Poetry Is the Language of Faith

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I don’t want to turn this into a lecture because it’s not in a lecture that I discovered how much I loved poetry. The world I enjoyed as a boy was suburban—south of Boston—but somehow enchanted. Leafy backyards became whole forests, neighborhood parks battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War. My family’s summer vacations in Maine glitter in my mind; I can still feel the cold waves wash over me, see the tall pines on the rocky coast. In the delicacy and ruggedness of its natural beauty and people, Maine itself is something of a poem. It invites you in, but on its own mysterious, somewhat flinty terms.

So when I “discovered” poetry in my late teens, it was for me a condensation of everything magical distilled into words with an almost talismanic power. When I started trying to write poetry many years ago, my Catholic Faith joined the process as seamlessly as those waves roll in day after day on the Maine coast. The practice of the Faith, itself a kind of journey, illuminated the small steps I took into the art of poetry, a life-long apprenticeship with language and mystery. What follows are some thoughts I’ve picked up along the way.

Christian poetry must before all else be poetry.

It must breathe the spiritual longings of the human person in and through the humble things of life, expressed in words of inspired precision and artistry. These words must illumine like a firefly the contours of this life of ours, making the many petals of creation—even those stained with tears—glow from within. They must be a light born from the true and the good, radiating outwards in a flame that is the beautiful.

Christian poetry’s unique gift to the world is its intimacy with the font of all authentic Christian piety: the Incarnation. While the range and subject of Christian poetry is vast and varied, it all seeks inspiration from the God who became man and is still God.

The Divine One, the Most Holy Lord, when the stars were holding their breath in silence (Wisdom 18:14-15), came to know first-hand the feeling of woolen swaddling clothes keeping his infant body warm. He didn’t know it only as Creator and Sustainer of all that is. He knew it as the WORD become one with the human nature he took to himself, a nature like ours in all but sin, and so vulnerable to the chill of the cave in which he was born. While the breath of farm animals steamed like wreaths of incense rising to the stars, the Almighty was held helpless in the arms of his mother. The invisible God became visible. The light glowing within all things walked among us, the Icon of all icons. (Second Council of Nicaea, 787.)

Or in poetic language, the Image of every image broke bread with his creatures. And that’s not simply a metaphor; it’s a metaphor that happened—and is happening even now at every Mass, a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God the Father in the person of his Son.

Poetry comes from our ability to adorn our everyday language by the human soul’s innate powers, found in some measure in all cultures and times. Christian poetry does the very same thing, illuminated by a light higher than our own, but not scorning the humble dust into which the Lord breathed his spirit. (Genesis 2:7)

“The Lord is my rock,” says the psalmist (18:2). The metaphor, literally a carrying over from one thing to another, throws light on God’s steadfast fidelity to his creatures. A rock’s immovability makes tangible a quality of God the perfect spirit’s nature.

Metaphor both conveys and comes up short; it’s true, but not literally so. (God is clearly not a rock.) Christian poetry feeds on this way of affirmation that is also negation, a proper deference to God’s mystery. It’s something like the clouds around Mount Sinai: it allows for endless depths in the very act of revelation. Something is always hidden because God is not less than he tells us about himself, but always more. The language of metaphor fits this bill perfectly.

Metaphor is also faithful to our body/soul unity in which our soul is expressed in materiality. We are embodied spirits. And so, in a way, is every true metaphor; it’s an embodied thought expressed in an image, a sign of a perception, feeling, experience. The way of salvation follows a similar path: the Incarnation is the perfect poem, the true story of the invisible God’s taking flesh for the redemption of the world. As Christ himself has taught us, his humanity is the path to the Father, now and forever. (John 14:6)

St. Thomas Aquinas makes arguments similar to these when defending the idea that it is fitting for scripture to use metaphors. He actually cites a reference to literary images as “veils” that communicate and protect the mysteries of our Faith. (ST I.1.9) While there are plenty of literal statements in the Scriptures alongside figurative ones, says Thomas, the interaction of both yields the best reading of the Faith, much like, I would add, the proper reading of a poem.

Dante felt the great pressure of this two-fold aspect of the poetical, its capacity to reveal and hide. Actually, 700 years ago, he coined the Italian word “transumanar” to describe the inexpressible “transhuman” destiny of our life in the heart of the Divine, which he then, brilliant poet that he was, went on to describe in the next 32 cantos of the final section of his The Divine Comedy.

As Christians, we must take poetry seriously. Poetic speech is one of the main ways we learn that God walked among us. Curiously, the only thing Christ wrote was in the sand before the woman condemned for adultery. (John 8:1-11) His words blew away in the wind, forever lost, forever pointing to his Person. But scripture does not leave us orphans; we can know “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16) in what the prophets foretold about him, and what his Apostles witnessed to in their own writings, and in the offering of their lives.

“Before there were treatises on the Trinity, before there were learned commentaries on the Bible, before there were disputes about the teaching on grace, or essays on the moral life, there was awe and adoration before the exalted Son of God alive and present in the church's offering of the Eucharist,” writes Robert Louis Wilken in his remarkable history of early Christian thought. This reality is chiefly a work of grace—but of grace working upon nature. And that nature also includes the world in which we live, one of poems, stories, images in color, sound, and word. All good poems are by necessity sacramental; they are signs bearing human gifts. Graces, really.

As the scholastics liked to say, God’s grace perfects our nature. And though God can dispense with any of our efforts any time he likes, he ordinarily works through things belonging to our humanity to transform it into his own likeness, love, charity, caritas. St. John Henry Newman once wrote that “nature...is a parable.” This has a two-fold meaning. We are surrounded by signs of God’s goodness in our world and in our hearts. Both reveal meanings more than literal in that their fullest significance lies beyond themselves. Both belong to him. Both are promised redemption through the Cross. Even our songs!

Now the Lord draws all things to himself through his Church and her sacraments. The Church herself is a sacrament in a larger sense, a sign, a visible image of God’s calling conveying spiritual grace. (Lumen Gentium,1) So much of the Church’s life is lived and expressed in signs—of the time, of grace, of offers of renewal found in her sacraments. We could, in fact, see the sacraments as Divinely instituted poems. After all, God’s speech to his people conveys and yet preserves his infinite mystery. A truth so true it takes a symphony of language to begin expressing it.

Hence the poet’s agony—and hope.