AS A CHRISTIAN, I believe that God has given us all a gift. It is our being. God asks for a gift in return — our becoming: who we become with our being. Because our gift back to God is lifelong and continually shifting and changing, it means that any language that is to be true to this spiritual adventure of being alive needs equally to resist closure; to protest at black-and-white conclusions and fixed meanings.
To be a language of human growth and formation, it needs to be a language of provocation, with tricks of the light, and complex, nuanced prompts that shift our terrain; that interrupt our snoring. Only this type of language will resemble the life of the soul in relationship and conversation with God, always furthering our boundaries into fresh wisdom and new being.
The language that helps us become, develop, and mature is rarely factually informative. It is, again as Jesus showed in his own teaching, parabolic and pushy, as it forbids our comprehension to close down.
I doubt that if Jesus had written a clear manifesto, mission statement or instructive text-book on the Kingdom of God, we would still be engaging excitedly with his vision today. His ceaselessly figurative preaching stops us, and our hope, becoming grounded. He never tells us what the Kingdom is, only what it is like.
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” noted Paul Valéry. Poetry is the language that most truly reflects the life of the soul. It is not for nothing that the Psalms remain one of the most treasured parts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
I am privileged to be a spiritual director to some incredible people. One of the questions we find ourselves asking from time to time is: Who do people become in my presence? When they are with me, who do they become?
It is a question we can ask when in the presence of a poem, too. Poems can be very helpful to two people in this soul-friendship, as they unearth things that we know somewhere within us, but have never yet said, or even consciously recognised.
When John F. Kennedy gave a eulogy to the American poet Robert Frost, reminding his listeners that art was never a form of propaganda, but a form of truth, he said: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
And just as the person of faith brings him- or herself before God in prayer, seeking the freshness that will illuminate his or her own reality, so that it might be humbled by God’s, so reading a good poem can be like standing in an empty room, having to confront yourself and the depths that you have learned to cover over or avoid.
Poems and prayer make us think about lives that have never been ours because forces of habit have deprived us of them, and they set us on course to be remade to fit our larger unspoken hopes and glimpses. Poetry may be fun or sad, complex or accessible, but it is always inseparable from possibility.
The American poet Emily Dickinson captures this in one of her untitled poems:
I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —
Of Chambers as the Cedars —
Impregnable of eye —
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky —
Of Visitors — the fairest —
For Occupation — This —
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise —
I’m a Shropshire boy by birth, and I love returning to what is one of the most beautiful counties of England. There are a lot of sheep in Shropshire, and I joked once with an old shepherd that my boss in London had a shepherd’s crook a bit like the one he was holding. I asked him if he used it to haul in the naughty stray lambs.
“No,” he said, “that’s not what this is good for. I’ll tell you what I do with this crook. I stick it in the ground so deep that I can hold on to it and keep myself so still that eventually the sheep learn to trust me.”
I have been dying to preach at a bishops’ consecration service ever since!
It seems, though, that, as well as being a good model for a pastoral ministry, this story could be applied to how poetry differs from our day-to-day language.
“Let us be proud of the words that are given to us for nothing, not to teach anyone, not to confute anyone, not to prove anyone absurd, but to point beyond all objects into the silence where nothing can be said,” advised Thomas Merton (“Message to Poets” in Selected Essays, Orbis, 2013).
Instead of its being used to barter, argue, and casually relate, poetry is the language that is more rooted in a deeper earth, and which, with patience and attentiveness, we can learn to trust. We can have faith that it is leading us to places of refreshment, even if we don’t yet know where those might be. It is the language that takes on the spirit of self-postponement that can too easily take hold of a life.
ATTENTIVENESS, said Malebranche, is the natural prayer of the soul. Poetry is a form of attention, a literal coming to our senses, a turning aside from convention and memory. Our attentiveness will make us more alive by the time we die. We are freed of first impressions, as we properly attend patiently on what is before us.
In poetry, with this initiation of attention, seeing is meaning. This is more than important because of all the aggressive danger that fantasy fuels in us. Poetry can instil a peace as we come to see, in an incarnational way, how the material and the spiritual are indivisible. Poetry and faith are both arts of attention.
Rowan Williams has written:
. . . one of the tests of actual faith, as opposed to bad religion, is whether it stops you ignoring things. Faith is most fully itself and most fully life-giving when it opens your eyes and uncovers for you a world larger than you thought — and, of course, therefore, a world that’s a bit more alarming than you ever thought. The test of true faith is how much more it lets you see, and how much it stops you denying, resisting, ignoring aspects of what is real.
(What is Christianity?, SPCK, 2015)
Again, the same could be said of poetry.
This is an edited extract from The Splash of Words: Believing in poetry by Mark Oakley (Canterbury Press, £12.99 (CT Bookshop £11.70); 978-1-84825-468-8).