Can Poetry Help Us Understand Scripture? Part 2

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

Last week, I noted that I had attended a poetry workshop taught by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Twelve of us spent two days talking about poetry, and talking about poetry in relation to Scripture, and writing poetry, our overnight assignment: pick a difficult passage of Scripture and explicate it – using poetry. In other words, we had to write a poem that might help our understanding of the passage.

Much of that idea of explicating Scripture underlies Cairns’ Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Published in 2002, the volume includes both new poems and poems from his previously published collections (he’s also published more since then). The term “philokalia,” or “love of the beautiful,” is taken from the collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Easter Orthodox theologians.

Among the new poems in Cairns’ collection are five “Adventures in New Testament Greek,” in which uses the form of poetry the meanings of five words: metanoia (repentance), hairesis (heresy), nous (mind), mysterion (mystery), and apocatastasis (universal redemption – a heresy of Syriac origin). Here’s what he does with metanoia:

Repentance, to be sure,

but of a species far

less likely to oblige

sheepish repetition.

Repentance, you’ll observe,

glibly bears the bent

of thought revisited,

and mind’s familiar stamp

--a quaint, half-hearted

doubleness that couples

all compunction with a pledge

of recurrent screw-up.

The heart’s metanoia,

on the other hand, turns

without regret, turns not

so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim

has been surprised to find

that sin is not so bad

as it is a waste of time.

Philokalia contains far more than explorations of words; Cairns considers and examines all kinds of themes, divine and human. What the poems have in common is the use of a spiritual lens; these are themes and subjects best understood as subjects of faith, including issues we wrestle with and including the idea of poetry itself. (One poem, “Interval with Erato,” is a sexually charged poem about poetry and its inspiration.)

I have many favorites in this collection, but the one I found particularly appealing is “The Translation of Raimondo Luz.” It’s a long poem, and Cairns tells us it’s about “the greatest postmodern poet writing in Portuguese.” We learn he’s never left his hometown in Brazil; he’s self-taught, speaking seven modern languages and three ancient ones; he’s known as a radical theologian; he loves American rhythm and blues; and he’s an accomplished chef. And then Cairns tells us he is also a complete fiction.

That’s Scott Cairns – giving all of this extensive background and then offhandedly mentioned the person isn’t real, and then goes on to write a 10-page poem about him.

That same sleight of hand (or is it?) can apply to using poetry to explain difficult passages of Scripture. I know. I did it for the workshop.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Scott Cairns: Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

This article was first published at The Master’s Artist.

In 2010, I attended a writer’s conference at Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country about 90 minutes or so west of San Antonio. I had signed up for the poetry seminar taught by Scott Cairns, a professor at the University of Missouri, which is about 90 or so minutes west of where I live in St. Louis. I had previously read his A Short Trip to the Edge, an account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos (Cairns in Greek orthodox), and Compassion of Affection: Poems New and Selected.

I was looking forward to the seminar; I was not disappointed (and I loved Laity Lodge). Twelve of spent two days doing something I’d never heard of – using poetry to explicate Scripture.

That’s the idea, or one of the ideas, behind Recovered Body: Poems, published by Cairns in 2003. Cairns uses poetry to explicate Scripture, and more than that, to explore poetry as a kind of Biblical enterprise. And it’s utterly fascinating.

The poems are divided into three sections.

The first, “Deep Below Our Violences,” covers a range topics – a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, the Old Masters’ paintings, archaeology, a rather erotic discussion between the poet and his muse Erato, the death of a father. The poems are characteristically Cairns, and I can hear his deep, slow voice now that I heard in Texas on a windblown patio near the Frio River. And I can hear that characteristic wonder of life. Here’s “Regarding the Body:”

I too was a decade coming to terms

with how abruptly my father had died.

And I’m still lying about it. His death

was surely as incremental, slow-paced

as any, and certainly as any

I’d witnessed. Still, as we met around him

that last morning—none of us unaware

of what the morning would bring—I was struck

by how quickly he left us. And the room

emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.

If impiety toward the dead were still

deemed sin, it was that morning our common

trespass, to have imagined too readily

his absence, to have all but denied him

as he lay, simply, present before us.

In the second section, “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,” the reader is given an introductory warning about the rabbi, who has often been accused of “apostasy, blasphemy, manic-depression, drunkenness, bad manners. He has been praised for his compassion, revered—if not much liked—for his eager upbraiding of the pious.”

