Poetry is a holy waste
Photo by Denis Degioanni on Unsplash
As a young girl, I heard my father say to me, “God is a mathematician.” He cited the stars, the way the planets move, the infinite complexity of creation, and physics. Possessing somewhat other than a passion for math myself, I protested. No, I felt strongly, God cannot be something so boring. Since that time I’ve heard my father repeat the phrase, and each time I feel obliged to protest—though always realizing that my father, as usual, is right. God has to be a mathematician. Mathematics are beautiful. And yet. And yet I can’t think God only occupies himself with working out math problems in the heavens. I think in my youth and inexperience I had caught hold of something true, too. It’s true that God loves math, but God also loves poetry. And now, in my slightly greater age and experience, I realize that God delights to be addressed in poetry, and that poetry is an extraordinarily fitting way to express oneself in prayer.
Look at the Psalms, for just a brief example. Jesus, for one, made use of the Psalter in praying to his own father. Ever since the formation of the Benedictines in the early sixth century, religious men and women over the face of the earth have employed the verses of David and the other psalmists to respectfully, yet sometimes with scathingly honesty, address the Almighty. The Psalter has been called the school of prayer, the examples each faithful person ought to study in order to learn how to address his God. What the Psalms tell us is that God loves poetry. He writes it in the person of the Holy Spirit (the muse), and he loves to hear it spoken back to him. The Psalms have even become the official daily liturgical prayer of the Church, spoken by all priests and monastic orders multiple times throughout the day. When the Church prays, she prays as her Master did, in verse.
Poetry and prayer are not, however, the same thing at all times. Certainly, as in the case of the biblical poetry, verse can cross over into prayer—and prayer, as we see in the lives of the saints such as John of the Cross, can sometimes only be expressed in verse. But poetry is not always prayer, and prayer sometimes makes use of more mundane language than poetry. This is an important separation to keep in mind, because while it rifts the two into definitely distinct categories, the division gives both poetry and prayer space to operate on their own with freedom. A poet must not feel always obligated to nod to God in his verse, and a person of prayer need not be pressured to learn meter and rhyme, or even a freer style of poetry. The two begin very close in mission, though: poetry seeks to express mystery to an audience, and prayer seeks to express itself to mystery itself. Poetry and prayer, while different, oftentimes cross into each other’s territories. Poetry can express prayer and prayer enlivens the matter of poetry.
According to the Bible, poetry may even rise to the level of exorcism—not a sacrament strictly, but a sacramental release from evil. The first book of Samuel tells the story of how King Saul met David. Saul was on the search for a lyre player, at the suggestion of his servants, who knew that Saul suffered from the visitations of an evil spirit. Find a lyrist, they advised him, who can play skillfully. Saul found David, and the author of 1 Samuel tells us that “whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him” (1 Samuel 16:23). The nature of the evil spirit seems, in this passage, to probably be a devil who was permitted by God to torment the king, similar to the way in which Job found himself afflicted. At the sound of David’s lyre (and probably singing) the evil spirit took flight. It’s interesting that Saul wanted an expert lyre player, instead of a saint. The beauty of poetry can perform the same kind of exorcism that the words of prayer produce. Verse and song soothe, they heal, they transport the mind to heaven. I think an analogy can hold for psychological illnesses. Upon finding oneself afflicted by some disease of the mind, a person ought not only to seek counsel, but poetry. As we see from the example of Saul and David, poetry restores order and balance; it casts out evil; it rests the soul.
As a means of direct address to God, poetry has a divinely ordained freedom of speech. In the Psalms, we see the poets praising, but also complaining and railing against what appears to be God’s silence and neglect, or interrogating him and imploring things of him. Poetry can be a means of working out the problems in the spiritual life. Psalm 49 says, “I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre,” or as it is often translated, “with the harp I will solve my problem” (49:4b). Why with the lyre? A complex math problem might do the trick, or a clean Thomistic formula: God only does what is good for us, but God allows suffering; therefore, suffering is for our good—let’s dust off our hands and get on with it. Well, the problem, as everyone knows who has suffered, is that math problems and syllogisms, however unarguable, don’t actually get to the heart of the matter, which is the human heart itself. Poetry does. Poetry can pierce to the dim depths of brokenness and need and say, yet all will be well. Paschal tells us that the heart has reasons which reason knows not, and a Psalmist worth his salt might add that poetry is the way we can reason with our heart, and with our God. Poetry casts into the depths of mystery and seeks to explain what it has discovered there—which is why it is such an adequate way, if there ever was one, of explaining man’s relationship with God, who is the greatest mystery.
