JOHN
DONNE (1572-1631) was an English poet and lawyer who lived his life in poverty
and yet so rich with friends (no one is so poor as to have nothing to give; no
one is so rich as to have nothing to receive!); spent his life in womanizing
and traveling until he settled with Anne More, his wife, with 12 children (the
pro-RH advocates will make his life as a case for the quest of quality life;
the anti-RH advocates will make his case into a crusade to defend life); a
brilliant satirist and a charismatic preacher whose sermons exposed the folly
of the sanctimonious (the Christian fundamentalists will disown him; the
Vatican will silence him, even if he's a protestant.) and unveiled the idiocy
of the brainiacs (the atheists will berate him as irrational; the skeptics will
dismiss him as irrelevant). In listening to his sermon, the hearers were confronted
with ironies, metaphors, paradoxes--all intended to plunge them into
existential anxiety and doubt, and in the process, exhorting them to think and
wrestle with God. In this article, I reproduce his famous Meditation XVII where
we find his two most popular quotes -- "No man is an island" and
"For whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee".
