On Tuesday the 22nd
of July theologian and poet Tony Kelly CSsR gave a reading and paper at the
Carmelite Centre in Middle Park as part of the 2014 Poetry for the Soul series.
Here is an extension of words used that night, assembled by Tony later in the
week.
John L. Mahoney, ed., Seeing into the Life of
Things. Essays on Religion and
Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998)
We all know that there are
regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around
us, in the expression of art, in yearning toward God, the soul grows upward and
finds the fulfilment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within
us, a striving born with consciousness of an Inner Light proceeding from a
greater power than ours. Science can
scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a
striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be
suppressed.
(Sir Arthur Eddington in The
Nature of the Physical World, quoted on p. xiii of Preface of above).
The wonder and mystery of art,
as indeed of religion in the last resort, is the revelation of something
‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and
enriched.
(Wallace Stevens, cited on p.
277 in above).
‘There is
nothing more real than true poetry.
There is nothing more poetic than the theology of God’s Word working
through all that is good and true and beautiful in our created world’.[i] In those two sentences, he opens up the
theme that we are exploring this evening. You might let two questions linger in
this regard, without any pressure to hurry to an answer. In what sense is poetry more ‘real’ than any
other form of language? And, if
theology of the Word of God is ‘poetic’, what does poetic mean in such a
context?
Bad
theology and bad poetry don’t have much to do with one another. But it is otherwise when both the theologian
and the poet are drawn out of themselves, celebrating in their respective ways
what has been so uncannily given, and using words to word what is the most
particular and the most universal in human experience. With the displacement that occurred in the
history of that experience through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth, a new form of literature came into existence – the Gospel. It is not simply that wonderful and terrible
things happened in this man, as one more of any number of good people who have
been a light in the darkness of human history.
But he is present to those who believe in him, as the resurrection and
the life: all that he was and did; all he spoke, stood for and suffered, his
death and resurrection, comes to Christians as the self-revelation of God. Through the witness of the Holy Spirit, he
is for us the way, the truth and the life.
The writers of the Gospels were writing about Jesus, a man known and
named in human history, and remembered through the decades that looked back to
the time of his ministry and his eventual shameful execution. Yet they were also writing about Christ; for
they were dead sure that whatever happened in what we call the resurrection, it
was a world transforming event. It left
the tomb empty, but filled the world with light. ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘Christ Jesus’ – those two words are both the
most condensed Gospel and the most condensed poem ever written.
That
the authentic witness of faith makes wonderful alliances with the poetic can
hardly be doubted, least of all in the Scriptures themselves. The sacred writings of Israel have been
lovingly incorporated into the Christian Bible as the ‘Old Testament’. Its psalms are the heartbeat of daily
prayer. The great prophecies of Isaiah,
the erotic tenderness of the Song of Songs, the wonderful contemplative
meditations of the books of Wisdom and the bracing melancholy of Ecclesiastes –
all have entered the bloodstream of the
life of faith. The words, if not the names of these prophets and sages of old,
speak through the centuries to the human heart:
Though the fig tree does not
blossom, and no fruit is on the vine,
Though the produce of the olive
fails and the fields yield no food;
Though the flock is cut off
from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls,
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation (Habacuc 3:17-18).
Delight in language reaches to
its highest purpose in praise of
The one who sends forth the
light, and it goes;
He called it, and it obeyed
him, trembling;
The stars shone in their
watches, and were glad;
He called them, and they said,
‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for
him who made them.
This is our God (Baruch
3:33-35).
Significantly,
the great christological moments of the New Testament are typically expressed
in hymns and poem-like utterances, as we would readily see in the Prologue of
John’s Gospel, in those great passages in the Captivity Epistles (Eg., Eph
1:3-14; 3:14-21; Phil 2:4-11; Col 1:15-20).
Then, in the parables and other teachings of Jesus, we are invited into
the imagination of this one man who saw everything differently; and here we
touch on something for which poetry is too weak a word. In the beatitudes and the parables ordinary
human words suddenly reach into wonderful, other realms of meaning. The way he called on his disciples to
consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky point to manner in
which he saw all living things in the light of his Father’s universal
providence (Mat 6:25-34). Such words
lead to a silence and hope beyond any human utterance. Paul’s hymn to charity (1 Cor 13, 1-13) is
so much more than moral exhortation.
