Before this point in my life I have not been a huge poetry fan. I didn’t actively dislike it, but with few exceptions I didn’t love it, either. I am not the best poetry reader and I’m a worse poetry writer. I did read enough poetry when I was an English major to get a sense of styles I am drawn to and those I’m not (lets just say that T.S. Eliot will never be one of the 3-4 poets I dwell one).
So why did I start reading more poetry once I became a pastor? I don’t think it was just because Eugene Peterson said I should or the inner English major who always wished I was better with poetry. In the “Author Q & A” of Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-life Faith Crisis she talks about why she reads and writes about poetry. Winner bases her answer on an observation by Richard Rohr that our spiritual lives have two halves—the season where you build a spiritual identity and the season where you face crisis and come to know God in a deeper way. “Rohr says that in the second half of your spiritual life you may find yourself reading a lot of poetry. Maybe, before, you read dogmatics or self-help how-tos or narrative history. Before, poetry may have seemed elusive and loopy. In the second of Rohr’s two halves, you like the space that poetry offers” (pg. 205-206).
In the messiness of being a pastor, I like that space poetry offers. Every day I face questions and ambiguities about faith and life. There are the questions that inevitably come with reading scripture. There are difficult situations in people’s lives that pastors are called to walk through with them. There are specific applications of how we love our neighborhood, like do we help this person with their rent? And who am I in all of this; what does it mean to be a pastor?
In the messiness, poetry gives space. Space to be. Space to live with the ambiguity. Space to question and wonder and enjoy something beautiful. In her book about being good stewards of language, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre says, “poetry can teach us specific skills that we need now more than ever to cultivate if we are to retain a capacity for subtlety” (pg. 159).
Good poetry doesn’t try to give all the answers and tie everything up into neat bows. It isn’t full of platitudes. I appreciate that because it is honest and authentic. That's the kind of person I want to be, too—someone who can hold up to the pressure of the ambiguities in my own life and others lives. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that one of my favorite books of the Bible is Psalms, a book full of poems. In the psalms I find that same sort of honesty and authenticity as in other poetry. The psalmist doesn’t usually sugarcoat things. If he (or possibly she) is angry at God or feels wronged by God, he says so directly. The psalms don’t always wrap everything up neatly, although they almost always end with a statement of trust in God. The psalms, and other poems, give space to live with the ambiguity that comes from living in a broken world. Poems can also point us towards the hope that we have in Christ, that things are ultimately secure, even if they appear to be falling apart.
I’m going to keep reading poetry, to keep finding that space and keep honing my skill with language. I’ll keep sharing some of my favorite poems here, as I’ve done in the past. The poets I have read the most in the past couple of years (in addition to the Psalms) are Scott Cairns, Mary Oliver, Robert Frost, and Luci Shaw. The Poetry of Robert Frost is on my bed stand right now, so perhaps he’ll show up here next.
Photo by Liesbeth den Toom, used under a Creative Commons License.
