FEEDING THE SPIRIT
Te poet needs to be willing to walk into and live in the shadows. Our enlightenment minds want to shed light on everything, to ex-plain, to make flat—no hills or hidden glens or shadows. But in truth, much of the world—or the self or God—cannot be rationally explained. Ursula LeGuin wrote in Te Wizard of Earthsea, “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
Te poet needs to be willing to live in the questions, in the land of Not-Knowing. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Letting questions be questions is at the heart of the poet's task, because a thing once explained is rarely again pondered. Tat which we think we understand is rarely again contemplated. And that includes God. Maybe especially God. “Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus,” wrote Augustine in Sermon 117, “If you think you understand, it isn't God.”
Poetry uses the concrete things of this earth to speak about the unknowable mysteries of this earth, of life, and of God. It is incarnational language—most appropriate for a religion of
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the Incarnation. In a Masterclass, Billy Collins said, “Te poem wants to leave the object and go beyond it into something greater.” Poets use metaphor and symbol and story to help us all deeply enter the questions and shaded vales of life.
Jesus was a poet. He didn't teach in words like, “Te proleptic and soteriological caritas of the Godhead . . .” Instead he said, “Tere was a father who had two sons . . .” Te words evoke the experiences of the five senses to lead us to glimpse truths about the unseen and eternal. Everything that we think we know is mediated through our bodies, through our five senses. Te skin and the brain are formed from the same embryonic tissue, the primary ectoderm. Our bodies think. Our bodies know beyond words. Incarnational language.
And so in that strict form of poetry called a hymn, questions are left unanswered, but the answers are hinted at. Come over to this window, do you see what the psalmist saw? In beautiful and true images, the hymn writer tries to evoke God and Christ and the Spirit, without giving the impression that we have God all figured out. Te
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