Truth Telling
The theologian who writes poetry, or the poet who writes theology?
I feel, ideally, that one would not have to choose between these two… what should we call them? callings, vocations, identities, paths? The pedantic among us—shout out to my bestie, Christian—would say that everything is theology. To Christian’s credit, I agree with him, but only insofar as we’re saying that philosophy and poetry touch on the nature of Being, and the nature of Being is directly related to the One who created Being. Taking my turn to be pedantic, I would qualify that to say everything is theological, because theology is a discipline in its own right, with many subcategories underneath it. There are many poets who write theologically, or write explicitly about God, Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke come immediately to mind, and many theologians have written poetic theology, like the word weaver Willie James Jennings or the ancient Ephrem of Syria, whose theological works were, in fact, mostly poems and hymns.
Though Ephrem might most embody the ideal, his poems all dealt with explicitly theological topics. They are wonderful, and I wish that writing madrashe (Syriac word for these theological-poetry works) was normative practice today, but I don’t recall a poem or hymn from Ephrem that didn’t deal specifically with Scriptural or liturgical topics. It’s not entirely his fault that today he’s thought of as a theologian more than as a poet, and I think he would be a bit heartbroken to know we’ve bifurcated these disciplines as we have.
Why, though, do I feel this bifurcation? Why do I feel pulled taught between the two? Because I can only image a world where Wheatgerm and Thoughts and Prayers exist as one vocation through a glass darkly. Because nearly every time I post in Thoughts and Prayers, I gain a subscriber, while nearly every time I post in Wheatgerm, I lose one. This hints, I think, at the fact that more people appreciate my thoughts over my prayers. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I deeply appreciate every single person who reads my cultural and theological musings on one Substack and every single person who reads poetry on the other. Because I can barely imagine a world where I can sustain both endeavors.
And still, there’s something driving this wedge between a life of theology and a life of poetry, and I don’t know how to take the wedge out.
Thresholds
I’ve written about this already, but I’ve taken to writing poetry more seriously and consistently. I have loved the endeavor and have been enlivened by it. A year ago, I took up photography, which has been a fascinating adventure in learning to perceive the numinous in everyday moment and distinguishing that from just “a cool shot.” Whether I’ve succeeded in communicating that through the images I’ve captured is for someone else to say. A little over a month ago, Katrina and I took up pottery, and I’ve fallen in love. Feeling the clay whirling through my hands and bending in my fingers is vivifying, and I can imagine myself making a practice of it.
Since I was a child I’ve felt creative, longed to be creative, and took up creative practices here and there, but always quit after a failure because I believed failure meant I was not good and couldn’t become skilled. Painting and drawing lie in the cemetery of my murdered endeavors alongside other desires I couldn’t imagine myself surviving because of the learning process.
But I’ve aged, and after thirty-seven years, I finally started to mature, by which I mean I finally stopped catastrophizing myself and the things I desire to do because I’m not immediately amazing. Initially, it was growing food that taught me to struggle against my perfectionism, with the help of Katrina and some dear friends. Now I feel… brave enough?… to give myself to these practices I love, not without fear, but working through the fear and failure and imperfection to bear the fruit of art.
Something opened up for me as I stood on the precipice of forty, though I’m not quite sure what it was, and the rejection from Duke tore it the rest of the way open. Or maybe it was the plants. Or maybe it was a little bit of both, and I can’t help but sense the fluttering of the Holy Spirit in all this.
Rivers
I can't hear anymore
the whine of the old TV set
where the old farmer works
trapped in his own particular Samsara
fixing fence posts.
None of the tell tale omens
give warning before they arrive,
the first of which is a longing,
and ache in the heart
wrapped in a vining fear
that engulfs the mind
and fruits in the body.
The promise of Heraclitos
floats down my marrow.
One never steps,
can ever step,
again into the same river.
All is a rushing
whirring
crashing
violent
and then suddenly still
movement
to a bright -
or is it a dark? -
infinity I scrape at
with an imagination
I barely understand.
Forty was a mythic age
I believed would be always
beyond me,
always in the dusky horizon
where mountains blur into the sky
and one can never tell
where they end and the clouds begin.
But now I am present
to this first descending turn of the sun
into its golden procession.
