Power in Poetry

"If there be indecorum in my songs,

fasten the blame where rightly it belongs:

on Him who offered me too many cups

of His most potent goodness--not on me,

a peasant who, because a king was host,

drank out of courtesy."

                                                ~ from "But Not With Wine" by Jessica Powers (1984)

Poetry unlocks possibilities in language and experience left bound up by prose. Jesus-followers have a rich repository of poetry in the scriptures, especially in the psalms and the prophets. Jessica Powers, who became Sister Miriam of the Carmelite order, was a modern master craftswoman of the poetic word.

Read poetry. Buy it in the form of a book bound in paper, and then loose it out loud on your summer porch. In particular get your hands on The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers (ICS Publications, 1999). (It can be found here at one of my favorite online booksellers.)

Often with rhythm, often with rhyme, often with meter, Powers' work wanders all the tracts of creation and opens all the windows of the human heart. She helps us glance into heaven:

"The spirit, newly freed from earth,

is all amazed at the surprise

of her belonging: suddenly

as native to eternity

to see herself, to realize

the heritage that lets her be

at home where all this glory lies . . ."  (from "Heaven")

 and into the meaning of gifts:

". . . If you have nothing, gather back your sigh,

and with your hands held high, your heart held high,

lift up your emptiness!"  (from "If You Have Nothing")

She walks us, unafraid, to the conversation with death:

". . . Come death, my friend, my friend.

I know the good your coming works in me.

Shape me to Christ before my journey's end;

Hack me and hew me till Christ comes to be

my dear identity. . . ."   (from "The Monk at Quadragesima")

By Powers' words we bask in the beauty of the young world:

". . . That free is a child's word none deny--

this, heaven and earth both testify,

that God is a meadow in some high way,

a meadow moreover revealed in ours

where only the children find the flowers."    (from "A Meadow Moreover")

She sees the spirit in tectonic plates:

". . . Anyway, he turned over and his weight

of bedding moved with him, and houses fell . . ."    (from "Los Angeles Earthquake")

We must not shy away from the deep difficult parts of our story, including such fractured paradoxes as the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham; so Powers invites us to look in that mirror with her:

" . . . O love far deeper than a lone begotten,

how grievingly I let your words be lost

when a shy question guessed I had forgotten

a thing so vital as the holocaust. . . ."   (from "Take Your Only Son")

Powers' poems are mostly one-page pieces, easily read in small doses, like a heavenly flavor for your morning coffee. Or you could read entire sections of the book in a single sitting, divisions with names like "The Mercy of God," "Angels," "Decisions," and "Birds and Lessons for Life." Like all poetry, in reading the first line we surrender control over the end of the journey. The capable talents of Jessica Powers take the reins and carry us to mountains and vales poignant, surprising, filled with beauty, and up to the edge of everyday vistas of love:

". . . Love has its proper soil, its native land;

its first roots fasten on the near-at-hand.

Back toward the house from which I deftly fled,

down neighbors' lanes, across my father's barley

my heart brought home its charity. It said,

love is a simple plant like a Creeping Charlie;

once it takes root its talent is to spread. "  (from "My Heart Ran Forth")

In all her work this Carmelite psalmist equips us to live out her own final prayer from the book (entitled "Doxology"), to which end we hear all of faith and life calling us:

"Praise to the Father and the Son

and to the Spirit! May I be,

O Water, Wave and Tide in One,

Thine animate doxology."

love,

emrys

p.s. Thanks to Martha for introducing me to Jessica Powers' work. What a gift!

Argument From Silence, or the Ghost of Marcion

I have been enjoying the daily reflections emanating from the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), an institute started by the Franciscan Richard Rohr (thanks, Loretta, for passing along that link). They often provide a compass pointing us toward the peace and love displayed by Jesus Christ.

This one gave me pause. It lifts up the places in the gospels in which Jesus cites the Hebrew scriptures and interprets them. What gave me pause was not the citations from the gospels. I stumbled on, as an example, the assertion that Jesus "omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree." In this particular case Rohr refers to the episode in Luke in which Jesus does not read a verse about God's vengeance in the scroll of Isaiah.

Why Jesus omitted that verse is a fascinating question for preachers and teachers. But to say, as Rohr does, that Jesus kicked some words of Isaiah to the curb--as opposed to, for instance, saving them for later--makes a drastic assumption about the gospels.

Between the lines of this CAC post is the assertion that if the gospel writers didn't mention a Hebrew text, that text can be considered invalid. Beneath this assertion sit two dubious assumptions. First, we would have to assume that there were no steps of interpretation between what Jesus said and did and the gospel writers. We would assume that what the authors of the gospel recorded was Jesus' intention, perfect and complete. Given the various (and sometimes conflicting) reports of the four gospels, I think this is a problematic assumption. Second, we would have to assume that the gospel writers recorded all of Jesus' references to the Hebrew scriptures. Given the brevity of the gospel texts covering three or more years of public ministry, this assumption stretches credulity.

To assert that whatever Hebrew texts don't show up in the gospels can be set aside by Christians puts us on the fringes, if not well within, something called Marcionism. Marcion of Sinope, leader of an early Church movement, declared that the Hebrew Scriptures reflected the work of a different god than that of Jesus Christ. Though we may not want to ascribe authorship to another divine being, we're not far away if we say that the God of Jesus Christ does not want us to read uncomfortable texts from the Hebrew Scriptures.

I think we can embrace a new mission in Jesus Christ without claiming that he "ignor[ed] most of his own Bible," as Rohr does. Perhaps Rohr is overstating the matter to make a point, which puts him in good company with Jesus. But, like many of us Jesus-followers do, taking overstatements at face value can lead to problematic conclusions. It is a lifetime task of Christians to seek to understand how God, in Jesus Christ, is weaving all the threads of Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, and the Epistles into a tapestry that embraces the entirety of human history. To set aside some of the story because it makes us uncomfortable or we disagree with it deprives us of opportunities to be a part of that glorious, all-encompassing work.

love,

emrys