Reader site, you will discover a different pagination for the poem. It is the one that I will follow in these posts. The Reader pagination corresponds to the original work, Verses on Various Occasions. More specifically, it reproduces the 1903 edition. The first edition was published thirty-five years earlier in 1868 by Burns, Lamburt and Oates. The Dream of Gerontius was one of the poems in that original edition.

I'd like to make some observations about Verses on Various Occasions and what it might tell us. Before I do, it is important to note that The Dream of Gerontius was published in two parts in The Month magazine in 1865. Newman had almost too casually provided the poem at the request of the editor. The priest was diffident about whether it merited attention. He was never sure of the value of his efforts or his ability to write poetry on demand. [2]

Yet, attention it did receive. It may well have been the impetus for Newman pulling together his other verse work for publication a few years later. How fortunate we are that the editor asked. No wonder Newman saw himself as a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. We'll see how profoundly true that is shortly.

I'll close this post momentarily. It is getting a little long. We'll have to explore more of the context in the next post. However, I would like to make the observations that I mentioned above. Firstly, in the 1903 edition, we see that Newman completed the poem in January of 1865. This was a month before his 64th birthday. For his time, he was growing old. Death was obviously on his mind.

Secondly, we note that Newman dedicated his volume of poems to Edward Badeley on 21 December 1867. Badeley had been one of the peers who had worked with Newman in the Oxford Movement. He was also part of the team that defended Newman during his libel case. Additionally, Badeley would continue to provide Newman with legal advice as when Charles Kingsley, the Evangelical minister and author, libeled him. It was Badeley who endorsed Newman's initial "reflections". These were the foundation of Newman's full response to Kingsley in the form of Apologia pro vita sua. [3] This great apology has influenced many, including myself, for over a century and a half. [4] We are all in Badeley's debt.

With relevence for today, Badeley also argued that priest-penitent privilege was applicaple in English law. [5] He did this with regards, in part, to the infamous Constance Kent case. As a teenager, she had slaughtered her younger half-brother in her home. For the British middle-class of that time, the home was sacrosanct. Until then, in the minds of the public, evil resided elsewhere. Kent was also known as Ruth Emilie Kaye who emmigrated to Australia and worked as a nurse in Tasmania while living with her surviving brother. It was this case, perhaps more than any other, that propelled novelists to undertake the writing of detective fiction that so many of us now enjoy. [6]

Sadly, Edward Badeley died in March of 1868. He was sixty-four. In a future post, we'll see that Newman's poem has helped to prepare many people for their eventual deaths, including me.

[1]	Gliebe, J. (1916) Dream of Gerontius. New York: Schwartz, Kirwin, Fauss.

[2]	See Newman's dedication of Verses of Various Occasions to Edward Badeley.

[3]	Ker, I. (2009) John Henry Newman: A biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (I have a copy signed by Ian at Newman College when he came to speak there!)

[4]	Bloomsbury republished Apologia pro vita sua in 2014 a hundred and fifty years after the first edition.

[5]	Badeley, E. (1865). The Privilege of Religious Confessions in English Courts of Justice Considered, in a Letter to a Friend. London: Butterworths.

[6]	Summerscale, K. (2008) The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House. London: Bloomsbury.

Returning Gifts

2019-10-04T13:00:00+10:00

Newman has been a part of my life for some forty years now. I first discovered him as I was preparing for Protestant ministry during my seminary years. I found his thinking profound and his evident holiness inspiring. As I began to realise my need for deeper roots for living my faith in the post-modern world, Newman was my Virgil during the difficult transition into the Roman Catholic Church. As my life became more involved with academic pursuits, his understanding of what it meant to be educated and, indeed, an educator became a lodestar.

With his canonisation imminent, I feel that I owe him the gift of this site. Of course, it more deeply reflects my gratitude to God for His watchcare over each of us through His creation.

Over the next little while, I'll be praying through the canonisation novena, the nine days of prayer, that can be found at the Newman Canonisation site. I'll also reflect on Newman's poem, The Dream of Gerontius. It is certainly more timely in my life now than when I first discovered it! Elgar set the text to a stunning choral composition. A classic performance can be enjoyed by following the links in the sidebar.

For those who wish to explore Newman's works, there is a link in the same sidebar to The Newman Reader site which has posted a great many of his works. It is a treasure trove indeed!

One phrase of Newman's has become my motto:

I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.