Then you read the rabbi’s “commentaries” on the image of God, sin, Lot’s wife, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Joseph thrown into the well and then sold, the death of Moses, Solomon and his Song, Jephthah’s terrible vow, Jonah’s imprisonment, and the exile. Yes, those accusations against the rabbi have validity, but his commentaries force the reader to confront and wrestle with the meanings of the Biblical texts being commented upon.

And I wonder if I didn’t hear a little of that rabbi down in Texas, too.

The third section of poems, “Supplications,” is devoted to New Testament themes – Christ in Gethsemane, the thief himself crucified who ridiculed Jesus on the cross, a beautiful poem about Mary Magdalene, and Jesus descending into hell, among others. The poem about Mary Magdalene, entitled “Loves” is simple and strong, and a memory, declaration and hymn all at once. Cairns subtitles it “Magdalene’s Epistle,” and it is written as a kind of deep, thoughtful and profound letter.

Recovered Body is a strong collection. Many of the poems were previously published by Chariton Review, Image, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications and two anthologies. The poems, individually and collectively, provide a different way to look at both Scripture and poetry, as text and a way to understand text, and how to apply that text and understanding to life.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poet and Poems: Scott Cairns’ “Idiot Psalms”

I met Scott Cairns once, in 2010, down in the Hill Country of Texas. Laity Lodge was hosting a writer’s retreat, and I had signed up for the poetry seminar. Cairns was our seminar teacher. I had previously read

two of his books of poetry, which I’d found in the faculty publications section at the University of Missouri at Columbia bookstore.

He taught our seminar like he writes poetry – quiet, reflective, low-key, questioning, gently probing. We sat on a terrace in cool September sunshine, on a bluff above the Frio River. We reads poems written by others, and we read poems we had written as overnight assignments. The experience had something of the liturgical about it, with the words, the coolness, the sunshine resembling more of a worship service than a poetry seminar.

Cairns new collection of poems, Idiot Psalms: New Poems, has that same sense of the liturgical.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Luke Hankins and "Poems of Devotion"

I learned recently I was doing something I didn’t realize I was doing. In fact, I’ve been doing it for more than three years now,

I know about the time it started – October, 2010. I know where it started – Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country southwest of San Antonio. And I know who started me doing it – poet and professor Scott Cairns.

But it took poet and anthologist Luke Hankins to explain it to me (Cairns called it something else – using poetry to wrestle with difficult passages of Scripture).

“It” is the devotional poem. Not a poem of devotion, but doing a devotional through the writing of a poem.

In Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, Hankins has brought together examples of poems as devotions form a wide array of poets, and he defines “recent” as having been alive after 1950. I scanned the table of contents, and I recognized most of the poets listed – names like Cairns, Luci Shaw, Jane Hirschfield, and Nick Samaras.

These poets, or most of them, likely knew what they were doing when they write poems as devotions. I didn’t. I was just doing it, and not realizing what a history and legacy I was stumbling into. It was like writing poems before you bit into the fruit of the tree of (poetic) knowledge.

The idea of the poem as devotion has been around for a long time, but one group of poets, Hankins notes, is most closely identified with it, and that is the 17^th century metaphysical poets. We read them in high school, and if we took English Lit in college, we read them there, too. Poets like John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell.

They’ve had their ups and downs from the critics (Samuel Johnson tended to sneer at them), but they had a significant impact on later generations of poets, poets we are extremely familiar with today. Gerald Manley Hopkins. T.S. Eliot. Joseph Brodsky. Czeslaw Milosz. Robert Penn Warren. Thomas Merton. E.E. Cummings. Louise Gluck. W.H. Auden. Wendelly Berry. Seamus Heaney. And more. Most of these poets have at least one poem included in this anthology.

We make think of a poem of devotion as a kind of psalm, and it can be – several included here read like a psalm of David. But they are also struggles, and ventings, an occasional rant, a love poem – all of the ways we approach God, except translated into written poetry.

I found myself marking many favorites in the volume; so many good ones are included that’s it difficult to name one as the best. One I liked immensely was this one by Ilya Kaminsky:

Author’s Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave

this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,

for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge

of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without

touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”

I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.

Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and

Ina language not mine, speak

Of music that wakes us, music

in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest

says must I praise.

It’s something of a surprise; you don’t expect to land in a poem of devotion until you’re right in the thick of it. Once you see the reference to God, you go back to the beginning and your understanding of the poem changes. (By the way, I did a short post on Kaminsky in 2011 for Tweetspeak Poetry.)