Explain it as you will, it witnesses to that transformation of human
life which only the revelation of infinite love could promise as it invites
believers to keep on doing what God has done and is doing in the world. One of the most genuinely artful passages of
the highly wrought Epistle to the Hebrews is the following. The breadth of its
allusions evoke Moses meeting with God on Mt Sinai and Elijah’s experience on
Mt Horeb, to compare them with what characterises a new covenant:
You have not come to something
that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest,
and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that
not another word be spoken to them… But
you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly
of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and
to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a
new covenant, and to sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood
of Abel (Heb 12:18-24).
When you
ponder on passages like that, and the others already mentioned, you realise
that Word has become flesh in the most beautiful words of the world. And of course the liturgy abounds in hymns
and passages which, at least in their original languages, were marvellous to
tongue and ear. Not too many weeks ago,
many of us heard the Exultet sung in praise of the Easter candle, symbol
of the Light of the world. Whatever the
limitations of the performance, the words seem to have an afterlife of
resonance in the heart, which is a good indicator of great poetry:
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing
choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around
God’s throne!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining
splendour,
Radiant in the brightness of
your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory
fills you!
Darkness vanishes forever!
And then, as
the great Easter hymn works through all its acclamations celebrates ‘the power
of this holy night’, ending so evocatively, ‘May the Morning Star which never
sets find this flame still burning: Christ, the Morning Star, who came back
from the dead, and shed his peaceful light on all humanity, Your Son who lives
and reigns forever and ever.’
True,
not all hymns are like that; but that is another matter. Perhaps our hymn-writers today are little
exposed to the arts of poetry. Do note, however, that none the passages I
referred to would be what they are unless someone, somewhere, back at some
distant time, had very carefully composed them with an ear attuned to what the
art of language can do. Admittedly, the
writers and witnesses who gave us the Bible were not interested in writing
poetry; their concern was to testify to the Word become flesh to dwell among us
in our endlessly chattering world. The
great German language poet, Paul Celan, makes the point perfectly: “A Rumbling:
truth/ itself has appeared/ among humankind/ in the very thick of their/
flurrying metaphors”.[ii]
But
Words weary and stale. The flow of
language freezes; its values congeal into notes and coins of a currency which
grows more and more inflated: consider words like ‘spirituality’, ‘Church’,
‘institution’, ‘religion’, ‘sacraments’, ‘grace’, ‘salvation’, ‘charity’,
‘sin’, ‘worship’, and even ‘God’. To
make a point, would you pardon the intrusion of an unfinished poem of my own?
Address for a Special Occasion
How
the bishop gamely tried
to
tickle the plump sense of occasion
into
a little transcendence! --
To
take a step beyond
the
mundane of the heat, summer frocks,
smart
suits, and rows of polished cars;
beyond
where family values are secure,
spouses
faithful, children obedient,
motherhood
a treasure, and even fathers
have
a special role –
to
that other region...
In
the religious perspective
the
vanishing point
makes
all meaning shrink:
old
bird-words are no longer winged;
no
more abiding the open air
they
roost, moulting,
pecking
seed from the preacher's hand.
Some
wild amazing thing has flown away:
once
reachable in a bound of hope or praise,
or
in the dart of love or pang of guilt.
Piety
lives here now
as
a drugged bird of paradise,
smuggled
in, and revived,
allowed
to live decoratively,
at
least as a specimen
in
the ecology of a cage.
Customs
check the contraband:
importing
exotic fauna
is
against the law.
The
safer option is taxidermy...
But
jokes get by --
ironic
resonance
with
what we barely know,
as
everything comes tumbling down,
and
nothing sure can stand
against
the earthquake tilt from nowhere.
For
all I know, tears may be
a
surer path, a strange confiding gift
flowing
with more elements,
and
welling up from where forgotten things
are
felt – and spell,
in
a giving too deep to be one's own,
existence,
if only for the moment,
shamelessly
ecstatic.
