Poetry and the Psalms

Transcript (edited for readability).

So, follow up, then, with that, as it gives care to God's word and the congregation. The unique and distinct role of caring for a soul in a particular situation — you've talked of cultivating an imagination. How do you walk alongside them, evoking and using their imagination, to bring to life God's word, and apply God's word, to the care of that soul?

Well, you get to know them well enough so that you can preach in their language. I never use Greek or Hebrew words in my sermon. It's not their language. It's my language, but that just mystifies them. I never — I didn't think quoting other people was a very good idea. I very rarely quoted from writers, theologians, other preachers. They were preaching to another congregation, not mine, and it's my job to know these people, and their world of living.

So, anyway, if all people do is watch television, and read the financial page of the paper, that's not a good way to develop your imagination. Most of what we live with, we neither see nor hear — it's invisible, inaudible. And so it's the novelist and the poet that can evoke a kind of attentiveness to these unseen, unheard dimensions of our lives. You know, nobody's ever seen the air. You feel it sometimes.

I think the poets and the fiction writers are really very strong allies in what we're doing. I think you should experiment with poets — not every poet is for everybody. I think my two most used poets are George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They're both Christians. Herbert an Anglican priest, and Hopkins — Irish, a professor, I guess, when he was ordained. He was a priest. But they were both in touch with all this complex world that we live in, that we can't touch, can't see, can't smell. Most of what we deal with as Christians especially is invisible, untouched. That's why the whole business of the Eucharist, baptism — they all pick up on that too, because it gets rooted then in what's visible and touchable and audible. But, you know, nobody's ever seen love. We stumble around and try to figure out what's going on, and some people get those dime novels that tell them exactly what it is, and get divorced in two weeks.

You know, Eugene, the reality is that most people are occupied full time with constant stimulation, visual and otherwise, and don't really become contemplatives or evoke the power of the imagination. And you put your finger on the power of poetry. And yet, I think, sadly, even most of us who ought to gravitate in that direction probably aren't as thoroughly aware of all dimensions of that. So I wonder — one of your favorite poems, I know, is "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." Would you read it for us, and talk with us a little bit about the power of those words?

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; as tumbled over rim in roundy wells stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's bow, swung, finds tongue to fling out broad its name; each mortal thing does one thing and the same: deals out that being indoors each one dwells; selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, crying "What I do is me: for that I came."

I say more: the just man justices; keeps grace, that keeps all his goings graces; acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father through the features of men's faces.

Now, isn't that just marvelous? The rhyming words, the sonority, the energy, and the truth. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same, deals out that being indoors, each one dwells" — which you can't see, gets out. "Selves, goes itself. Myself, it speaks and spells." And then the thing that's embedded itself in my imagination is: "acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Christ," where Christ plays in ten thousand places.

I think I was attracted to this poem the first time right here on Flathead Lake, because early in our marriage we decided we would learn how to be birdwatchers. So we got books, and tried to learn the songs and habits of the birds. And the first bird I learned that I hadn't heard of before was a kingfisher. And we had a kingfisher one summer that nested just across the lake, and it would come around to our bay and fish. And I sat down on our patio and watched him fish. He dove — I counted twenty-seven times into the lake to get a minnow, and finally got one. And I thought, you know, I need to learn that kind of patience. The kingfisher — he's the king fisher, and he has to do it twenty-seven times. So, you know, I embed those kinds of things in my life, and it does something to you.

Why do you think poetry is so important especially for pastors?

Because it deals with the invisible. Or it makes the transition — what's seen and heard and tasted, into the self, into who you are — and we don't have people doing that for us. All the advertising is just glamorous and exciting — go do this, go do that. A poet digs in beneath all that. Another poet that I think you all ought to know is Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry, one of your poets?

Well, he's a Christian. He's a farmer. And he's a marvelous novelist and poet. He's a poet that I memorize quite a lot. He's about my age. His work is vigorous. People have often asked me if I'd like to meet him and offered to introduce him to me. I've never done it. He's kind of crusty, and I think I might be disappointed if I did. But he writes about pastors, and about people in a small town — he's created this small town in Kentucky, and he calls it "the membership." And you learn a lot about the observation of what a membership is. And I often would think of my congregation, thanks to him, as a membership. This is — this is the membership.

Somewhere in one of your books, you talk about how language can be misused, and we're not aware of the power of words. And you go into the etymology of poetry — from "to make," "to do."

Make something, yeah.

And so you mentioned that although you never used a manuscript in the pulpit, you always wrote it out completely, and I gather that's because you wanted to choose the right words.

