(This is the text of a short talk during a Lenten Worship)
Faith and Poetry
When Peter (our vicar) asked me to fill this sermon slot, giving me the provisional
titles ‘Faith and Poetry’ or ‘The Faith of a Poet’, my initial reaction was quite
self-
I remember, in my days as an atheist, challenging a Christian friend who was, and still is, a poet. I said “As a religious person, you cannot be completely free to write as you would like because you must always be concerned about causing offence to the God who constantly peers over your shoulder.” It was a cheap and tenuous shot and I knew it even then. But admitting that now doesn’t really help me. As far as I can tell, unless the poet is writing about a biblical, theological or Christological matter – which they may be tempted to do – the poetry is unlikely to be affected in any great way. As Rowan Williams put it “I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.” I think this sentiment may be revealed in some of my own work. I wrote the skeleton pieces of my book The Pustoy as an atheist Master’s student, but completed the larger part of it after my baptism into the Christian faith. Apart from one obvious reference to the death of St. John the Baptist, I don’t think I would be wrong in thinking that one could not tell which scenes I wrote before, and which I wrote after, my conversion.
It occurs to me then, that I first approached the issue of Faith & Poetry from the wrong direction. Faith can inspire poets to write on matters of faith, and also gives the writer a greater arsenal of religious imagery and metaphor, but these, indelicately speaking, are differences of a fairly superficial nature. What may be interesting to discuss I have realised, is the effect that understanding the nature of poetry can have on one’s faith; the effect it can have on one’s understanding of God, of Christ’s teachings and the Holy Spirit’s movement through the world.
Of course, we can talk about how the Old Testament is encased in metaphor and idiom
and in some places even written in verse. And in the Gospels, Christ uses parables
in order to convey meanings greater than lessons in plain-
When working on the subject of the arts and the concept of beauty, the philosopher
Immanuel Kant said that for us to legitimately claim that we have experienced something
beautiful, four moments must have occurred. Firstly, we must have found the thing
beautiful without any vested interests or external information affecting our decision.
Secondly we must think of the beautiful thing being universally beautiful -
In most cases, poetry puts itself forward as a beautiful thing. It can achieve the
first moment, the instant unvested interest, through its imagery and the musicality
of the words within it. If one enjoys a poem, she will generally consider there to
be something wrong with a person should they disagree and this covers the second
and third moments of beauty. Perhaps more so than with any other art form, the nagging
half-
Those without faith often deride the faithful for mistakenly seeing patterns and
intentions where there are none. It’s a child-
I believe that what I almost hear is the ever-
In this way, I think we can legitimately think of God as a poet. And existence as his poem. We see before us the magnificent imagery of a universe filled with stars and wanderers and springs of life; we read the clever nuances, the lyrical tricks and inflictions in cultural, biological and geographical variety. And behind it all is the incomprehensible, ungraspable, untranslatable Word. The Word that was in the beginning, the Word that became flesh. And though we continue to mishear it, I think it is important to keep listening. It is by trusting in such intuitions – our receptiveness to the subtle interaction between God and existence, the poet and His poem – that we are able to take the leap of faith where others may not.
If I may, I’d like to end with a poem, originally written in Welsh by Waldo Williams and translated into English by Rowan Williams. I think it incorporates a few of the ideas that I have mentioned, as well as dealing with the difficult topic of integrity and martyrdom in the face of theological uncertainty and political pressure.
Die Bibelforscher
For the Protestant martyrs of the Third Reich
Earth is a hard text
to read; but the king
has put his message in our hands, for us to carry
sweating, whether
the trumpets of his court
sound near or far. So for these men:
they were the bearers
of the royal writ,
clinging to it through spite and hurts and wounding.
The earth's
round fullness is not like a parable, where meaning
breaks through, a flash of lightning,
in the humid, heavy dusk;
imagination will not conjure into flesh the depths
of fire
and crystal sealed under castle walls of wax, but still
they keep their witness pure
in Buchenwald,
pure in the crucible of hate penning them in.
They closed their eyes
to doors that might have opened
if they had put their names to words of cowardice;
they
took their stand, backs to the wall, face to face with savagery,
and died there, with
their filth flowing together,
arriving at the gates of heaven,
their fists still clenched
on what the king had written.
Earth is a hard text to read. But what we can be certain
of
is that screaming mob is insubstantial mist;
in the clear sky, the thundering assertions
fade to nothing.
There the Lamb's song is sung, and what it celebrates
is the apocalypse
of a glory
pain lays bare.
Amen.
Philippe Blenkiron
Faith and Poetry