How does
poetry affect our language? At some
level, it brings a renewal, a new charge of feeling at the deepest registers of
our being. In the lines just quoted, I
conceded that ‘tears may be a surer path, a strange confiding gift, welling up
from where forgotten things are felt…’ and so on. In this regard, poetry wells up from the ‘sacred heart’ of our
humanity where life and death, suffering, separation, longing and hope are felt
realities. A great Australian poem here
is Les Murray’s ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’.[iii]
I am sure many of you know it well, how the word had gone around all those
little coffee shops and watering holes round Martin Place, to report that
‘there’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him’. The traffic banks up, and the crowds gather:
The man we surround, the man no
one approaches
Simply weeps, and does not
cover it, weeps
Not like a child, not like the
wind, like a man
And does not declaim it, nor
beat his breast, nor even
Sob very loudly—yet the dignity
of his weeping
Holds us back from his space,
the hollow he makes about him
In the midday light, in his
pentagram of sorrow,
And uniforms back in the crow
who tried to seize him
Stare out at him, and feel,
with amazement, their minds
Longing for tears as children
for a rainbow.
The
next few verses show how all this was very embarrassing, but oddly challenging
to the bystanders, unused to such a spectacle.
They give various interpretations of the scene, but miss the point. But ‘the fiercest manhood, the toughest
reserve, the slickest wit amongst us/ trembles with silence, and burns with
unexpected/ judgments of peace.’ The
weeping man is alien, except for some: ‘Only the smallest children/ and such as
look out of Paradise come near him/ and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty
pigeons’ But the poet sees also a
‘woman, shining stretch her hand/ and shake as she receives the gift of
weeping,/ as many as follow her also receive it..’ Some begin to weep ‘for
sheer acceptance’, but more ‘refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance’. In the meantime, ‘the weeping man, like the
earth, requires nothing’ but cries out no verbal messages, but only ‘grief’ and
‘sorrow/ hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea’. It all ends rather suddenly: ‘when he stops,
he simply walks between us/ mopping his face with the dignity of one/ man who
has wept, and has now finished weeping.’
Then comes a delightfully ironic ending, at least to my mind: ‘Evading
believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street’.
The
greatness of this poem lies precisely in the possibilities of interpretation
spiralling off in all directions. I am
sure Les Murray himself would be quite interested in what we thought he meant. It is not unlikely that he himself would be
loath to assign one precise meaning to the whole poem or its many provocative
phrases. For believers – the ones the
weeping man evades – must try to catch up with him, in order to recover
disowned depths of feeling in themselves.
It might suggest a sense of the feeling, in the passion, of
Jesus, the sacred heart who feels our grief more than we do, and who works in
our heart to give us the ‘gift of tears’ in the words of the old Roman
missal. It is a matter of seeing life
with eyes refreshed with weeping. Faith
can indeed be refreshed by a poem like this, in its feeling and weeping. After all, St Paul would declare in his Letter
to the Romans (8:19-27) that all creation is groaning, that we are groaning within
it, and, most mysteriously, that the Holy Spirit groaning within us.
Let’s take
another poem, an early one from a far different poet, Kevin Hart, who also made
a collection of Australian religious poetry (despite the hundreds of poems in
each anthology, there are very few in common – though Murray’s poem is included
in both). Both, incidentally, are
converts to the Catholic faith. In my
own little poem given above, I spoke of experiencing existence, through ‘a
giving too deep to be one’s own’ as ‘ineluctably
ecstatic’. Consider, then, Hart’s ‘The
Stone’s Prayer’.[iv] The stone turns in praise to God – for the
wideness of the earth and sky, for the forces – ‘the sharp rain and the
scraping wind’ – that have carved it from the mountain. The stone continues its praise of God for
its colour and reflection in the water between the evening stars, and for its
quartz that flashes to reflect the glory of creation, and for the fact that God
has seen fit to place it near a stream so that it can contemplate the passage
of time. The stone continues its
prayer,
For
all that is around me I sing your praise,
For
the fierce concentration of ants, their laws,
For
all that they tell me about you.