I wouldn't always preach the words I thought were important, but at least I'd had a feel for them, soaked in from your study of the text. You'd marinated in that text, and then you're bringing that into the context. And, you know, you realize much of the Bible is poetry. So if you learn to read poetry, well, you're way ahead of the game, because all the prophets were poets. And David, of course, was a poet.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, the minor prophets, yeah. So, I just — I'll tell you the thing that makes poetry difficult: you've got to slow down. You can't speed-read a poem. When I was in college, that's all I wanted to do — speed reading was a big thing when I was in college. So I learned to speed read. It almost ruined me. I could read the page, and then I couldn't remember it two days later. I don't know who started that.

It needs to be relished on the ear as well, not just read on the page.

That's right. Savor it.

Yeah. And that's why this poem is such a good poem — there's not a cliché in there. But these rhymed words, the sound, the texture — it embeds itself in your imagination.

Can you contrast a little bit of poetic language versus cliché? I mean, you just mentioned cliché in passing, but it seems like cliché is how we talk now — everything is cliché. And that needs to be assaulted.

It does, yeah. A cliché is just a tired-out word or phrase that everybody uses, and nobody knows what it means anymore — you can put your own meaning into it. And a preacher who specializes in clichés, although they don't know they're doing it, is just awful. This language we have is a beautiful language, and we need to honor it.

I found Mary Oliver to be a poet who resonates with me. She's very sensitive to the world around us, but to people too. I rarely read a Mary Oliver poem that I don't think, "I never quite saw it that way before." And—

So "telling it slant" would probably be a cliché, you—

But tell us — you walk away and you think, why did she say that? And then you realize it's slant — not quite obvious, but it gets in behind your presuppositions.

I shared something with you earlier, Eugene, and I was never sure if you said it or wrote it, and you said you don't think you did. But I read it when I was a young pastor, and it says: "When I was 30, I wanted to be a great preacher. When I was 40, I wanted to have a big church. When I was 50, I wanted to write a book. When I was 60, I wanted to learn how to pray." And I'm going to turn 60 this year, and that resonates with me a lot. But I heard it early on and thought, is it really going to take me that long? So my question is two things: would it have mattered to you as a young pastor if someone could have said, "this is where you will end up" — or did it have to be the struggle to get there? I think it is, often, for all of us, but I don't want to answer that for you. And what would you say to other young pastors, newer pastors, who are thinking they have to be so many different things — you want to be subversive with them and say, "I hope you learn how to pray"?

You can't really tell people to pray. There's got to be some kind of hunger, some sense of wanting something more than just your own thoughts in your own head. So, praying the psalms — that's where I start people. And it's interesting to read the Psalms in context. They're not organized in an obvious way, but they are organized into five books. The five books of Moses, five collections of Psalms — and I don't think it's hopeless to try to match a passage in Genesis with something in the Psalms. But what it trains me in, anyway, is an attentiveness to answering God. There's no logic, really, in a prayer. It is an immersion in images, metaphors. That's why Psalm 18 became a kind of parade example of the Psalms for me when I was younger, because it's all metaphors.

Now, we're talking about poetry, poetry mostly made up of metaphors. And a metaphor is literally a lie. God is not a rock. So what are you saying — God is like a rock? No, not quite. So it both is and is not what it says. Now, you've got to pay attention to that. If you don't know what a metaphor is, you're going to be a literalist about the Bible, and you're going to get it all wrong, because the Bible is made up of a lot of metaphors.

Now, start paying attention to metaphors: "You are the salt of the world." Well, nobody takes me and sprinkles salt on their eggs as a substitute. But when we start seeing the connection between the invisible and the visible — the sensory perception and the spiritual perception — they're the same. They come together. Without a metaphor, life just kind of gets flattened out. And then we get arguments among people over what the Bible says, and what it means, and silly stuff — it's the Scofield Bible kind of stuff.

You spoke of remembering the psalms in their context, when they were written, how they were written. But yet, as we speak those songs, as we pray those songs, words that God already gave us that were answering — how do we take those words of the psalms and meditate on maybe one or two verses? Is it appropriate to say that whenever we meditate on the psalms, when we pray the psalms, we would also think about or contemplate what this particular verse means to me, or what I'm experiencing now, and reflect on that, and have our mind or our imagination even wander in a contemplative way, and then return back to the psalm — and read yet maybe another verse? Try not to put too much structure around it, but at the same time, God gave us these words first. Would you comment on that?

Yeah, I think what you said is just right on, yeah. We enter a world of words that is given to us, and we just get familiar with that. And we don't try to pay attention too hard. Don't let your own attention or desires mess up what God might be doing. Yeah.