It’s an excellent compilation of poems and poets, some dead and some in the 20s, with every other age group in between. Gathering them in this way demonstrates a connection, a continuance of this poetry (and devotional) form.

Sitting there on the banks of the Frio River at Laity Lodge, little did I know that I was reaching back four centuries to John Donne. Luke Hankins and his Poems of Devotion connected me to those still tolling bells.

Photograph by Bobby Mikul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Scott Cairns' "Philokalia"

I’ve previously noted that I had attended a poetry workshop taught by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Twelve of us spent two days talking about poetry, and talking about poetry in relation to Scripture, and writing poetry, our overnight assignment: pick a difficult passage of Scripture and explicate it – using poetry. In other words, we had to write a poem that might help our understanding of the passage.

Much of that idea of explicating Scripture underlies Cairns’ Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Published in 2002, the volume includes both new poems and poems from his previously published collections (he’s also published more since then). The term “philokalia,” or “love of the beautiful,” is taken from the collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Easter Orthodox theologians.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

In 2010, I attended a writer’s conference at Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country about 90 minutes or so west of San Antonio. I had signed up for the poetry seminar taught by Scott Cairns, a professor at the University of Missouri, which is about 90 or so minutes west of where I live in St. Louis. I had previously read his A Short Trip to the Edge, an account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos (Cairns in Greek orthodox), and Compassion of Affection: Poems New and Selected.

I was looking forward to the seminar; I was not disappointed (and I loved Laity Lodge). Twelve of spent two days doing something I’d never heard of – using poetry to explicate Scripture.

That’s the idea, or one of the ideas, behind Recovered Body: Poems, published by Cairns in 2003.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

Last year, I attended a poetry seminar at Laity Lodge with poet and teacher Scott Cairns, who led 12 of us on a two-day journey to destinations none of us quite imagined when we started. Our overnight assignment was to write a poem based on a hard or difficult passage in Scripture.

It was something I had not considered before – using poetry to explicate Scripture. Cairns and most of the others in the seminar seemed quite comfortable with the idea and practice. I wasn’t; I was also nervous about the idea of reading a poem I had written to a group of people, something I had never done before. But I plunged ahead, wrote (and rewrote and rewrote) my poem, and actually read it.

It opened up a new world for me, a new way to study and understand Scripture.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

“The Jesus Prayer” by Frederica Mathewes-Green

Years back, I spent a lot of time reading church history, works by Christian and secular scholars alike. I still have 1970s reprints of 19^th century books by Sir William Ramsay (like The Church in the Roman Empire), the two-volume History of Christianity by Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, New Testament History by F.F. Bruce, Alfred Edersheim’s Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, and Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo. I also read a lot of the original writings of the early church fathers, like Origen and Tertullian.

It was while reading Latourette’s History that I discovered eastern Christianity in more than a cursory way. The history of Christianity in Western Europe and North and South America is largely the story of Latin, or western, Christianity and its Protestant offshoot. Eastern Christianity has a full and rich history as well – the eastern Roman Empire, the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, the desert fathers (and mothers) and the story of the growing struggle against the spread of Islam. (For all the talk about the Western imperialistic Crusades in the Mideast, people forget that before the Crusades there were the Islamic jihads that conquered large parts of what had been the eastern (and Christian) Roman Empire.

I learned that the history of eastern Christianity was as fascinating as the history of its western counterpart. I also learned about the significant differences between the two.

More than 20 years later, while visiting our younger son at the University of Missouri, I picked up a book in the campus bookstore – Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns. A professor and poet, Cairns is also a practicing Orthodox Christian believer (just consider that combination for a moment – a professor at a public university, a poet and an Orthodox believer). The book was an account of the author’s various pilgrimages to the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece.

Suddenly, Cairns had me in the weeds of Orthodox belief and practice. My reading from years before helped my understanding. But I had to read the book slowly. Because much of what it contains was alien to my western Christian mind. I thoroughly enjoyed the book – even if I wasn’t quite prepared to venerate an icon with a kiss.

One spiritual practice associated with Orthodox Christianity is “the Jesus Prayer,” and it is the subject of Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The Jesus Prayer. It is a deceptively simply prayer and practice – the repetition of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” An acceptable variant adds “a sinner” after “me.”

Mathewes-Green, the author of several books on Orthodox Christianity, explores the history of the prayer (arising among the desert fathers) and then provides an extensive step-by-step explanation of what it is, how it works and the training and practice that’s needed to pray the prayer. Much of this explanation is in the form of an extended question-and-answer section that becomes a kind of mediation itself. (And whether the Questions are her own writing device or real questions that people have asked, I found that she used several questions that I had about the prayer and practice.)