Keep
me, I pray, whole,
Unlike
the terrible dust and pieces of bone
Cast
about in the wind’s great breath, unlike men
Who
must suffer change,
Their
endless footprints deep as graves;
Keep
me in truth, in solitude,
Until
the day when you will burst into my heavy soul
And
I will shout your name.
The
prayer works through so many associations and images, the ants, the bones, the
changing human lives leading to the grave.
But it remains a psalm of praise and exultant hope, as that last
beautiful verse brings out: the self-contained stoniness waiting for God to
burst into its heavy soul in a universe transformed.
You can see
why both these poems would figure in a collection of Australian religious
poetry. They easily chime with explicit
biblical and Christian symbols. Clearly
they do not exhaust the genre; in fact the more you look at it, the more you
can agree with Kevin Hart, when, in the process of making his selection, he
found himself considering these three terms Australian, religious,
and poetry
as different threads that had
been interlaced... made from the overlapping of various fibres, not one of
which runs through a whole length… there [is] no single knot that ties together
all three to make ‘Australian religious poetry. There are several knots and they do not always tie up the same
fibres’.[v]
Given so many
possible interlacing connections, I am not disposed to attempt any artificial
clarification in the present context.
Poetry is as large as life; and life, in its heights and depths, touches
on mysteries that the routine world does not easily contain. Take for instance,
Judith Wright’s ‘The Forest’.[vi] Under the metaphor of her youthful
enthusiasm in exploring the varied delights of the rain forest, the poet
suggests the onset of another stage in her life:
Now that its vines and flowers
Are named and known,
Like long fulfilled desires
Those first strange joys are
gone.
My search is further.
There’s still to name and know
Beyond the flowers I gather
That one that does not wither –
The truth from which they grow
This
poem is not explicitly religious in the biblical sense. Rather, in an Australian setting, it is an
expression of that ancient search for wisdom characteristic of the great
tradition of philosophia perennis.
Take another poem, Francis Webb’s ‘Five Days Old’.[vii]
This great poet suffered throughout his life with mental depression to an often
incapacitating degree. In England during the war, he was being treated by a
young Canadian doctor who had invited him home round the Christmas of that
year. The young parents put their five
day old Christopher John in the poet’s arms, and left him alone for a while.
This poem was the result. It tends to
feature in all the collections. It
concludes,
For the snowflake and face of
love,
Windfall and word of truth,
Honour close to death.
O eternal truthfulness, Dove,
Tell me what I hold –
Myrrh? Frankincense? Gold?
If this is man, then the danger
And fear are as lights of the
inn,
Faint and remote as sin
Out here by the manger.
In the sleeping, weeping
weather,
We shall all kneel down
together.
Tenderest
perceptions of the utter vulnerability of a new born child are interwoven with
the sublime realism of the incarnation and particular feelings associated with
Christmas and the wintry weather of the Northern Hemisphere in a time of
war. The poem comes together as an
expression of defiant hope in the face of the darkness and violence looming
over Europe through those grim years. I
suppose there were hundreds of sermons preached in churches throughout the land
in that period. You would have to
wonder, however, whether any of them could have spoken as tellingly as this
poem composed this man in whom poetic genius and psychological fragility were
so combined.
What is it,
then, that poets do for us? In certain
circumstances it seems that they can make faith come alive in a special
way. Why is this so? James McAuley, in his ‘Credo’,[viii]
points toward an answer for those of us who wish to be open to what faith
reveals and poetry can express – be it in terms of a man weeping, or a stone
praying, or a baby cradled in a poet’s arms.
He presumably would include such examples in a larger list of things,
‘from the ant to the quasar/ from the clouds to the ocean floor’. He says that
‘the meaning is not ours, but found/ in the mind deeply submissive’ to what he
terms ‘the grammar of existence’ and the ‘syntax of the real’. Though the power of the word, a wondrous
transformation occurs – of the ‘alien’ into the ‘human’, the ‘thing into
thinking’, ‘the world’s bare tokens’ into a golden coin stamped with the king’s
image. And so he ends,
Stamped with the king’s image;
And poems are prophecy
Of a new heaven and earth,
A rumour of resurrection.
