My hope is to help us see how engaging poetry is a viable and enlivening spiritual practice.
In addition to the icon or window, I want to offer the image of the compass as a way of explaining the relationship between poetry and the spiritual life since, as the title suggests, we will be reading, pondering, praying, listening to, and discussing poetry specifically “for the sacred journey.” Why poetry? Because like a compass poetry has the potential to situate us as human beings, to guide us on the sacred journey, and to direct us in the geography of faith. Why poetry? Because poetry humanizes us and for humans there is no sanctification apart from becoming human. Why poetry? Because there are some poet’s who, simultaneously intoxicated by the power of words and sobered by their inadequacy, equally acquainted with grief and joy, tenants of both grace and disgrace, are able to point us toward the mystery which can never be captured in language, packaged in concepts, or explained in theories, whether that mystery is the divine breath which animates all life or a poor old woman munching a plum.
If you’ve ever seen an old compass, you know that it is both a helpful instrument for making one’s way and a thing of beauty. Such is the case with a good poem. On the one hand, we will read poems for the sheer enjoyment of the poem, reveling in the musicality of words, the pull of evocative images, or the freshness and consequent clarity of a metaphor. On the other hand, we will allow poems to function allusively, following words culled from the soil of silence that after they have done their magic, slipped off our tongue, and fired our imagination point us toward truths that reach further than even language can stretch. We might call this participating in the ministry of words. Poet Seamus Heaney writing on William Butler Yeats said, “The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole.”
What we won’t be doing in Poetry for the Sacred Journey is dissecting poems for meaning or worse yet for something we deem spiritual meaning. As I mentioned last Sunday, we are not so much like biblical exigetes interpreting the text as we are like beggars waiting to receive what the poem wants to give us at a particular moment in time. We are not trying to analyze poems, but rather making ourselves susceptible to being broken open by the poem.
For Your Reflection
So if the poems are the compass then what of the journey? And what makes the journey a journey and not merely a trip? And beyond that what makes the journey sacred?
Friday Poem
The Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
© William Carlos Williams
Extravagant Blessings,
Dan