It is almost natural for a poet to pray, and for a mystic to be a poet. The methods are very much the same. In meditation, a person seeks to imagine the face of Christ—how he moves—to hear his voice—to touch him, to speak to him. Prayer requires deep silence and a disregard for the things of the world such as money, sleep, and even a ticking clock, in favor of desire to know God. Likewise, poetry asks its devotees to be silent, engage the imagination, and strip away all but the truest words about the object of verse. Neither prayer or poetry will succeed with half-hearted efforts, and neither the poet nor the person of prayer can make it far without embracing what difficulties arise from sitting in silence.
A difference, however, between pure prayer and prayer expressed through poetry is that poem-prayers seem by nature suited to share out with a wider audience than just the Most High. Language is communal, and while it’s not hard to imagine a person praying in secret and then keeping the words of his prayer to himself, it’s harder to conceive someone writing a poem and never having it shared with another soul. Of course, it’s not impossible to keep poem-prayers secret, and indeed a poet of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ caliber managed to keep his poetry to himself, his God, and a few friends. Just like any of the arts, when someone writes, it’s generally with the expectation of an audience. Indeed, what better way to convey the secrets of prayer and a relationship with God than a poem? John of the Cross was someone who knew both the mystery of God and of poetry intimately. What he brought back from the depths of prayer, he expressed in verse: “His God is poetry, and only weakly prose,” as Fr. Iain Matthew says (The Impact of God).
When posed with the idea of explaining his verse in prose, John of the Cross says, “I have felt somewhat reluctant . . . to explain these four stanzas [of “The Living Flame of Love”] as you asked. Since they deal with matters so interior and spiritual, for which words are usually lacking . . .” (The Living Flame of Love). John then proceeds to write a book entitled The Living Flame of Love in which he sets out to explain the poem of a bare four stanzas, a mere one-hundred and twenty-six words in English. What he had set down in his poem required a full book of prose to explain. What we learn from this exquisite example is that poetry compresses, and teaches prayer by experience rather than by description. Reading “The Living Flame of Love” plunges a person into prayer, even if it is secondhand. We can taste what John tasted. We can find the words for our longing in his: “Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!” Poetry like his and like the Psalms becomes a school of prayer not only through method but through actual experience. We learn that Christ is merciful not because someone has told us he is so, but because we can catch a glimpse of the way he has laid his hand upon someone to heal.
Certainly it’s not required for a person of prayer to also write poetry, but doing so is helpful to grow in the spiritual life. I blush to call myself a real poet, partly because it seems pretentious, but also because I lack the fullest dedication and skill required of the name. However, I think anyone who dabbles a bit in the art has the right to relate what little experience she has. It’s more natural to me than mathematics, at any rate. Recently, I found myself writing a poem entitled “John 21,” about the Gospel story which has for years captured my interest. It wasn’t until I wrote the poem, however, that I saw the utterly ordinary way in which our Lord went about lighting the fire on the beach that day: “Onshore, you tie your hair and hum folk songs, / but softly.” In not quite as radical a way as prose fiction, poetry still must concern itself with the things of this world. Writing poetry forces a person to come face to face with the Incarnation. God made man is a comfortable reality shoved away into the past, until a person has to put the face of our Lord into meter and rhyme.
It also seems, on the most basic level, that God ought to be addressed properly. We are, after all, his people, and he is our Creator-Father. A child should speak respectfully to his parents, and even more so should a servant. Speaking to God in poetry or writing poems about him is comparable to the sweet perfume which Mary Magdalene poured over the feet of our Lord—a holy waste. It takes time and effort that might otherwise be profitably applied to serving the poor, cleaning the church, or even taking care of one’s own children. It doesn’t have to be said that real obligations cannot be neglected, but a person ought neither to feel guilty for “wasting” precious time pounding out a poem instead of serving the less fortunate. Take my word: knowing Christ is worth it.
It’s interesting—at least for me, in my less-than-perfect skill—to consider what we will find of the arts when we reach heaven. I wonder whether it will take as much effort to write a sonnet as it does here on earth. Rhymezone.com, for one, will definitely not be around, so our Lord is going to have to provide some kind of replacement. Tolkien believed that heaven would be a place where all stories were brought to perfection. Perhaps also with poetry, and especially with poem-prayers. Dante described the heavens in verse, after all. I feel certain that the poetry which we’ve written here on earth will not be lost, though I can’t say what form it will take in the heavenly realms. Such a generous effort is just the thing which pleases God—a rejoicing in mystery’s beauty, a holy waste.
I am indebted to Fr. Iain Matthew for his insights on John of the Cross. I wanted to find the page number of the cited quote, but couldn’t remember exactly where in the book it was.
Other works cited:
RSVCE Bible
Matthew, Iain. The Impact of God. Hodder and Stoughton, 1995.
John of the Cross. The Living Flame of Love. https://www.jesus-passion.com/LivingFlameLove.htm. Accessed 7 December 2023.
