Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
“Whatever” has become a gesture of indecision, a casual concession offered when one doesn’t have the interest or energy to be the decider. Whatever you want. Whatever you all decide. Whatever. Let’s move on.
Reducing it to a dismissive wave, we forget what a wide and hospitable word it can be. “Whatever you need, I’ll be there.” “I’m in it for the long haul, whatever is required.” Even when it bespeaks a slightly delusional confidence that we can make so extravagant a promise, “whatever” gives some measure of generous intention. To begin a prayer with it, as Kinnell does in this poem written not long before his death in 2014, is to restore its largeness: we recognize in it an echo of “Thy will be done.”
“Whatever happens.” The period that abruptly makes those two words a sentence requires us to heft the full weight of the phrase. We hear wedding vows in it, and the impassioned promises of young love and vows of loyalty between friends. We hear “unto death” and “no matter what” and “the whole nine yards.” A lot can happen. Sickness will come, or death will part us, and “poorer” may never become “richer.” To declare that “whatever happens” is what I want is to fully, daringly, even brashly commit to radical contentment, taking no thought for the morrow, considering lilies and birds of the air, and accepting what you cannot change—“life on its own terms.”
This prayer, written by an out-front activist, realist, and spiritually edgy poet of the Vietnam generation, is a little scary in a similar way to Father Thomas Keating’s “Welcoming Prayer.” Its bold affirmations always bring up, for me, flickers of self-doubt. I may want to welcome “all that comes to me today,” including “all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions,” and to let go of my desire for power, control, affection, esteem, approval, pleasure, survival, and security, but am I really anywhere near actually welcoming them? I can put my heart into the final lines in which “I open myself to the presence of God and God’s action within,” but I’m left still wondering whether I actually have done all the welcoming and letting go required to give God room to act, “whatever happens.”
Reading Kinnell’s “Prayer” for the first time (and the second and third) made me smile. It still does. It reads like a riddle, or a haiku, or a koan, all of which deliver a surprise deftly, obliquely, eliciting laughter, puzzlement, and then reflection, then insight, sometimes dropping us suddenly, as off the end of a sandbar, into deep waters. The words “whatever what is is is what I want” have to be parsed a second time before they make grammatical sense, and then pondered a while before they make rational sense. The sense they make may not, in fact, be rational. Because “what is” is apparently something of a mystery, at least to the speaker in this poem. He admits he’s not sure what really is, and implies that we may be a little too hasty to assume we know what is. The visual and verbal playfulness of the sentence tricks us into recognizing that we don’t know.
As I read it, I remember a TED talk by a physicist explaining how many dimensions (eleven, by his count, I believe) have been identified. I think of what physics has revealed about the paradoxical and often inscrutable character of what is at a subatomic level—about waves and particles and quantum leaps and neutrinos. And I think about how much of what is in the natural order we have endangered out of ignorant disregard. Ridding ourselves of inconvenient insects or bacteria, laying waste to rainforests and building developments in deserts, we disrupt what is (or at least what was and has been) in favor of what we want. I think of the large body of testimony to the existence of angels, near-death experiences, swift and dramatic answers to prayer—all a part of what is that defies full accounting. Whatever. I want that. I think.
It takes imagination and spiritual maturity to want what is—both what is given from the hand of God and what is strewn where heedless humans have passed. We get what we get. We are born and grow into it. To want it, though, is to calm vagrant desires, stop, and say yes without argument or further evidence. “Be joyful,” Wendell Berry writes in one of his poems, “though you have considered all the facts.” It may be that “be joyful” is another phrase for wanting what is.
“Only that.” Nothing more, without impatience for change, willing to dwell with and in the moving stream of circumstances, welcoming them and not letting disordered desire drive wonder out. If we think we’ve somehow achieved a fine ethic of simplicity, that we don’t want much, if we are among those who have read Thoreau or Lao-Tzu or the Gospel of Matthew and think we tread a little more lightly on the earth than our fellow pillagers, it’s worth putting this attitude to the test: “only that.” Try saying, for instance, “I want only the world I got, complete with its problems and threats.” I want only to live where I live, in the body I got, with the car I have, the family and colleagues I have, the opportunities and limits my situation brings. I want the world as is, even as I do my part to heal its wounds and bring it peace.
Wanting only “what is” is not, I think, an opposition to working for change, but a basis for activism rooted in realism. Contentment drives out compulsive, distracting greed and challenges the narcissisms we have normalized. Wanting “only that” is not an end point, but a beginning.
And, significantly, the poem ends not only with an affirmation of contentment but of wanting. In the final, emphatic “But that,” Kinnell insists on having life in full measure—as Thoreau did when he wrote that he wanted “not, when I came to die, [to] discover that I had not lived,” and as Mary Oliver does when she writes that she wants not, when she comes to die, just “to have visited this world.” One of Christopher Fry’s most appealing characters in his delightfully dark 1948 play, The Lady’s Not for Burning, set in the Middle Ages, is a woman being tried as a witch who very much wants to live. She affirms that same appetite for life in these memorable lines:
What is deep, as love is deep, I’ll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I’ll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
She lives in a dark age. The man she is coming to love finds the world, as Hamlet did, “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” But she wants that world, and will fight to stay in it as long as she can, because life is precious.
We might well wonder, when we see people in circumstances we pray to be spared, whether, in fact, life is precious on any terms. Kinnell’s prayer presupposes that: Whatever is, I want that. Because whatever is, is mine to learn from, an occasion for trust or love or endurance or hope.
In each of its three lines the poem allows us flickers of amusement. It is playful in the way spiritual teachers are often playful. “Whatever happens. Whatever” teases us into curiosity and puts feeling first before making meaning. A second palindrome, “what is is is what” dares us again to read forward and backward and then forward again, reminding us that meaning is multidimensional and multidirectional, epiphanic and delightful even as it challenges us to confront hard things. The final line, though it continues a sentence already begun, also stands as its own statement of purpose: “I want. Only that. But that.” It speaks with authority. It presumes a God who honors the claim of the heart’s deepest desire—One who can promise in confidence (and did) that what we most truly desire, when we have learned to desire truly, will be granted because the desire itself will be of God.