Here's an old article in Theology Today - Poetry and Theology by Patrick D. Miller ...
... The images of poetry speak to startle and puzzle us, to provoke us and cause us to think. They set the imagination free, opening the reader to theological possibilities that might be less acceptable or even unthinkable in the essay mode. Images, dreams, personal experiences, sensual realities-all these aspects of our life that are often filtered out of theological work are front and center when poetry is the medium of faith's expression ....
Below are three poems, all pretty different, that illustrate this ...
* The Angels
They all have weary mouths
and bright souls without marge.
And a yearning (as for sin)
sometimes haunts their dream.
They all seem so alike;
in God's garden silent they remain,
like many, many intervals
in his power and melody.
Only when their wings spread out,
they are the awakeners of a wind:
as if God with his broad hands
of a sculptor went through the pages
of the beginning's dark book.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
* O Deus Ego Amo Te
O God, I love Thee, I love Thee -
Not out of hope of heaven for me
Nor fearing not to love and be
in the everlasting burning.
Thou, Thou, my Jesus, after me
Didst reach Thine arms out dying,
For my sake sufferedst nails and lance,
Mocked and marred countenance,
Sorrows passing number,
Sweat and care and cumber,
Yea and death, and this for me,
And Thou couldst see me sinning;
Then I, why should not I love Thee,
Jesus, so much in love with me?
Not for heaven's sake; not to be
Out of hell by loving Thee;
Not for any gains I see;
But just the way that Thou didst me
I do love and I will love Thee:
What must I love Thee, Lord, for then?
For being my king and God. Amen.
- Francis Xavier / translated by Gerard Manley Hopkins
* O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
- Denise Levertov
7 comments:
Thanks for the article, Crystal, and the poems. Mr. Miller certainly pushes one of my buttons. First I would enlarge the meaning of poetry; it's not so much a form of address as a language. And to me it's the natural way to "do theology", so much freer than restrictive "proper" prose statements (such as this!). Poetry is also a personal trait: some people are poetic to their fingertips; others are terribly prosaic. How do you express yourself? there's a spectrum from one extreme to the other.
For years I've been saying that the whole Bible is poetry. What does that mean? It means that you cannot talk any other way about God, the Beyond, love, truth. You can only talk in metaphors. Poems are metaphors, not pinning one down, suggestive.
Blake said only an artist can be a Christian, a pretty extreme statement, but very poetic. What he meant was that a Christian is bound to break the bonds of any hidebound dogmas, doctrines, exclusive truths; they don't exist in the real world. Blake would say it's the world of shadows.
Crystal, I didn't mean to get off on a tear, but there it is.
Hi Larry - I like it when you rant :-)
It's strange, I like poetry for expressing feelings and describing things that are hard to describe, but I don't want to think of the gospels as poetry - I want them to be factual.
Being factual and being poetry are not mutually exclusive.
Good point, David. But I have a hard time understanding poetry - it can be so ambiguous. I want important info to be straightforward, I guess.
There is a lot of information in the gospels. But the point of the gospels may not be in-formation but trans-formation. That is a part of what's going on in the Jesuit exercises. By walking through the story in your imagination it awakens feelings leading changes in thinking and perception.
David,
I love this: "...the point of the gospels may not be in-formation but trans-formation." That's just how I see it. And the poetic will nurture transformation on a subconscious level, as Miller said, to set our imaginations free. In therapy we often utilize fable and metaphor to speak to a deeper part of ourselves than can be reached through our intellect alone.
Thank you for these poems, Crystal. I love Rilke, especially.
In Rilke's poem the angels somehow seem sad. I like it best of teh the three. Though I'm not quite sure what he's trying to say.
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