Prophecy?
A rumour of resurrection? Hints,
inklings whispers of other dimensions certainly. Can we express the role of poetry in the life of faith more
clearly? There may be no special
advantage in trying to.[ix]
Still, I do have a small suggestion. I
think you can come at it ‘from below’, so to speak, as human experience blooms
through the art of language into amazing rhythms and sounds. In this case, poetry is looking for ‘faith’,
in the sense of the ultimate revelation of the real. But you can also imagine it ‘from above’, from the vantage point
of belief in the great mysteries of faith, as the light of revelation shines
into the world. In that case, it would
be more a case of faith looking to its best poetic expression. So, a brief word
on each.[x]
To illustrate
the first approach, that is, ‘from below’, we can appeal to a splendid passage
from David Malouf’s novel, The Great World.[xi] The good Mr Warrender has died. He had been a poet of some standing. At his funeral, there was a third speaker, a
young academic who had written on Warrender’s poems, who reflected on the
hidden dimensions of anyone’s public life, especially that of the poet:
He was speaking of poetry
itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives, especially here in
Australia, though it was common enough -- that was the whole point of it -- and
of the embarrassment when it had, as now, to be brought into the light. How it spoke
up, not always in the plainest terms, since it wasn’t always possible, but in
precise ones just the same, for what it deeply felt and might otherwise go
unrecorded: all those unique and irrepeatable events, the little sacraments of
daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but
inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history,
the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and
is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has
been from the beginning. To find words for that; to make glow with
significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too -- that, when it occurs,
is what binds us all, since it speaks out of the centre of each one of us;
giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words
for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own.
I cannot
imagine finding a more compressed exposition of the meaning of poetry. The young academic concerned, having delivered
himself of this memorial speech, disappears totally from the scene! Well, he left something good behind. More to the point, what we have here is an
indication of the philosophy of life and literature that have made Malouf the
artist he is. There is quite a nest of
evocative terms and phrases in this passage: the hidden place of poetry in
Australian life, the artfully allusive character of poetic idiom, its
concentration on ‘what it deeply felt’, and what could not be recorded in any
other way. He instances these as the
unique irrepeatable events of life, ‘the little sacraments of daily existence’
– note how he glances toward a Christian language at this point – and then, the
movements of the heart, and intimations of what is so close, but inexpressible
in its grandeur and terror. All in all
poetry speaks from and to that ‘other history’, the depths of life that hold
ephemeral events of our world together.
The right words for that other dimension binds us together, since it
speaks from the centre of each human being, to give shape and form to our
deepest experience. The passage
referred to is, in effect, a prose poem about poetry; and you can easily see
how a whole book could be written bringing its elements together. For the moment, we have to settle for the
merest indication, of how poetry is a voice speaking within our experiences to
make ‘the heart/ Kindle and quicken at the mystery’ (A.D.Hope).[xii]
In the most literal sense, it is a language designed to be ‘learnt by
heart’.
Martin
Heidegger, the influential German philosopher, was deeply affected by the
writings of poets such as Hölderin and Rilke.
In a long reflection he tries to answer a question that one of them
posed, ‘What are Poets for…?’.[xiii] The fuller form of the question was ‘What
are poets for in this destitute time?’