Along the way, Mathewes-Green explains the prayer’s place in “remedial awe,” or learning how immense and majestic God truly is; how transformative the prayer can be (I loved her insight that “everyone wants to be transformed but nobody wants to change”); how you will gradually silence the “inner chatter” that crowds prayer out; and how charity needs to be considered in the contest of personal relationships.

For those of us of the Protestant persuasion, the idea of a repetitive prayer – praying the same words over and over – sounds rather Roman Catholic with its “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys.” Yet as Mathewes-Green explains it, this short prayer is a significant spiritual practice, one requiring guidance and discipline.

Scott Cairns' "Compass of Affection"

I’ve never read a theology of poetry before, but I have now with Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected by Scott Cairns.

Published in 2006, this volume of poems includes several selected from previously published works from 1985 to 2002, and then new poems published in 2006. Together, they constitute a kind of “theology of poetry,” or perhaps a poetry of theology.

Cairns, professor of English at the University of Missouri, employs poetry to study the teachings of the Bible, the role of tradition, and the life of faith. It is a quiet volume, quiet but full of important things.

It’s not the first poem selected, but “The Beginning of the World” is a kind of commentary and explication of the Book of Genesis. From that poem, first published in Figures for the Ghost in 1994:

“But even before that original issue, first utterance of our Great
solitary, His self-demarcation of Himself, before even that first birth
I suspect an inclination. In God’s center, something of a murmur,
pre-verbal, pre-phenomenal, perhaps nothing more disturbing to the
moment than a silent clearing of the hollowed throat, am approach
merely, but it was a beginning earlier than the one we had supposed,
and a willingness for something standing our apart from Him, if
nonetheless His own.”

“Blessed,” published in the volume Philokalia in 2002, is a kind of commentary on the beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew:

“By their very designations, we know the meek
are available for all manner of insult,
the poor have no effectual recourse against
the blithe designs of the rich, and that enigmatic
crew we recognize as merciful still refuses
to stand up for itself, which makes all of them prime
objects for whatever device the brutes ordain…”

Many of the poems are about the idea of life and faith as pilgrimage, yet it is not the idea that “the journey is the point” but more than faith itself is a pilgrimage, often an interior pilgrimage, the growing awareness of God. From “Against Justice” (2006):

“Yes, I know the poem is difficult, but far more likely to be read
than any script the habits score. The chore, as I’ve suggested,
lies in tracing any solid thread between the outcome
and its cause, any lead, or leading proposition posed
so as to offer what pass for revelation. The God
is hardly just, and we are grateful for His oversight.”

Compass of Affection is a richly splendid introduction to Scott Cairns’ poetry and his faith, as well as to the idea of faith itself.


Related: “Scott Cairns: Poet of Pilgrimage,” my post at The Christian Manifesto.

Scott Cairns: The Poet of Pilgrimage

When I attended the High Calling editorial team meeting and writers conference at Laity Lodge last month, I participated in the poetry workshop led by Scott Cairns, professor of English at the University of Missouri. I posted three articles on the workshop: the first day, the results of the overnight assignment, and a kind of summary and thank you to the participants.


Today, Christian Manifesto has posted my article on Scott – “The Poet of Pilgrimage,” in which I consider four of his works – two books of poetry, a memoir and a long essay. Take a look and let me know what you think.

A Poetry Workshop - Part 3

The poetry workshop led by Scott Cairns at the Laity Lodge writers retreat extended over two days, Friday and Saturday. Each session was three hours of discussion and readings, with some additional hours (for me, anyway) for the overnight assignment.

If someone had told me that by following Sam Van Eman’s blog New Breed of Advertisers almost two years ago that I would end up a writer for The High Calling and in a poetry workshop in southern Texas, well, who’d of thunk it? And read a poem I’d written to a group of people I scarcely knew? Who’d of thunk that, too? Two years ago, writing poetry wasn’t even on my radar scope.

But there I was, sitting with 11 other people, listening and talking, listening and commenting, being part of the silence after each poem was read.

At the Sunday worship time, I found myself sitting between two of the poetry workshop participants, Cameron Lawrence and Joan Fry. Another participant, Brian Williams, was sitting on the other side of Cameron. (At the brunch afterward, I would sit with Joan and still another participant, Jean Dunham.) In a few short hours, poetry had created a bond.