Our light is still strong,
almost oppressive,
as we face our age
of memory.Truth Telling
I highly value Truth. Not simply facts or even their coagulation into an idea or theory we might call “the truth,” but Truth, that something that undergirds all reality and meaning. It’s the creative force that both Heraclitus and John the Apostle discerned as Logos. Knowing a truth is to think correctly about a given idea, like 1+1=2. Intuiting truth is to believe that 0.999 repeating infinitely is equal to 1. Knowing this truth is to have two apples in your hands. But knowing Truth is to taste the sweetness of the apple in your mouth, or experience in your being that you and your beloved are one flesh, or that the one God is three Persons. Math cannot give you the sensual taste of apples, or ignite intimacy, or plunge you into the surging sea that is the love of the Triune God.
I…gained? earned? found? was inflicted with this desire for Truth early in the 2000s when, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I woke up unsure about the reality and nature of God. I never could accept the world of the materialist—I carry spirituality in my bones like a genetic inheritance—but I couldn’t know if I believed in God as I had grown up knowing him, or in his Son, Jesus. For months I teetered on the edge of belief, asking myself if I believed in God, asking God if he were real, begging Jesus to reveal himself to me, and I could not find faith until one late spring night I heard a song that asked me, “Do you remember?”
With those words, I didn’t jump, so much as fall into faith, remembering all that the Son of God had done for me, to me, and in me up to that point.
But the wound remains sensitive. I remain committed to Truth, to remembering that I know very little, and that the One who is Truth, the Logos, would reveal himself to me if I remained humble under his wise hand and powerful word. There are so many facets to this, and it’s unfair to simply say it the way I’m about to, but that wound, this Wounder, formed me into the person I am today. It led me to Bonhoeffer and the Sermon on the Mount, then to seminary, then to the soil, and now here, where I crave the writing of poetry.
I still love theology. I am currently reading three works of theology, and I still want to write theologically on topics of Christian ethics, Christian environmentalism, and discipleship. But giving myself in this new way to poetry and taking up photography and pottery is an embodied theology I don’t know how to explain just yet. Theology can be, and maybe needs to be, didactic. There is beauty there, but not often in the words and form of theology, but the way it shines light on the Logos and the way his Being flows in and through different facets of reality.
Poetry, on the other hand, doesn’t try to shine light on anything. Instead, the poet steps into the water and runs with the currents of the Logos, inviting the reader to do the same. It’s in this way that poetry is, if not theology, at least theological, and why it’s so often described as prayer.
In her book, Feeling as a Foreign Language, poet Alice Fulton says:
Readers of fiction are propelled by the story’s future developments: How will things turn out, what will become of the characters? Readers of poetry, on the other hand, develop a Zen gift for existing in the moment. No one reads poetry (including narrative poetry) to discover where the plot will settle. Poetry is neither future-driven nor teleological in spirit. The pleasure exists in the presence and texture of each line as each line is experienced. Which is to say: Fiction is about what happens next. Poetry is about what happens now. Immediacy is one of its hidden assets—immediacy as paradox, requiring a surrender to extemporal pleasures. That is why poetry remains a puzzle to the impatient. Yet, rather than a riddle, poetry has the potential to be a subversive force.
Readers of theology are propelled by developments of theories, ideas, doctrines. Each work of theology is teleological in spirit. There are arguments to be made and goals to be reached. Poetry is not like this. It lives in and experiences the Truth of these moments and transports the reader into those moments as they experience them again and again. Poetry is not only prayer, it is meditation because it is both presence and being present.
Writing poetry requires a slow and intentional discipline, as does reading it. Alice reminds us that poetry is not a riddle because those coming to poetry for the first time often experience it as riddle because poems can be hard to understand. But poems cannot be solved anymore than life can be solved, anymore than any moment in the human life, regardless of how horrific or beautiful, can be solved. Learning the discipline of reading and writing poetry forms a person to walk slowly, giving them the attention to notice the fragrance of primrose or the sound of bees or the sight of a single dandelion seed sailing through the air.
To tell those moments because one has experienced them is to tell the Truth in love.
And now, finally, I can return to my question. Do I see myself as a theologian who writes poetry, or a poet who does theology? I’m hoping to continue my practice in such a way that I don’t have to force the two worlds together, but that they grow into and integrate with one another organically. What I love about theology is the way I am lead into ideas that enliven love. It’s very often not the words or the way they’re written, but the concepts themselves that inspire worship, but it I am lead to worship all the same. Poetry follows the same direction, only on a different path. It may also be that one learns to love their neighbor through poetry as they enter into the experiences and tempers of the poet, and in so doing, learn to love God.
Beautiful poem 👌🏼