Heidegger dwells on the destitution of modern culture. Not only is there
a loss of the sacred, but a numbing in our humanity as well: ‘God is dead’ as
Nietzsche would claim, and our humanity suffers as well -- with a deadness that
arises paradoxically from our failure to accept our own mortality; and with it,
the possibilities, promise and limits of love and freedom. Precisely in this time of destitution, the
vocation of the poet is most clear, to anticipate a time or a dimension beyond
the present destitution, and to give voice to a forgotten human wholeness. The philosopher reflects further on a
phrase, entitling another essay, ‘… Poetically Man Dwells…’.[xiv] Now poetry is seen as not as an adornment of
our human dwelling on the earth, but as creating it. It is the way we dwell in our place and make it specifically
ours, thus to measure existence with a human sense of proportion. Despite the
difference of idiom – as well as the difficulty of translating both Heidegger and
the poets he refers to – what he says over many pages leads pretty much to what
Malouf has written so concisely. Even
more concisely, Les Murray refers to poetry as ‘wholespeak’, as opposed to all
other limited kinds of language.[xv]
A style of
thought characteristic of recent decades is often referred to as
‘Postmodernism’. There is no room for a
prolonged effort to wrestle with that particular column of smoke in this brief
reflection, even if there is one positive point to be made. Compared to the great ideologies and massive
scientific control presiding over modern life, postmodernism is struggling for
something beyond that. It is searching
for a new buoyancy and openness in a way that will subvert the massive
congealed structures of power and control. It tries to make room for the
particular as opposed to the standardised and universal; for the fresh insight
as opposed to presumed understanding; for allusion and the play of images and
conversation as opposed to one level of meaning. Above all, it resists any totalitarian approach to reality; and
so stresses otherness, difference, and openness to the unexpected and the
surprising. To some degree, this movement of thought represents a rediscovery
of the poetic dimension of life, a move to break out of all the ossified
objectivism of closed systems of thought, and to attend to the overflow of
experience which can never be neatly directed in ready-made conceptual
channels. This, I think, is where the
meaning of ‘wholespeak’ can be understood, as the language of the poet ‘in a
time of destitution’.
It seems we
are living at a time when the world is weary, not only of the torrent of
verbiage carried by the media, but also of technical prose intent on
calculation, control and analysis.
Here, the poet is a witness to what is outside all categories, to the
light eternal, ultimate mystery, the silence out of which our words arise, and
to which they finally yield. The poet
attends to the uncanny otherness of reality, and of the universe that has
brought us forth to stand in awe and thanksgiving within it. The poet attends, not to abstractions, but
to the concreteness of ‘be-ing’, to the is-ness and the this-ness
of what is given, enfolding us in wonder and inviting us to see things
differently. Poets, witnesses to what
is culturally inaccessible, go against the grain of our routine perceptions and
language, to makes us see things as if for the first time. The meanest flower can often give rise to
thoughts that lie too deep for tears, as Wordsworth would have it. The poem
works by suggestion, as its metaphors entice the mind to be open and receptive
to what can be spoken only by indirection.
The art of poetry plays at those limits where presence fades to absence,
where life, though shadowed by death, moves through transitions and
transformations to the outskirts of any familiar place, so to touch the borders
of another land.[xvi]
George
Steiner, in his stimulating book, Real Presences, states his
unfashionable thesis,
… any coherent understanding of what
language is or how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity
of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling, is, in the final analysis,
underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.[xvii]
After a
breathtaking meditation of the meaning of arts, above all, of music and
literature, he concludes that we are living in the secular equivalent of Holy
Saturday.
There is one particular day in
Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make
report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which
Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. That is to say that he knows of the injustice,
of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending,
which so largely make up the not only the historical dimension of the human
condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives… We know also about
Sunday. To the Christian, that day
signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond
comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered
death. If we are non-Christians or
non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of liberation
from inhumanity and servitude… the lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of
hope.[xviii]
He goes on to
say that ‘ours is a long day’s journey of the Saturday’. He concedes, given the horror of the Friday
when all that is best is defeated, that even the greatest art and the greatest
poetry are almost helpless. For that
Sunday when all that is best will be vindicated is not yet evident. But the
arts are most fittingly located on the second Holy day, the Saturday, a day of
pain and hope. For the arts, and all
great poetry, ‘have risen out of the immensity of waiting that is man’. ‘Without them’, he asks, ‘how could we be
patient?’.[xix]
I have been briefly
indicating how, in effect, poetry and the arts generally anticipate the faith,
hope and love we need. Let us look at
this from a theological angle, focusing on how the Word, incarnate in the life,
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, looks to its expression in poetry. Karl Rahner, in a lecture given to
educators, has left us a modest but profound reflection.[xx]
He asks, how does the Word of God prepare us for faith? He realises that grace precedes the
explicit, preached word, and works through the whole of human existence, above
all, in commitments to true humanism.