So, I’ve written this, for Scott Cairns and all of the workshop participants (Brian Williams, Cameron Lawrence, Joan Fry, Jean Dunham, Bill and Diana Bridgman, Mary Earle, Angela Carlson, Olga Samples Davis and Verbie Ann Helyger).

Workshop

We sit circular,
approximately,
holding pages filled
with hope and
desire and not
a little anguish.
And he says,
the opposite of faith
is not doubt;
the opposite of faith
is anxiety.
We nod.
Tentatively, then
more boldly, we read,
our words suffused
with Spirit, a cascade
of worship.

Photograph: Waterfall at the dam, Laity Lodge; courtesy of my cell phone.

A Poetry Workshop - Part 1

At the High Callings Blogs staff meeting at Laity Lodge last week, we joined the writer’s retreat conference on Thursday evening. On Friday, the workshops started, including ones for fiction, spiritual writing, non-fiction, song writing and others.

I had signed up for the poetry workshop, led by Scott Cairns, a poet and professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia. (Yes, I see a certain irony in traveling to the Hill Country of south Texas for a workshop led by a man who lives an hour and a half from my house in St. Louis.)

At the workshop, 12 of us gathered in a circle, and Scott began the discussion by asking what, exactly is a poem? How can poetry apply to scripture? Could we learn something from how the Jewish commentators explicated their scriptures? He read a prose poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “Legend,” about Cain and Abel meeting long after the great drama (and Abel’s murder) in the Book of Genesis. This is what I wrote as I listened to the poem and the discussion:

Listening to Borges

I was listening to a poem
by Borges and wondered,
did the mark upon Abel
become the mirror that
became the mark
upon Cain?

Scott had so many good things to say. I don’t think I’ve known a more gracious workshop leader, and as this was my first poetry workshop, I had a lot of questions about what might happen. Among several other things, he said, “To understand tradition, you have to be humble. Arrogance has no understanding of tradition.” And this: “Let the mind descend to the heart to hear the text in a different way.”

I felt completely at home in the discussion, until he rather innocently asked each of us to name a passage in scripture that we found to be a “dark saying” or particularly difficult. Most of us could think of at least one.

And then he said, “Now, your assignment is to write a poem about it and read it to the rest of us tomorrow for comment and critique.”

I had posted poems online before – and they are always the postings I’m the most nervous and sensitive about. But I had never read a poem I wrote aloud to a group. Not to mention doing so with the expectation of comment and critique.

Oh, my.

Photograph of Scott Cairns by University of Missouri.

Virtual Staff Becomes Real Staff

For the retreat at Laity Lodge with the High Calling Blogs (HCB) staff, we drove from San Antonio west to Kerrville, and then another 20 or so miles west. Then south for quite a ways, turning off on a road of crushed rock (I’d guess limestone but I’m no rock expert; I sort them into ugly, pretty and common).

We drove for a few miles in the darkness, and then descended to the river. We went straight in and followed the river road (or road in the river) for what seemed like the equivalent of three or four blocks. And then a steep turn upward back on to the road. Eventually, four of us were dropped off at Song Bluff House – Gordon Atkinson, David Rupert, Sam Van Eman and myself. It was actually quite a nice residence – three bedrooms, two baths, large living and dining area, and perched on a bluff about the lodge’s youth camp. It was well after midnight, and we all crashed.

Breakfast the next morning was at 8, and then a devotion time followed by the staff meeting. Gordon led the devotion on Matthew 7:21-24, and I should have known something was up when I wrote the following in the journal I carry everywhere now:

Change Psalm

My heart is the Lord’s
My hands are the Lord’s.
My ears are the Lord’s.
My feet are the Lord’s.
My will is the Lord’s.
My hope is the Lord’s.
My desire in the Lord’s.
My desire…
    My…
        Lord…
            The Lord…
The Lord is my desire.
The Lord is my hope.
The Lord is my will.
The Lord is my feet.
The Lord is my ears.
The Lord is my hands.
The Lord is my heart.

The meeting started with a short presentation on the history of the Foundation for Laity Renewal and the Howard E. Butt family, and the lodge property itself. HCB editor Marcus Goodyear discussed the upcoming merger of the High Calling site with the High Calling Blogs site. Then Laura Barkat, HCB managing editor, talked about the importance of trust. We had lunch and then a telephone conference with the site design firm on the new process for entering content.

