Lest those of us who are Catholic forget, the single greatest liturgical change that was set in motion at the Second Vatican Council, was not that the language of the Mass changed from Latin to the vernacular of the people gathered, nor that Monsignor Corboy now faced his ruddy wrinkled Irish mug toward the assembly instead of the back altar, not that the gathered community was treated to a more expansive repertoire of scripture and a greater emphasis on the liturgy of the Word, nor that the homily became a more esteemed dimension of the liturgy. The greatest change was that the assembly, the entire gathered community of people, were no longer to be mere spectators but rather “full, conscious, and active” participants “which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (Sacrosanctum Concilium , Constitution on the Sacred liturgy, No. 14).  Even though the battle continues over what this actually means and looks like in the Eucharistic Liturgy, let’s focus instead on the imperative of participation.

It’s not just in pre-Vatican II worship where the tendency to reduce persons to onlookers is operative. Pew potatoes were but a forerunner to couch potatoes. Contemporary American society is a spectator culture enamored with being entertained rather than oriented toward full, conscious, and active participation. Entertainment is easy and makes few if any demands on us. Participation asks something of us and often is difficult. I am my own first audience. But I know that the rewards of entertainment are short-lived and that the fruits of participation are found in the act of engagement itself and continue on.

One way that poetry intersects with and informs the sacred journey is by pointing us back to life as a participative venture and adventure.  When poetry is hospitably and attentively read, Ed Hirsh maintains, we realize “poems speak from the ground floor of being.” He writes:

Reading poetry is an encounter with one’s depths. It is a participative relationship, demanding intimacy with what the poet is asking for—deeper contact with another, deeper contact with oneself. . . .[Each of these poems] asks us to open up to its experience, it urges us toward a reckoning. Each asks us to be accountable to its dark wisdom. It incites us to listen, to change, to feel a living hand coming off the page. To take up the offer of these poems is to engage a solitude that would be transformed, a loneliness that would become holy, a desolate crying out that signals we are in the presence of the sacred.

Girl Reading by Pablo Picasso

Unlike entertainment, reading poetry is an encounter and a reckoning. In “a participative relationship” whether praying or reading poetry or planting trees or making love, something is required of us. Call it deeper contact. Call it accountability to its light or dark wisdom. Call it presence. Call it the need to listen, the invitation to change, the transubstantiation of loneliness into a solitude that evokes an inaudible or deafening cry out of our subterranean and sacred depths. Call it connection. Call it holy communion.

Rabbi Heschel stressed that whereas the purpose of speech is to inform, the purpose of prayer is to partake.  If prayer is nothing else, it is the courage to participate fully, consciously, and actively in one’s own life— in the unique questions that that life raises if we but listen, in the unforeseen detours and dangerous curves and rocky roads that we encounter there, in the struggles we suffer and try to endure, in the “magnificent defeats” that alter our lives, in the summons to throw off small scripts and “live into largeness,” in the simple enchantments that come unannounced, in the messy, but unspeakable beauty of friendship or family, in the joy and satisfaction of a job well done or a meal well received, in the unmouthed gratitude that writes two wet sentences from our eyes to our ears as we lie in bed in the dark in the poem that is our life, a work in progress.

Whether the mystery of a poem or the mystery of our lives, something is asked of us and something is offered us—to partake. It might only look like a hook or small change, but I promise you it’s not. It’s so much more.

Hook

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.

Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.

Ain’t got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?

What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.

Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.

Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?

I took it.
It wasn’t the money I needed.
But I took it.

© James Wright

We’re all just trying to get home.
Together,

Dan