Poets and Poems: Sr. Sharon Hunter and “To Shatter Glass”

Sr. Sharon Hunter is making sense of her life, and she’s using poetry to do it.  

The 56 poems of her new collection, To Shatter Glass, are a journey into childhood and memory, the grief and pain of a broken marriage, and a coming to terms with one’s life and the people who have shaped it. This is the poetry of an interior pilgrimage, as real and palpable as any physical pilgrimage to a revered place. On this journey, Hunter is reaching for understanding and forgiveness, both for the people she knew and for herself. 

 

The poems are not easy to read; they were likely far more difficult to write. Hunter moves back and forth between memories of being raised by alcoholic parents, a marriage in which she often felt her husband’s abuse was justified, and the gradual steps toward resolution. These poems raise important questions about human brokenness, like whether we can ever be made whole in this life. 

 

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

Poets and Poems: Edward Holmes and “Bravery ( Brevity”

Bravery & Brevity, the new poetry collection by Edward Holmes, almost defies description. 

Is it poetry? Absolutely; Holmes writes in both a poetic form and style. 

Is it reflection? Yes; you can find deep reflection in every poem. 

Is it a mediation or devotional? No question here; Holmes is reaching for something larger than what a poetry collection is usually about. 

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

To sing a song

After Psalm 6

I sing a song,

a story, a biography

of anguish and sorrow,

a song that reaches

outward and upward

to the ears that hear,

the ears that listen,

the heart that heeds

and responds, overwhelming,

as arms embrace me,

as heart that keeps time

surrounds me,

making my song

a note in its own.

Photograph by Laith Abuabdu via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A cry, heard

After Psalm 6

A cry from the heart,

a cry is heard,

the heart’s tears

have flowed into ears,

a cry is heard,

a cry for mercy

unmerited, unjustified,

undeserved, yet

the cry is heard and

accepted.

Enemies retreat,

sorrows retreat,

anguish retreats

in the balm

of acceptance.

Photograph by Vinicius Amano via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The groaning

After Psalm 6

My bed bobs in the sea,

a sea of tears, my own,

flooding me, threatening

to drown me as I sink

in my groaning, as I drench

myself in tears, my own,

the tears of knowledge, my own, 

the tears of brokenness, my own,

the tears of recognition, my own,

the tears of sorrow, my own,

as foes surround me,

foes including my own heart,

the tears flowing from sorrow,

the sorrow that brings weakness,

the weakness flowing from my eyes.

In my weakness am I found.

Photograph by Kat Love via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A thin black line

After Psalm 6

A thin black line

stretches before me,

a line unending

into the horizon,

into the void, no refuge,

no respite, no relief

even if only temporary,

this void I languish in,

the void I anguish in.

My voice begs forgiveness,

my voice pleads rescue,

my heart screams to avoid

the anger, the justice,

the discipline, all justified.

Photograph by David Pl via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Forgiveness” by Brian Jones

A friend makes an offhand remark, and suddenly it’s almost 10 years ago. I’m sitting in my office and work, my back to the door. I hear a noise and turn around, and three people are standing there. One is my boss. One is his boss. And one is a high-level executive who felt threatened by my speechwriting work for the CEO, and politically maneuvered me out of doing it.

They had a problem. The replacement speechwriter, who had no prior experience, had turned in a 30-page, single-spaced manuscript – that’s 12,000 words – to the CEO for a major 15-minutes speech. It should have been 1,500 words, and the CEO didn’t even like full-blown manuscripts, preferring extended outlines. And the speech was two days away. The three executives were there, essentially hats in hand, to ask me to fix it.

My first reaction was anger, carefully contained. The second was an inward smugness – the CEO had sent them to me to fix it. And fix it I did. But I had to be careful, because, in the corporate world, this is the kind of situation that the three would likely try to find a way of blaming me for their mistake. It was unfortunate that I felt more gratification than forgiveness.

It is, perhaps, one of the most difficult issues anyone, and especially Christians, must wrestle with in a broken world.

Forgiveness.

It may be forgiving a colleague at work who engaged in the fine art of political backstabbing, with you as the victim. It may be a relative or close friend. It may be a pastor or an entire church. And it may be forgiving yourself.