One of the best parts of the meeting was to talk with people I’d been working with online for more than a year in some cases. I had just worked with Sam on a Random Act of Poetry post for HCB. I’d worked with Marcus on several projects, and had been communicating and then working with Laura Barkat since the summer of 2009. And I work closely with Bradley Moore, aka Shrinking Camel, who’s my editor at HCB for posts on work.

But then there were all the others, people I had followed on Twitter and Facebook, left comments on their blogs, traded emails with from time to time: Gordon and Sam, Ann Kroeker, Laura Boggess, Claire Burge, Dan Roloff, David Rupert, Cheryl Smith, Dena Dyer, Deidra Riggs, Dan King (the Bible Dude himself!), Ann Voskamp and Jennifer Dukes-Lee.

When you read people’s writing for a sustained period and work with them online, you gradually form a picture of what they must be like in person. And for me there were no surprises. Well, not exactly. Sam Van Eman is a lot more serious on his New Breed of Advertisers blog than he is in person. Not that he’s wild and crazy. Well, not hugely wild and crazy. Okay, he’s kind of a crazy guy in a reserved sort of way.

That evening, we joined 50 or so other writers for the opening reception of the regular writer’s retreat. As I looked across the Great Hall, I noticed a tall man who looked a lot like someone I had seen before at my church in St. Louis. When he sat at my table at dinner, I realized he was the guy from my church. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him – neither of us knew the other was a writer. (It’s a big church.)

I ended the evening by walking back to Song Bluff House, about a half a mile from the main lodge. The next day, Friday, we’d begin the workshops. I would be participating in the poetry workshop with Scott Cairns, a poet and professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia (who lives about 90 minutes from my house). All these Missouri connections…

Photograph: Laity Lodge, Great Hall building from across the Frio River, courtesy of my cell phone.

The Jesus Prayer

Last November, my wife and I drove one Saturday over to Columbia, Missouri, to see youngest son in college. We brought food relief, went out to eat (at the Flatiron, if you’re ever there and looking for something good and inexpensive), and then hit the University of Missouri bookstore. My wife and youngest son gravitated to logo clothing while I wandered among the book stacks, and specifically the poetry stacks.

One of the books I found was Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns.

Cairns is an accomplished poet and an English professor at Mizzou, where he teaches modern and contemporary American literature and creative writing. He’s also an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and he writes about his faith. A lot. His Love’s Immensity, in fact, is a collection of translations and adaptations of writings of various Christian apostles, disciples and saints on faith and prayer, from Saint Paul to St. Therese of Lisieux, and written as poems.

Short Trip to the Edge is the account of four pilgrimages Cairns made with the hope of finding a spiritual father to guide him in a life of prayer – two to the monasteries and “sketes” of Mount Athos, one to an Orthodox monastery in Arizona, and the fourth back to Mount Athos, this time with his teenaged son. To join Cairns on his journey is to discover some of the most revered places in the Orthodox church, to see how seekers and others undertake a pilgrimage, and to watch as they and the monks and priests leading them participate in worship.

It’s a very different kind of Christian faith from what I’ve experienced. It’s a tribute to Cairns’ writing that I found myself sitting alongside him, in my own “stall,” listening to the chants of the monks and standing in line with the other pilgrims to receive the Eucharist, and then afterward to join in venerating the icons. (And veneration of the icons is something almost alien to this evangelical Presbyterian.)

As I was finishing the book this past week, what should arrive in my email but a daily reflection from Mark Roberts, senior director of Laity Lodge and Scholar-in-Residence, part of the High Calling organization (my blog is affiliated with the High Calling Blogs). This is a daily email, and Roberts has been writing and meditating on the Gospel of Mark. Thursday’s reflection cited the Jesus Prayer. And Roberts said that, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, “One of the most common and influential prayers is… the so-called ‘Jesus Prayer,’ which has a variety of forms, and is spoken millions of times each day by believers throughout the world.”

And it’s the prayer that Cairns prays throughout Short Trip to the Edge.

Okay, so it was a coincidence. But I ponder coincidences like that, and I started to pray the words. I can’t say that anything miraculous has happened as a result, nor do I expect that. But I’m finding it is a way to calm myself and focus, and I’ve started praying it several times a day.

The words are simple.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”


Short Trip to the Edge also has things to say about poetry. Visit TweetSpeak Poetry for my post on that aspect of the work.

On Friday, my friend Jim Schmotzer looked at The Jesus Prayer in poetic form, and it's a beautiful rendering. The fact that it was on both of our minds at the same time is another one of those coincidences.