Making poems to God

Spiritual Life, Fall 2000 by Matthews, William R

I AM A CREATURE WHOSE only knowledge of God is through experience: the gentle smile of my wife, the Bach prelude before worship, Communion, my friend Mary's gritty acceptance of life in a nursing home. But experience, as life itself, is at best fleeting. The child's ecstasy before the Christmas tree invariably ends in broken toys and fallen needles. "Each moment contains some sign of the will of God," however, writes the eighteenth-century spiritual director Jean-Pierre Caussade.1 How do I slow down long enough to read the signs? One way is to seek language to embody his presence, words that say, "This is exactly what it is."

Making Poems

Forty-four years ago in downtown Columbus, OH, my five-yearold son and I waited for a bus to take us out of the city. Plowing through the slush that bleak December afternoon, crowds of harried shoppers had searched vainly for the perfect Christmas gifts. Unfortunately, Billy had found nothing suitable for his Mommy. A bus roared to the curb, its windows fogged, with rivulets of water meandering down the glass. My son pointed upward as we joined the other weary boarders and said, "Look at the bus's tears." In that bit of childhood poetry, my son experienced a moment of presence and through language engraved it in my memory.

Poets have traditionally been called "makers," those who construct language to express an insight which has not been "named" before. We are all in one sense poets because, made in God's image, we share his creative power, albeit faintly. Adam's first task in the garden, naming his fellow creatures, set a pattern for humankind. In order to know a thing, we must find a name that describes it, thus making order out of chaos. The potter shapes the clay, as does the painter work with oils, the carpenter with wood, the mason with stone, the dressmaker with cloth, and the writer with words. Each creates a gift of celebration of God's bountiful universe, a gift that the maker shares with others.

Since the expulsion from Eden, the universe has seemed shattered to human beings. The fatal decision to look at things through their own eyes, not God's, cost Adam and Eve the certainty of the oneness of creation. Human beings, originally made with total vision, can now see only reflections in St. Paul's "dark mirror." Throughout history, the artist-a shard chipped off the rock of God's totality of sight-has struggled to clean a fragment of that cloudy mirror, to regain the vision of wholeness. St. John wrote that in the beginning was the Word. The process of poetry-of making it-sharpens language, brings the object we're describing nearer to the beautiful thing it was in the original garden. All of us, like my son Billy, can make a poem, that is, clothe an insight in memorable, musical language. In the making, we draw ever closer to the ultimate maker. Seeking words to express God's creation may be the ultimate worship of God.

Such language echoes and reechoes in our minds. Last Sunday during Communion, we sang the Taize chant, words of Christ to his disciples that last night at Gethsemane: "Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray, watch and pray." Through the week, I found myself humming the words at odd moments-while the cashier totaled my grocery bill, until the traffic light turned green, as I pondered the next sentence of this essay. Even more am I haunted by my own "poems." On the way to teach my class at the university, I crested the long hill outside our village and saw spread before me, glorious in the spring sunlight, the whole range of the Massanutten Mountain, "signs of your perfect love." A prayer, that has since become second nature, welled up in me: "Dear Heavenly Father, let me feel your presence and know and follow your will for my life."

Personal Poems and Metaphors

Such memorable bits of language, what teachers of meditation call mantras, are in truth personal poems that we need to find and begin to live with. They are most powerful and healing when expressed in metaphors: T. S. Eliot's "Christ the tiger." One way to begin is to write down all the words (the names) suggested by someone or something deeply important to us: a spouse, a friend, a child, a vocation, a book or piece of music, or God. God, of course, is beyond naming: "I am that I am." The "numinous," the "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" was as close as Rudolf Otto could get in his book The Idea of the Holy. Language is so inexact an expression of reality that it requires comparisons (metaphors), if only for a short time. Most of the people we Christians live among, including other Christians, have no Christian memory. The cross is a piece of wood; Good Friday is another TGIF day; wine is wine and bread is bread. The refreshment of such images and the discovery of new ones is the heart of devotion. Perhaps a vital vision of God is in Christian songs in rock arrangements which thud through our townhouse wall from the young people next door.

Professional poets know exactly what they are doing with each syllable, each comma and pause, when they make their lines. If the amateur wants to try quatrains, free verse, or haiku, fine. The kind of poetry I am suggesting, however, is between the poet and God, is possible for all of us, and is, as I said above, a simple saying that one thing is another thing. "Your eyes are like stars" was no clich when Adam, deeply in love with Eve, first pronounced them. Eve must have cherished the words. Today's lovers cherish them too, when sincerely meant. The metaphor, the heart of the poem, is fresh and draws you closer to God if it is fresh to you. Personal discovery is the important thing. Jesus as shepherd is perhaps the most familiar of all Christian metaphors, except for the Cross. The image is still powerful even to those who live in great cities and whose view of sheep is a glimpse from a speeding car on a rural interstate highway. Outside of western movies or biblical TV epics, most of us have never seen a shepherd. But as lost sheep in Chicago or New York, we can feel what a shepherd does 'and long for one ourselves.