Drawing on metaphor

Christian Century, Sept 24, 1997 by Kathleen Norris, Jane Flanders

Religion and poetry both originate in speech and song -- in words incarnated, breathed in and out. We forget this at our peril. Out of touch with orality, words become rigid, academic, irrelevant. As language dis-incarnates, losing its grounding in the senses, it also loses its life and its power to refresh and inspire listener and reader.

Gail Ramshaw makes a useful distinction between the vernacular, which the church needs if its worship is to remain in a living tongue, and the colloquial, which is much too flimsy to sustain the experience of worship. I make a habit of collecting prayers that fail to take this crucial distinction into account. Here are some examples, taken from "prayers of confession" I've heard over the past few years:

"Use this hour, Lord, to get our perspective straight again."

"We are easy prey, living God, to slick advertising and, as a result, we always fall victim to our own acquisitiveness and that of our society and culture."

During the praying of this prayer, everyone stumbled, of course, over that mouthful, "acquisitiveness," which looks impressive on the page but is difficult to say out loud -- a sure sign of disincarnated language.

Such phrases use the language of sociology and pop psychology, not, I would argue, the incarnational language of prayer. Despite the attempt at relevance, these prayers are very far from the language that most people speak. Crudely put, the prayers represent the arcane speech of a clerical class, of people with degrees in counseling or ministry (and language such as this used in worship makes me wonder if we haven't lost the distinction between the two).

We load our prayers with verbal fluff, confessing to God "that we have hindered your will and way for us by keeping portions of our lives apart from your influence." A God who will listen to such prayers is a great and forgiving God indeed. I sometimes picture God longing to say to us, like a crusty old writing teacher: "Could you just say what you mean?"

American poetry is blessed these days by an abundance of poets who are saying what they mean, and in resolutely incarnational language. Among the best are Mary Oliver, Philip Levine and Jane Flanders. Here is Flander's poem "Planting Onions":

It is right that I fall to my knees on this damp, stony cake, that I bend my back and bow my head.

Sun warms my shoulders, the nape of my neck. The air is tangy with rot. Bulbs rustle like spirits in their sack.

I bury each one a trowel's width under. May they take hold, rising green in time, to help us weep and live.

Coleridge said that a poem, unlike a work of science, has pleasure and not truth as its immediate object. To some extents this is true of worship also, although both poetry and liturgy to express truths that can be revealed only through metaphor. And both poetry and worship survive as living languages only as they refuse to accept the weight of mere ideas. As incarnational languages, they ground themselves in bodily experience, the experience of the mouth and the ear, the sense of touch, smell, taste. They even involve that elusive called beauty.

Beauty metaphor and sensory experience all can seem dangerous to people who want exactitude, who seek to bend language and liturgy to their own ends. Incarnational language pulls things together; the language of appraisal, scholarship and politics tears things apart.

Good scholarship is important, and so is politics. But worship needs a language capable of transcending them, allowing for a poetry, for language rich in ambiguity. Poetry, above all, makes room. In our ideological age, making room, especially for those who disagree with us, is a dangerous thing to do. Poetry does not lend itself to ideology and I suspect that this may be part of the reason it is either marginalized or so consistently abused in our culture (including the culture of the church).

The church has a particular obligation to use incarnational language. Taking advantage of the fact that metaphor, like the incarnation itself, us a uniting of disparate elements, we might explore ways in which poetic intelligence could be of use to churches that seem to be in danger of becoming just one more place in our society where the people become polarized over political issues.

That poetry is not designed to convince the reader of a certain point of view may constitute its greatest gift to the church. By drawing on metaphor, which yokes together that which the linear intelligence comprehends as disparate, the poetic intelligence might offer us a way to comprehend our essential unity.