The Poetry of Belief

Thomas, R. S. (n.d.). Kneeling by R. S. Thomas. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48946/kneeling-56d22a97b5917

It took a long time - a really long time - for me to fall in love with poetry. For so long, it seemed all too detached from reality, and it never named nearly enough for me to make sense of what a poem might be talking about or how I might encounter the poet’s words on the page. I felt that I needed something fuller - something that inhabited more of the page than a normal poem might. Throughout school - junior high, high school, and even college - poetry simply did not make sense to my brain. While I could immerse myself in prose to the extent that I would not notice things happening around me, poetry did not offer me the same escape as a good work of fiction or a well argued book of theology or philosophy. Instead of giving everything to me, I had to work at understanding the poem, and I had to wrestle with the few words on the page to make sense of what the poet might be saying to me.

Somewhere along the line, I began, ever so slowly, to fall in love with poetry. In a reversal, I began to appreciate the grandiose amount of white space left on the page. I began to relish the notion that the poet has left me room to make my own musings and to be carried away to this place or that place in my own thoughts - even if those places are not where the poet hoped I might end up after encountering her poem. In contrast to the writer of prose, the poet is making a decision of precisely which word belongs next in the verse, which verse belongs next in the poem, and the way that the words will inhabit the page. The word choice, the spacing, the timing within the poem, the location of the word on the page itself, and the profound sense that there is so much more to say about what the poet is reflecting on within the poem all seemed to draw me closer and closer to poetry as a meaningful form of prayer, reflection, and expression of faith. It was not about getting everything exactly right since the poem leaves so much of the page untarnished by words. Instead, it was about saying some things but also leaving other things unsaid. The poet is an artist in creating space for each of us to bring ourselves into the poem and to allow that poem to bring us into a new territory of imagining, of hoping, of faithing, of loving.

For many of us, we are encountering the poem of God’s love in our lives in different ways. The poem God has written, is writing, and will write leaves us the spacing we need to find the courage to utter this thing or that thing about faith, and like any good poem, we find ourselves in a place that is utterly astonishing in the surprises that we encounter along the way. The poem of God’s love that we encounter throughout our lives allows us to bring our experiences into our reading of the poem, and we are able to take away from the current reading of God’s poem a whole new understanding of who God is, how God is doing something in our lives, and where God might be inviting us to wander with God in our imaginations.

As we wander with God’s love, we write our own poetry as we strive to follow God’s love in and through Christ Jesus. We do this when we worship with each other, when we commit ourselves to prayer and to conversation with God, when we join up with service projects or advocate for the least among us. We write our own poetry of hope, faith, and love as we journey along the way with God. Sometimes, the poetry we write is simply for us and for God to enjoy. At other times, our poetry is shared with a community of believers through the ministries we take up for ourselves. And still at other times, our poetry is shared with the larger church.

Like other poems, the poetry we write in our life of faith is not about saying everything there is to say about God nor is it about getting everything “right.” The intentional word choice is about saying the thing that we have to say in this moment, in this time, in this place, and on this leg of the journey we are making alongside others and alongside God. The placement of the word on the page is similar to when you decide to step on a particular place in the path as you are hiking a trail in the wilderness: it is the place that seems to be the way forward. The place of the word on the page is the place for the word for this moment in which this particular poem is being written. The words we write through our actions, through our prayer, through our song, and through our worship are the words that we individually are being invited to write for today. The words we write tomorrow or next week or a month from now will be very different words, or they may be the very same words but placed on the canvas of the poem differently.

Each one of the poems being written by followers of Jesus are, by their very nature, incomplete. They need sojourners to come along to read the poem, to offer back to the poet reflection and wandering, and to be taken up by a community of others who also are responding to the poetry of God’s love. Perhaps, within the anthology of poetry written by the generations of disciples of Jesus Christ, there is a glimmer of truth that shines through the glass darkly as we strive to build up the kingdom of God in our time and place. It is not that each poem has to be fully “right” so much as it needs to be the sharing of the heart by this particular disciple in this particular community found in this time of history.

The anthology of poetry written by the generations is the ongoing response of followers of Jesus to the presence of God’s love. Each poem written elicits a response: from others and from God. Like any other anthology of poetry, it acknowledges that there is more to be written, more wandering to do as we seek to discover more and more about the ways that God’s love is shaping us, and more responses invited by each addition to the growing library of poems written. And, as poet R.S. Thomas says in his own poem “Kneeling,” it is likely that we find the meaning of the poem offered in the waiting for the response.

What is the poem that is singing in your heart today? How has the poetry of God’s love invited you deeper into your faith life? When did you find meaning in waiting?

In Christ,

Hunter+