A PARABLE OF GULLIBILITY

4-6-24

PHILIP LARKIN—FAITH HEALING

Slowly the women file to where he stands

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer

Directing God about this eye, that knee,

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb

And idiot child within them still survives

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice

At last calls them alone, that hands have come

To lift them and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice--

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:

By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

This poem seemed so obvious to me at the outset but as I worked with it and its references and allusions it required more thought and even study. It didn't occur to me until much later that this poem is a parable for our times. I say this to remind myself what a poem can do and also my own sensitivities to how time changes perceptions and how time can sometimes stand still. This poem does both of those things: it comes to me as a piece of art from times past but its meaning also resonates in our own times. Let me explain by walking through what the poem seems to be saying and then reflect a bit on how I think it propels some important meanings for our own times. I think any good poem appeals to the reader for many reasons but also applies what is known about human behavior over the stretches of time.

“Faith Healing” is a tongue-in-cheek alert to what follows. If we know anything of Philip Larkin it is that he writes about religion and faith with a skeptic's eye and sensibility, never out of reach but never wholly into a zealous acceptance. In this case the sheepish candidates are women. I asked why Larkin would have made them the focus of this poem—and the healer a man. He is described as one slick authority with minions at his service. His voice is impatiently unctuous, giving each penitent just enough time to lay on hands and then dismiss them. The women move through as sheep in a herd with some straying to keen and gesticulate wildly with flailing arms, as we can imagine from the scene of healing.

By now we are into the second stanza of the poem and we now have some insight into the minds and expectations of the women. It seems their hope was to receive something from the healer that might restore them to a world of kindness and comfort, what Larkin refers to as the hopes of an “idiot child.” There is a moment when that seems possible, the remnants of their physical ecstasies clouding their minds or maybe just in a state of confusion. But here we hear the voice of the healer echoing from within them: What's wrong? Indeed, the earlier question seemed an invitation to release troubles as a preparation for the healing to come. The second time that question is posed it comes as an exclamation from the poet who observes something darker than an invitation for cure; a dissonance, an answer to the question the women might not have wanted to hear. The answer proposed is “all's wrong.”

I think there is always a mismatch between what we expect and what we can actually experience and that mismatch creates dissonance. This mismatch and the resulting dissonance often accompany loving and being loved. The poem says that loving others is only a source of dissonance for a minority. For the majority the expectation of being loved is the greater source of dissonance. Perhaps most of us feel we are not loved as much as we would expect. We imagine our lives as being different if only we were loved more. The poet feels this is the basis on which many of the women in the poem approach the healer. There is a search for more love and the comforts that will bring. They even imagine that their twenty second interactions with the healer, “within whose warm spring rain of loving care,” will bring them satisfaction. In some way, the healer's presence and presentiment are evidence of healing authority for the women. And they come to him as sheep might congregate as a scattered herd would to the calls of a shepherd.

The poet declares that there is nothing to cure the hollowed out loss of the love the women seek. In this final stanza “voice” returns but this time it isn't “the deep American voice” of the healer but one transcendent that only echoes the dear child of the healer but this time mocks the idea that the charlatan healer can provide what the women seek. Or, is this second voice, one from “above,” one that addresses the women with the mercy and understanding emanating from some spiritual whole, maybe from God? Perhaps the dear child of some pandering snake oil salesman becomes the Dear child (the capitalization here might be significant) of being held in a divinely focused gaze. The poet remains skeptical that even this might be the reality that lessens the dissonance the women experience. Who knows?

Many poems of past times are products of the world that surrounds them and from which they are produced. They also tend to mirror our own times and that makes them timeless. I think I am particularly sensitive to these extensions across time. I thought of the showman P. T. Barnum when I first read this and the declaration of his livelihood that “there is a sucker born every minute.” It is our tendency to become suckers in the face of our deficiencies to seek out charlatans, self-proclaimed saviors and healers, quacks, impostors, and frauds. It is not unusual for them to wrap themselves in the raiment and auras of religiosity, if only to maintain their hold on the vulnerable. And aren't we all sheep at one time or another? Our times now see the global sweep of authoritarianism and the rise of nationalism and mass paranoia and fear. We are living in times of turmoil and shifting social structures with economic and political pressures that are not unknown in human history. But our troubles are of the same kind but different in their own complex ways. The vague sense of entropic forces at work has created a vacuum, a gap created by the disparity between our certainties and assumptions and what reality has to show us. This is not unlike the dissonance the women of this poem experienced. It is “an immense slackening ache/ as when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps.” Our landscape is also thawing and weeping.