If we are to be believers there is a first requirement: openness to the
word through which the silent mystery is present in the Gospel. It means that we must permit ourselves be
addressed. After all, we might add, the
first words of the Word in the Gospel of John are a question. Jesus turned to the would-be disciples
following him, and asked, ‘What are you looking for?” (Jn 1:38). The Word addresses us. It comes by way of annunciation. To ready for that word one must be come into
the unutterable silence out of which it is spoken. We need practice in hearkening to the words of silence and
mystery. The limitless mystery of God
lays hold of us in a word. As Rahner
puts it,
If God’s incomprehensibility
does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his super-luminous
darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of homely,
close-hugged truths into the strangeness of the night that is our real home, we
have misunderstood… the words of Christianity.[xxi]
The word we wait
on is a word spoken to the heart of our human existence. The saving Word is addressed not immediately
to feeling or intelligence or moral decision, but to the unified totality of
human existence, symbolised by the heart. Rahner implies that the Word inspires poetry to teach us to have
a heart, as if to ask, how can we love God with our whole heart if the heart
has never learnt to be touched, broken, and healed. The Word works through human poetry in order that, like him, we
will have a ‘sacred heart’.
Thus, poetry
readies us to hear the reconciling Word, calling us into unity before the
all-surpassing mystery for which we were made.
And yet it is incarnate.
Our faith does not live in total silence. The mystery has come to us in
human words. However fragile they might
be, they are still the bearers of infinite.
Rahner speaks of the ‘The burning bush of the human word’.[xxii] I understand him as suggesting that poetry
pertains to the radiance of the incarnation, as, in its different moods and
styles, it words the Word in the stuttering, whispering, frail flesh of our
speaking existence. In this way, the
mystery of the incarnation is served by ‘a medium that excels in small glories
of particularity’.[xxiii] Hence, that great theologian would insist,
that a prerequisite to the full hearing of the revealed Word is a hearing the
‘the seminal poetry of eternal existence’ as it resonates through human
experience. He makes a strong – perhaps
a baffling statement to some:
the poetic word and the poetic
ear are so much part of the human that if this essential power were really lost
to the heart, man could no longer hear the word of God in the word of man. In its inmost essence, the poetic is a
prerequisite for Christianity.[xxiv]
He evidently
felt he was being a bit carried away saying that, because he went on to ask
about the non-poetic, those who feel tone-deaf to the arts of language. Well,
God’s gift can overcome that in the given instance, so as to inspire in
believers the requisite sensitivities.
Still, he insists, poetry is good training for faith and its
development. It takes us into the
radical questions of human life, beyond the deluge of printed and electronic
gossip filling so much of our waking hours.
To the mind of the great German theologian, Christianity, especially in
today’s culture, must defend poetry; for, since both Word of God and the poetic
word both cultivate the experience and expression of the mystery that is
unutterably intimate to us; indeed, Christian faith and poetry ‘live and die
together’.[xxv]
I would hope
they would live increasingly together.
‘There is nothing more real than true poetry’. How is this? I would
suggest, because of its power to refresh our experience of the particular, its
capacity to open the mind to insights that elude our routine relationship with
people, places, things and the universe itself; its ability to make us open and
welcoming to latent evidences of reality; its ability to bring us into a sudden
familiarity with the uncanny given-ness of existence; its intimations of the
transcendent truth, the goodness and beauty in which we all participate. And ‘there is nothing more poetic than the
theology of the Word of God? Any answer
must respect the communication of the divine Poet in uttering such a Word, and,
as we have seen, the manner in which that Word calls us into a listening and
responsive existence.
Les
Murray, reflecting on his experience of compiling his anthology of Australian
religious verse, makes a series of arresting observations. He is struck by the fact that much of the
decent religious poetry in this country dated from the period since Word War
II. He finds it hard to resist
speculating ‘that a decline in religious certainty has provoked an upsurge in
searching and questioning - and a decline in an odd sort of anti-religious
hectoring, which required a firm opponent to batter against’.[xxvi]
He senses the onset of a terrifying void now that the State has ceased being
able to appeal to any underlying religious ethic. He goes on to say,
It is generations since being
an agnostic involved any daring, and atheism tends to put one into coercive
rather than generous company. More seriously, whether we believe in the soul or
not, neither of these positions feeds it; we feel its hunger as a matter of
experience, and have nothing to feed on but our own selves. At bottom, we
cannot build a satisfying vision of life upon agnostic or atheist foundations,
because we can't get our dreams to believe in them.[xxvii]
A stentorian
judgment, indeed. But let us not forget
his more positive point. There is a
wonderful witness of poetry to call on.
