accessing the truth of God. Somewhere along the way, Christians, especially of the academic and clerical type, assumed that the truth of God and our lives was mostly, or even only, captured through rational, intellectual, systematic, and dogmatic writings. All the while, of course, the West continued to produce great visual, written, and musical art, all of which expressed essential truths about God and Christian life, but these expressions of faith and theology have always been relegated a second or third level of importance and truth when it comes to theology.
My conviction is the church would be served well by more poetry, as well as more art and more artists. Walter Brueggemann’s book Finally Comes the Poet speaks of Isaiah as the prophetic poet who brings poetic truth to a prose-flattened world. His work has greatly influenced my understanding of poetry as a vehicle of theological truth and encounter, seen wonderfully in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Jesus and so much of the great biblical tradition, not to mention the best of the liturgical and ritual traditions of the church. The key point I derive from Brueggemann’s phrase here is that poetic truth is not flat. It is not easily resolved into precise statements. It is irreducible and therefore engages the reader, much like so many biblical texts, in a conversation about the truth of God and the world and ourselves, a conversation that is open-ended and never finished.
This, of course, is precisely why poetic expressions of faith and theology are so suited to the task. The One of whom we speak and to whom we speak and listen is not flat, not resolvable, and is irreducible. Therefore, we cannot speak of God in such a way that misleads us into assuming we have captured and controlled God, and so we are finished with God. Poetry, much like humor, is never served well by being explained, but only by being encountered and experienced and confronted by and enjoyed. The same could be said of God.
The word “mystery” is so useful here because it leads us to encounter the holy as something knowable but never fully known or explained. Mystery is something to be enjoyed and experienced, but not explained, at least not in any final, dogmatic way. It is the truth of things that cannot be approached directly, but only sideways, tangentially, with peripheral vision at best.
These poems are, I hope, a way of enjoying the mystery and wrestling with it a bit, and it with us. It is not an attempt to use reason to capture God, but to move beyond reason as the primary category of truth. It is poetry without rhyme or reason, and therefore, maybe in the smallest and most humbling of ways, worthy of its subject.
A note on names for liturgical days: For Sundays outside of particular seasons like Advent or Lent, I am using the designations found in Evangelical Lutheran Worship. These days are called, for example, “Lectionary 23 A,” and correspond to the “Ordinary” days as named in the Roman Catholic and other lectionaries. The number scheme corresponds to the “Proper” designation by subtracting five. For example, “Lectionary 23 A” corresponds to “Proper 18 A.”
Hope Is a Blue Note
Advent 1 A
Isaiah 2:1–5
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD! (Isa 2:5)
Hope is a blue note on a jazz-worn clarinet
a chromatic piano chord dissonant and handsome
a minor modal song sung diaphragmatically strong
a silence between hymn and homiletic
puzzling it holds the day in a miter-cornered frame
setting off the eyes of the hopeful like sapphires
a run-on sentence waiting
for some punctuation to signify an end or a pause
or an unknowing or an exclamation of what is yet to come
that is better or more beautiful or at least makes what is now
worth the long, melodic, sorrowful, endless wait
This Advent
Advent 2 A
Isaiah 11:1–10
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Isa 11:1)
You light candles and you wait,
not like waiting at the bus stop
with the rain soaking your day
and the time passing like tree growth.
You light candles and you wait,
not like standing in line at the grocery store
with your parsley dripping on your shoe
and the woman in front of you
writing a check like a novel.
You light candles
as you sings songs of joy in minor keys,
and you wait
like a man sitting at the restaurant table
with the calla lilies in hand
and the diamond ring inside
the death-by-chocolate dessert,
looking every direction every moment
to see his beloved appear.
You wait like this
even without anyone coming
to take your flowers,
year after year
war after war
death after death,
lighting candles one by one.
Quiet Dismissal
Advent 4 A
Matthew 1:18–25
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. (Matt 1:18–19)
Quiet dismissal is what we do to you
when you are close,
because you flush our faces red
with your pregnant unexpectedness,
invading our strategies and medicaments,
ruining our safe careers and nest-egg certainties.
We would have you sent off Joseph-like
to a small town halfway house clapboard grey
where you can
