Preachers and poets

Christian Century, March 22, 2003 by Richard A. Kauffman

PREACHERS AND POETS have but two subjects, God and death. Everything else is just footnotes. But what about life? Indeed, we live most fully and poignantly in the awareness of our mortality, knowing that some day it will be otherwise. To remember every day that we will die, as St. Benedict advised, is not morbidity, it is being aware of and present with life. Jane Kenyon wrote this poem after her husband, the poet Donald Hall, was diagnosed with cancer. She herself battled with leukemia, to which she succumbed just before her 48th birthday. God is not mentioned in this poem. Still, knowing that reality will someday be "otherwise" gives the ordinary routines of life--eating and working and walking in the woods and making love and sleeping--a luminous, almost revelatory quality. It shouldn't be otherwise.

--Richard A. Kauffman, associate director