~ 2010-2011 Theme: Poetry for the Sacred Journey ~

One of the most important books that I have read over the years is a thin book (127 pages) by scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann called The Prophetic Imagination.  A succinct, eloquent, and powerful critique and call-to-action, it identifies the destructive power of the dominant consciousness against which prophets old and new are called to offer an alternative vision for life by singing a language of newness. Committed to the mystical and prophetic dimensions of the gospel of life, I appreciate the way Brueggemann brings together these two foundational and constitutive dimensions of any authentic spirituality. He refers to them as prophetic criticism (or the embracing of pathos) and prophetic energizing (or the emergence of amazement). Those of you who have heard me teach over the years about Abraham Heschel will recognize these two words, pathos and amazement, as being central to his spiritual vision. Brueggemann is well aware of Rabbi Heschel’s work. Affirming and influencing my own vision and life, these two movements are like beautiful, strong cords that Jesus braided together in his life and teachings. However obvious or subtle, these two expressions of faith, these braided cords, have always been at the heart of our explorations in The Human & Holy gatherings as well.

Brueggemann maintains that the prophetic life, and by extension the Christian life, is a life oriented toward an alternative vision (for example, alternative to an American ethos of consumerism or militarism), and as such is not merely an act of faith but an act of the imagination. In this sense, accessing “energizing memories” as well as daring “radical hopes” are imaginal acts that are at the heart of the kin-dom of God that Jesus embodied and proclaimed. So often what is lacking in the church is not faith but imagination. Imagination scares the be-Jesus out of those in power most likely because those same people remember what happened to Jesus whose entire life was an imaginal act, the incarnation of the dream of God which his eyes and heart told him was contrary to the dominant consciousness and agenda of both the religious and the political culture of his day.

It is here that the poet and the prophet are kindred spirits for each use words and symbols (the prophet uses symbolic actions as well) in a way that invites and encourages us to see things in a new way, to see the familiar, mundane, or unjust in a way that evokes pondering, new perceptions and awareness, grief, conversion, or wonder and awe. It can be a delightful or dangerous thing to read a poem.

When we approach a poem in the same way the poet William Stafford approached the blank piece of paper he sat in front of each early morning at the kitchen table waiting for the words to come — being “susceptible to now” — then words have the potential to change us, sometimes in small ways and other times in life-altering ways.

I am reminded of the writer Frederick Buechner telling of when he was a young man making his way one Sunday morning to a church he had uncharacteristically started going to that year. He started going, he said, because he had nothing better to do with his lonely Sundays and because the minister, George Buttrick, was a famous preacher, eloquent and imaginative. During this particular sermon, Buechner recalls, it was just two words set side by side that took advantage of his susceptibility, surprised, and undid him completely. In his autobiography, Buechner recalls:

“Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness,” Buttrick said, “but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place,” Buttrick said, “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.” 

It was the words great laughter that unsuspectingly redirected Buechner’s life and writing forever, compelling him to move in a direction he could never have imagined only thirty minutes earlier. He wrote, “It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.”

Something similar happened to St. Francis of Assisi when kneeling before the crucifix in the ruined, falling-down church in San Damiano he heard the figure say, “Francis, repair my house,” and the rest as they say is history, the poverello of Assisi becoming for Christians a “second-Christ” and for people of all religious traditions and of no-religious conviction a consummate human being.

The contemplative way of being suggests that the way we approach a poem, whether one written or one forming, is the same way we approach life: open and susceptible to the moment and ready to respond.

WARNING: Be careful when reading poetry as an imaginal act while being “susceptible to now.”  Afterwards you might find yourself smiling or chuckling out loud in the check-out line for no apparent reason, or weeping at the stop sign upon seeing a young father in the park throwing his squealing son high in the air and catching him. It might set you to giving away your furniture to the poor, or stopping to talk to the woman with the sign at the freeway exit, or doing your small part to repair something that is broken, a back fence or a heart (maybe your own) or a relationship or the church or the world.  Reading a poem can be rather precarious business as Rilke knew so well.♦

The Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
With eyes like opening fruit. And yet his torso
Is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
Like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

Gleams in all its power. Otherwise
The curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
A smile run through the placid hips and thighs
To that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
Beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
And would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur,

Would not, from all the borders of itself,
Burst like a star: for here there is no place
That does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell