The Roots that Clutch
Letters on the Origins of Things
Thomas Esposito
The Roots That Clutch
Letters on the Origins of Things
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Esposito. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to several confreres, friends, and students who aided me in the crafting of this volume. My fellow Cistercian Fr. Roch Kereszty, a self-proclaimed gadfly, pleasantly and persistently nagged me to share these letters with him as I composed them. I received valuable editorial suggestions from my Abbot, Fr. Peter Verhalen, and I am thankful for his support of this work. In addition, I enjoyed happy collaborations with many former and current students of mine at the University of Dallas. I extend particular shout-outs (or shouts-out?) of gratitude to Alec, Finbar (now Br. Christopher in my community), Teresa, and Kitty. To them, and to my future students, this book is dedicated.
A special note of appreciation goes to Jacquelyn Lee, who volunteered her excellent editorial skills in laboring strenuously but (she tells me) happily during term paper and final exam season to improve these letters.
Notes:
Earlier versions of the letters to Jonathan, Barnabas, Dr. Seuss, and Galadriel were published in The Texas Catholic, the newspaper of the Diocese of Dallas. Special thanks go to Michael Gresham for his permission to print them here in a new, lettered form.
All translations from the Bible are my own.
To the Reader
Dear Reader,
You may not be a fan of poetry, but I want to tell you about a delightful poem I have long admired. The poem is entitled “Digging,” and in short and simple verses the great Irishman Seamus Heaney fondly presents his recollections of the gardening his father and grandfather loved to do. He visualizes the spade sinking “into gravelly ground,” his father “stooping in rhythm” as he digs in flower beds and potato patches. He boasts of his grandfather’s legendary ability to cut turf, and recalls the smells and sensations of his own handling of potatoes and “soggy peat.” All of this comes to him in the form of memories, as “living roots awaken in my head.”1
Rather than take up that same generational trade, though, Heaney regards his pen as his humble instrument of choice, claiming he has “no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” It is with his poetic pen, rather than his father’s tools, that Heaney hopes to break up the earth of the soul, and plant new seeds in the heart-soil of his readers. He accomplishes this in “Digging” by allowing his memories of family and farming to fertilize the seedbed of his lyrical mind. The poet, in other words, plunges the spade of his pen into the nourishing ground of his past, and that literary gardening yields a harvest of graced nourishment for his readers.
Have you ever pondered how marvelous roots are? Those of trees shoot downward, lunging slowly but firmly into the brown earth where they usually remain hidden from human eyes. Beneath the ground, they strengthen the visible trunk and branches, suck nutrients from the soil, and channel water to generate growth. I have heard that the intricate root system of a tree grows as wide and deep below as the width and height of the branches that stretch skyward. What we see from our earthen vantage point is mirrored, though undetected, beneath our feet.
The lotus flower pitches its roots in water rather than soil. Its leaves float gently on the water’s surface, and hold aloft a beautiful flower of colored petals. The physical characteristics of the lotus are the inspiration for its symbolic meaning in the great religions of Asia, especially Hinduism and Buddhism: the flower, escaping the illusory and murky world of sense experience represented by water, emerges above it, and opens itself to the world of union and contemplation symbolized by the limitless sky. In imitation of the transcendent flower, the lotus position is the basic starting point for yoga meditation in these Eastern traditions.
Just as the physical yields to the symbolic in the case of the lotus flower, so also are the roots of trees and plants employed in a variety of metaphorical ways. When individuals in the United States trace their ancestral lineage by means of a family tree, they often speak of their genealogical roots lying in the lands from which their ancestors emigrated. The study of language often features the concept of root letters, or consonants forming the foundation of nouns and verbs. The verb systems of Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are arranged according to a tri-literal root, meaning the basic structure of the verb is composed of three consonants around which prefixes and suffixes are added to create new words and shades of meaning. A religion such as Christianity, or a country such as India, possesses roots deeply embedded in a particular region, stretching for millennia into the soil of history. Whether doctrines or practices, dominant figures or defining historical events, the roots of a given religion, people, or nation nourish those living in the present with the sustenance of prior generations and traditions.
To bring Heaney’s poem and my musings on roots together, the book you are currently holding is the fruit of my own digging within myself to examine the roots and experiences which have formed me and nourished my thinking, praying, and being. In my previous epistolary collection, entitled Letters of Fire, I explain my indebtedness to T. S. Eliot for much of my early intellectual growth and enduring spiritual insight, and this present book of letters falls under his aegis once more.2 The title of this volume comes from lines 19–24 of his grand, strange, and immensely difficult poem “The Waste Land”:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.3
Eliot’s poem, penned in the aftermath of the First World War, portrays with an odd and cold starkness the desiccated wilderness of European lands and culture. On the surface of that “stony rubbish” that once was a grand civilization, the poet sees only shattered mirrors, “a heap of broken images,” an unrelenting waste land of howling desert. Whatever roots had nurtured the trees of religion and government and Western culture were now shriveled and naked, senselessly standing sentinel after so many torrents of destruction had devastated them. Eliot presents his jarring poem, full of sentence fragments and obscure literary references, as a reflection of the world he lives in, one in which the roots no longer support the trunk and branches of religion and civilization. The reader gets the nostalgically tragic sense that nothing from the past but fragments, presented as barren roots lacking any vitality, can be salvaged.
It is tempting to think the same of the world we inhabit today. The daily