An Integrated Life
Gleanings.
Reading some of Christina Rossetti’s poems recently has led me back to her biography…
The most beautiful thing about Christina is this: she strives for an integrated personality. As she moves from her teens into adulthood, she still has fire, passion, and a sensual view of what makes up the beautiful, but it is marvelously controlled. Her images in poetry are at once visceral and yet innocent. That is a difficult combination to achieve and she does it effortlessly - or so it seems. That sort of balance always requires effort in one with an artistic temperament.
All her art flows from a person who has worked day by day on taming and developing a personality that is most emphatically passionate (She WAS half Italian as well as English),
In her younger years she was erratic and impulsive with her likes and dislikes. In deepening her faith through prayer, she was able to get to know herself in this regard and with the help of the God she loved most of all, and her somewhat stringent (to some) Anglican ideals, she gathered herself up into one whole, integrated human being. Self possessed, calm, knowing in Whom she believed and acting in accord with that belief. I find this so inviting in a person. So peaceful a personality. So strong and yet so gentled. The heavy wheat as opposed to the chaff. An ideal.
Christina is one of a small group of shining characters in my mind. Characters whose stability and contained fire light the world with constancy. The Colonel Brandons, Elinor Dashwoods, Cordelia Flyte's of this world. And anyone in our lives we have been gifted to know whose ideals match up with their daily actions and thoughts to form a whole, integrated person.
It is also unfortunately a fact of life that we inexplicably find ourselves attracted - if we are at all like Marianne Dashwood - to the Willoughby's, the Sebastian Flyte's, the Dante Gabrielle Rossettis of this world. They are so highly distracting - like butterflies flit beauty about in front of our eyes. They have beautiful ideas, they can quote poetry, they dash, they charm, they have an exotic feel of whimsy, they can find the way to our heart quite easily with an intuitive elacrity and wreak havoc there with thoughtless abandon - just for the fun of it. They have wit and banter and we are attracted like a moth to a flame. They might hurt us willy nilly and we come back for more. They are erratic. They say one thing one day and turn around and say the opposite the next. They speak beautifully about fine ideals - making our hearts burn within us - and yet we are confused as it slowly dawns on us how little they manage to live out those ideals in their daily life. They are dis-integrated. They teem with ideas and then promptly forget they have them when another shiny bauble appears to distract them. They seem always teetering among conflicting pulls.
We seek over and over to be their friend and are disappointed over and over again. We know that hitching a friendship to such an erratic star will only make our own lives unpredictable and erratic. It will not ever be a peaceful relationship. But once in their orbit it is hard to pull against the gravity of their admitted charm. . Poor Charles Ryder could never leave Sebastian Flyte no matter how badly and selfishly Sebastian treated him or played with his lonely, beauty seeking heart Sebastian sought only his own selfish need of distraction. Only later did great suffering bring a kind of integration to his soul.
In my older age, I am still part Marianne Dashwood, alas. I still find myself tempted to form friendships with the Sebastians of this world. But I am coming to see that friendship can only happen with integrated people - or at least people who are striving honestly for integration. People who remain the same day in and day out. People whom you know will be there tomorrow the same way they are here today. People who don't play with your heart and hurt it on a whim or for their own thoughtless sport. In short, the wonderful Colonel Brandons of this world. Or my husband Tony.
Christina was this sort. It took effort and suffering for her to reach this beautiful, integrated state. She knew who she was and who she was not. And any who had the gift of being her friend probably noticed it after a while. That in her presence there was steady fire, calm and waiting, an interesting person with well formed thoughts who knew how to govern herself by them - as opposed to the random, erratic, mesmerizing fires of her brother Dante which burned dangerously and unpredictably. Christina proves that poetry and art can exist most passionately and gorgeously in a self disciplined soul.
I suppose this integrity is what Jesus meant as purity of heart. I don't always think of that as much as I should. What a beautiful and hard won beatitude it is. But it is one that brings peace and the possibility of true friendship with others.
It has been something to ponder more deeply. Thank you Christina. for remaining exactly who you were. It is a warm and shining light to me.