In these musings, it has been my simple aim to underscore that witness
and that resource, while implicitly lamenting that our Christian communication,
our religious education, our theological exploration, call so little on what is
one of the greatest gifts our culture possesses. I think it is time for all of us to recover a sense of the poetry
of faith, and to make more inspired alliances with the faith, or at least, the
vision of poets.[xxviii]
Tony Kelly CSsR
Australian Catholic University
[i] Cuskelly,
‘Introduction’, vii-viii.
[ii] Paul Celan, Poems, M. Hamburger,
trans. (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980) 202-203. (EIN DRÖHNEN: es ist/ die Wahrheit
selbst/ unter die Menschen/ getreten,/ mitten ins/ Metapherngestöber”. .
[iii] Les Murray, ‘An
Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, in Les Murray, ed., Anthology of Australian
Religious Poetry (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1986) 100.
[iv] Kevin Hart, ‘The
Stone’s Prayer’, in Kevin Hart, ed., The Oxford Book of Australian Religious
Verse (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 89.
[v] Kevin Hart,
‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse,
xxii. See also his ‘Australian Religious
Poetry’, Literature and Theology 10/3, September 1996, 261-272.
[vi] Judith Wright,
‘The Forest’, in Les Murray, ed., Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry,
221.
[vii] Francis Webb,
‘Five Days Old’, in Les Murray, ed., Anthology…, 151.
[viii] James McAuley,
‘Credo’, in Les Murray, ed., Anthology…, 180.
[ix]
For a systematic approach to the question, see J.P. Manigne, Pour Une
Poétique de la Foi. Essai sur le mystère symbolique (Paris: Cerf, 1969).
[x] For the more
ambitious, I recommend Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and
Poetry (London: Harvill Press, 1954).
[xi] David Malouf, The
Great World (London: Chatto and Windus,1990) 283-284.
[xii] From
A.D.Hope's ‘Invocation’, Selected
Poems, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1970) 51.
[xiii] Martin
Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought, Albert Hofstadter, trans., (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971) 89-142.
[xiv] Heidegger, Poetry,
Language and Thought, 211-229.
[xv] Les Murray,
‘Embodiment and Incarnation’, in A Working Forest. Selected Prose (Sydney: Duffy and Snellgrove, 1997) 319-322.
[xvi]
On this point, and in reference to theology, see Andrew Rumsie, ‘Through
Poetry: Particularity and the Call to Attention’, in Jeremy Begbie, ed., Beholding
the Glory. Incarnation through the Arts
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000) 47-63.
[xvii] George Steiner, Real
Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 3.
[xviii] Steiner, Real
Presences, 232.
[xix] Steiner, Real
Presences, 232.
[xx]
Karl Rahner, ‘Poetry and the Christian’, Theological Investigations IV
(Baltimore: Helicon, 1966) 357-367.
[xxi] Rahner, ‘Poetry
and the Christian’, 359.
[xxii] Rahner, ‘Poetry
and the Christian’, 362.
[xxiii] Rumsie, ‘Through
Poetry: Particularity and the Call to Attention’, 51.
[xxiv] Rahner, ‘Poetry
and the Christian’, 363.
[xxv] Rahner, ‘Poetry
and the Christian’, 364.
[xxvi] Murray, ‘Embodiment
and Incarnation’, 311-312.
[xxvii] Murray,
‘Embodiment and Incarnation’, 312.
[xxviii]
A good example of research into the work of one of eminent poets is Colette
Rayment, ‘The Shapeliness of Shekinah’: Structural Unity in the Thought of
Peter Steele (University of Sydney Ph D Thesis: Faculty of Arts, 1997)
Publication planned.