There are any number of charlatans in every age and era and ours is not exception. Politics seems to breed such animals. Our newest and most dangerous charlatan is Donald Trump. Most faith healers are benign to the extent that they don't cause harm to their sheep, save what damage is done to their wallets. But politics today is breeding charlatans with power to cause institutions and norms to fall into pieces and be swept away by the winds of time. Our charlatans are capable of these destructions because they consolidate power and untruthfully corrupt and falsify reality, thus promising to heal whatever it is that causes suffering among the faithful. It is astounding to think that so many people could fall for such chicanery but then it is not surprising given the density and tenaciousness of the dissonance that now afflicts the lives of those who do not feel they are being heard or understood. Trump the narcissist demands loyalty/love from his followers and promises to dole out the same to his supporters, but don't all faith healers promise such things?

Another difficult point to ponder is how it is that so many people gravitate to people like Trump when his most grievous character traits are so transparent. I think, once again, it is important to reflect on how many of us are discomfited when it comes to how much love we crave and how little we actually receive. This is a normal human trait that is permanently embedded in so many psyches. Reversing this dissonance is not easy by persuasion or logic. It is an intuitive need, instinctual almost, I think. It seems to reside in the lower levels of consciousness, isolated from any realizations available to the wakeful state.

What began for me as a satirical pastiche evolved into a parable about thwarted expectations for love or cure, about blind trust, about human gullibility. What was at first a caricature of human behavior turned into a very sad acknowledgment of how all of us suffer in different ways and attempt in almost any way possible to relieve that suffering. We are in some sense “idiot children” turned into sheep with profound wants and needs. If our love is unrequited by the likes of faith healers, is it possible to find requited love in true faith? How must we behave to be awake to this possibility?

The poet has opened for us readers this possibility and made us fully aware of our gullibility. We are only human, after all. I have parsed this poem from the perspective of the poet who was an observer of the action, adding in his descriptions and interpretations (and maybe his judgments, too). When I thought about my own reactions to the poem, it became clear to me that I, too, was a gullible one, dependent on my own need to be loved. If, in fact, “faith healing” can come in more than one form, then my gullibility is based on an innocence of what the source of my faith really is. The source is clearly not a person selling something to solve my problems or my needs. I am not vulnerable to cultish rhetoric. I am, however, innocent, trustful, and curious, willing to put my faith in a Creator Spirit that is immanent and transcendent at the same time. It permeates and is eternal and I am open to knowing about it in ways that are not consistent with the scientific method. I believe that there are ways in which humans are able to channel its manifestations in their behavior, especially as we are able to love in a divine way all those whose lives resemble my own. I have no longing to belong to a cult or even to a dogmatic religious tradition. I trust more and more my own experience in a way modeled by William James and as he described it in his prescient and insightful The Varieties of Religious Experience. He made no claim to be a “believer” but was open to the ways in which other people found meaning in transcendent belief. He was willing to listen, to be curious, and to be present for the beliefs and experiences of those he interviewed. I think my approach is the same in many respects. I am more open to how my own experiences reveal a realm beyond the temporal, beyond politics and beyond “faith healing” that sells something.

My gullibility is not unlike that of the women (and men if they were willing to admit to such vulnerability) in this poem and for the poet himself. I think the second stanza of this poem indicates to me that he knows what the women seek and he shares in their search. Finding the source of love affirmed, of love beyond the leveraged or coerced forms, is problematic for most of us. In this all of us share a want and a need, examined or repressed. The search is very human and a matter of what it is to search for meaning, a lifelong pursuit and exploration.