The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [30]
Can poets be of any use here? I believe so, though I’m not sure of the reasons why. I may be doodling. But the sense of the sacred is very much alive in contemporary poetry; maybe because poetry, like prayer, is a dialogue with the sacred. And poets speak from the margins, those places in the ecosystem where, as any ecologist can tell you, the most life forms are to be found. The poet Maxine Kumin has described herself as “an unreconstructed atheist who believes in the mystery of the creative process,” while my husband, who is both a lyric poet and a computer programmer, declares himself to be “a scientific rationalist who believes in ghosts.” If, as Gail Ramshaw has said, “Christianity requires metaphoric thinking,” if, as a Benedictine liturgist once said to me, the loss of the ability to think metaphorically is one of the greatest problems in liturgy today, maybe the voices of poets are the ones we need to hear.
I hear many stories these days from people who are exiled from their religious traditions. They, also, speak from the margins. Many, like me, are members of the baby-boom generation who dropped religious observance after high school or college, and are now experiencing an enormous hunger for spiritual grounding. One woman wrote to me to say that she felt a great longing for ritual and community; she said she wanted to mark the year with more than watching the trees change. She’d joined some political organizations and a women’s service club but found that it wasn’t enough. She was afraid to even think of joining a church—the Bible makes her angry, more often than not—but she thought she might have to.
There is no set of rules for her to follow, but only the messy process of life to be lived. Since what she’s seeking is salvation, and not therapy, not political or social relevance, I suspect that she might eventually find what she is looking for in the practice of prayer and in communal worship. And if things work as they should, whatever healing needs to happen, whatever larger social dimension she needs to address, will grow organically out of those experiences, that community. But how does she get from here to there?
She may be closer than she knows. The Anglican bishop John V. Taylor has said, “Imagination and faith are the same thing, ‘giving substance to our hopes and reality to the unseen.’ The whole Bible endorses this, and if believers talked about faith in these terms they would be more readily understood.” In the Book of Deuteronomy, the commandment of God is revealed not as an inaccessible mystery but as “something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out” (Deut. 30:14). And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is.’ For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21).
The boy who wrote about his absent father had a story to tell. His heart was in exile, and the catalyst of poetry helped it come home. And what of the catalyst of faith? Drawing both from our reason and our capacity for negative capability, faith might help us see that our most valuable experiences are always those which leave us, as the sculptor and critic Edward Robinson has said, with “an unaccountable remainder . . . 2 plus 2 equals 5 experiences” that remind us that our relationships with each other and the world are more mysterious than we care to admit. In the universe God made, the real world we call home, love is bigger than Texas, and even death itself, and 2 plus 2 might be 0, 11, or even 4.
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