Forgiveness is tough terrain. And it is the terrain tackled by Brian Jones in his 2008 book, Forgiveness: Get Rid of the Gorillas of Pain, Anger and Bitterness and Start Living.

Jones, a pastor, has heard enough and experienced enough about pain and brokenness in human lives (including his own) to know of what he speaks about forgiveness. Through a combination of observations, personal anecdotes, Scripture references, and self-reflection, He speaks to the very heart and soul of what forgiveness is, why it’s needed, where it comes from, and steps one can take to actually do it.

“The best I can tell,” he writes, “the wrongs themselves aren’t what we catalog and keep recalling. It’s the triggers, the ambient sounds and sensations that bring back the feelings of rage. These are what we can’t help recording and what keep us from forgetting the wrongs done to us.” He’s exactly right. We don’t keep an open journal in our heads about who and what need forgiving, dwelling hourly on each entry there. Instead, the hurt and pain are buried, until something – an observation, an off-hand comment, a scene from a movie or a television program – trigger the memory. And the anger.

Brian Jones

Jones uses the metaphor of a gorilla to explain forgiveness. We all keep gorillas inside of us – angry, sometimes raging gorillas of hurt, pain, and brokenness. He tracks the gorillas in his own life and the lives of the rest us, tracing where they come from, what has really caused them (what he calls “gorilla DNA”). And then how we rid ourselves of the gorillas.

Jones is senior pastor of Christ’s Church of the Valley in suburban Philadelphia. He received his B.A. degree from Cincinnati Christian University and his M.Div. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of Second Guessing God (2006), Hell is Real: But I Hate to Admit It (2011), and a forthcoming book to be published in the fall of 2017. He also writes practical articles on leadership and preaching for senior pastors at SeniorPastorCentral.com.

Forgiveness is almost a decade old. But the wisdom and truth it contains about one of the most common needs people experience are timeless.

Top photograph by Peter Hershey via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Christians don’t do that, do they?

We were attending a large church, large enough for two services in a big auditorium but still small enough to know people. We had been there a while, and knew a lot of people through Sunday School, mission trips, and adult classes.

A friend from work attended with his family. We never saw each other at work; different facilities and totally different parts of the company. But we connected at church, shared work war stories, sat in classes together, and helped each other through our children’s teen years.

And then – train wreck. For a time, his wife stopped coming to church; he would bring the kids. Then he told me his marriage might be over. And then his wife started attending church with her boyfriend.

I didn’t know the whole story, only having heard one side of it. But it was devastating to my friend, to the children, and to the church.

And then another friend, one I knew professionally, decided she wasn’t happy in her marriage. And she knew God wanted her to be happy. So she walked out on her husband and child. Later we learned she walked out of one relationship to be in the relationship she had already developed with a co-worker.

Then a couple we were in a small Bible study group with broke up. He decided he didn’t want to be married any more. As it turned out, he had a relationship at work.

And then a friend, with whom I worked in ministry for years, told me he and his wife were divorcing. She had told him to leave. This wasn’t a case of infidelity on either side; it was more that their marriage was wrecked and neither saw any hope for trying to retrieve it.

All of these people were Christians. Bible-believing, church-attending Christians. In every case, no one had a clue, even their closest friends. They came to church every Sunday wearing their Sunday smiley faces. With ample opportunities to share their hurting in prayer, classes, small groups, and individual friendships, they had said nothing.

And it made me wonder if the problem might be the church. You’re not supposed to have problems like this if you’re a Christian. It’s non-believers who have these problems. It’s the culture.

And maybe it is the church.

In Heart Made Whole: Turning Your Unhealed Pain into Your Greatest Strength, Christa Black Gifford says that “Jesus’ intention for us as believers is never to suppress the truth of our emotions and put on fake religious smiles, attempting to deal with very natural things on our own. When life hurts, we hurt just as He did—and that’s simply okay.”

Gifford and her husband went through the agony of losing a newborn child. It could have destroyed them both; it could have destroyed their marriage. They had dark, black days, and they probably still do, but they knew that the depth of their pain was known and understood.

We the church need to do better.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Heart Made Whole. Today concludes the discussion. To see what others are saying about this chapter, “A Heart Made Whole,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Lila Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.