This article was originally published at
The Master’s Artist
That’s
the title of a poem by Luci Shaw, included in her collection Harvesting
Fog: Poems. It’s an arresting title, perhaps a trifle presumptuous, as
if God could be read as anything. And then you read her poem, and you
understand.
She’s
not saying God is a poem, or even that he can be read as a poem. Instead, she
is talking about where a poem comes from and the creative imagination. God, in
fact, is mentioned only in the title, and yet he permeates the poem.
I
came to poetry rather late. I did the perfunctory studies in high school, and
was interested enough to take two semesters of English literature in college
with the English lit majors while the rest of the sophomore class took American
literature. Most people wrote term papers on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young
Goodman Brown” and Faulkner’s “The Barn Burning.” I wrote papers on Beowulf, Piers Plowman, John Donne, Milton, Keats and Coleridge. But I was a
journalism major, and had to leave English literature and poetry behind for a
time.
A
decade later, working as a corporate speechwriter, I started reading poetry
again. And for the next 25 years, I read poetry, not as a steady diet but
enough to grasp rhythm, flow, meter, rhyme (and” un-rhyme”) and enough to know
who was a “name” and who wasn’t. Poetry’s expression of ideas in pacing and
word choice helped me write better speeches. Poetry comes from the oral
tradition. The same or nearly the same tradition that gives us great speeches
and orations (blame Homer and the Greeks).
Five
years ago, I started writing poetry. And I quickly learned three things.
First,
writing a poem is hard. It takes a lot of focused, concentrated work like any
act of artistic creation.
Second,
it’s personal. Rightly or wrongly (and people actually argue about this),
poetry evokes a feeling of vulnerability more than other kinds of writing. I
still feel naked when I post a poem on my blog.
And
third, writing poetry has helped me understand the word of God in a different
way. It’s not only because more than a third of the Bible is written in poetic
form. It’s also because Scripture can be both plain and complicated, with an
obvious meaning and then deeper shades of meaning. And you can read a verse a
thousand times, and suddenly something strikes that you never saw before.
A
poem is a lot like that. Meaning can be both simple and layered, obvious and
obscure. Here’s Luci Shaw’s poem:
On Reading God as a Poem
The
trail of connection is frail. I listen
for
the oblique to become transparent,
straining
to discern messages in
the
deep silences between the calls of
a
hoot owl on a moonless night.
Unfocused
images try to crowd between
the
words on some hidden script,
leaving
me guessing. Conversation, the to
and
fro of language, can never be a monolog.
But
maybe I’m deaf. Maybe I should
partner
mystery with my own silence, Or
Is
this a new language to be learned?
Struggling
for meaning is like angling my view
to
catch the glisten from a lump of coal
ready
for burning, wondering about origins,
about
carbon – its formation, its capacity
for
warming a room, the life implicit in
some
Mesozoic tree.
Each
of us has encountered a time when a verse – or something we’re struggling with
in our lives – is so beyond understanding that we listen intently for “the
oblique to become transparent.” We strain to discern meaning – what is God
saying here? – in those “deep silences.” All kinds of “unfocused images” come
to our minds, and we’re left guessing (What is your will here? What would you
have me do?).
Or
perhaps we’re deaf to what’s really being said, as we find ourselves
“struggling for meaning.” And often we have to go back to first things (I
reread the Gospel of St. John) – that lump of coal/carbon that’s the basis of
life, to understand the meaning that likely was there (“implicit in some Mesozoic
tree”) from the beginning. And perhaps I’m the lump of coal, glistening in my
dark ignorance but knowing that a lump of coal might one day glisten as a
diamond.
That’s
reading God as a poem.
