The Poet's Path Home
On the poetry of the Church & beauty's trail back into tradition
When I neared the final semester of my English literature studies, I became deeply unsettled by a perceived incongruence between my Christian faith and a love for beauty. I had always been a lover of the written word, but I felt this interest was imprudent compared to a myriad of others ways a Christian might spend their time. I could not reconcile that a reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass might be more spiritually edifying than the stack of recently released Christian nonfiction books on my shelf—although I was, in truth, becoming more convinced of this fact.
I couldn’t help but be wooed by the flowery musings of the Henry David Thoreau who lived for beauty, the precise cadence of Christopher Marlow flitting between spiritual realms in Dr. Faustus, and Mary Shelley’s keen understanding of man’s labors of vanity in Frankenstein. I was often asked by friends and family if I was experiencing any ill treatment at my liberal arts college because of my Christian faith. I had a hard time convincing most people that I was actually becoming a better, more well-rounded Christian because of my time studying old literature under atheistic professors.
Somewhere along the way of my degree, I reconnected with a love for writing poetry. I wrote a good deal of overly-sentimental and despairing poetry in high school (as we all do, surely), but returning to this form in a classroom context widened my imaginings for what stanzas could hold. A poem could be as lyrical and untouchable as Beowulf when performed aloud in the original Old English by my professor, or as comforting and saturated as Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up.” Poetry was past and present, structured and loose, concrete and abstract.
I have not stopped writing poetry since those formative days, although it was a long journey to understand how this affection might intersect with my Christian faith. In hindsight, the connection is obvious and cannot be argued with. But I had grown up with an overly-reasoned-with understanding of church and Christ, immersed in the idea that I need only to have the right thoughts about God in order to know Him.
As my love for poetry grew after graduation, I became acquainted with an insatiable spiritual thirst. I could no longer be soothed by simplistic ideations of the gospel; I was desperate for gaudy beauty that did not hang from the blank walls of minimalist modernity. How could our modern American church services be more void of beauty than age-old forests, Baroque artwork, and ancient Greek epics?
I became even more disoriented by the modern church’s erratic acknowledgement of ecclesial heritage and ritual. It seemed to carry on with performing certain symbolisms of the ancient church, but I had no clue as to what these symbols actually symbolized. I had some vague notions that bread and wine were to be holy substances, but what of the stale cracker and grape juice sealed within a plastic, disposable cup?
Christianity is rich with poetic heirlooms. Christ spoke in parables, Adam’s first words were an enraptured song, and the Bible is comprised primarily of poetic literature—I clung to these relics. And yet within church spaces I knew nothing of pregnant imagery, only of peculiar symbols reduced to mere sentiment.
One of the key identifiers of a well-written poem is whether it is merely describing something, or if it is its own entity. Or, more simply put: does the poem refer to something, or is it something?
The modern church seems to settle for a rhetoric of referral, where images and symbols are two-dimensional as they only are meant to remind us of some untouchable truth. But as Joshua Gibbs articulates in Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity1, this is ought not to be so:
For medieval Christians, meaning was a cause that brough a thing into being, and so the symbol and the symbolized thing could not be separated. When a man ate a certain food, he ingested the meaning of that food in the same way that he ingested the nutrients of the food… The ex opere operato2 view of the Eucharist was not some lonely theological fact. Rather, Christians held an ex opere operato view of the entire cosmos. Every conceivable object was the sacrament itself.3
It is within the theology of the sacrament that I, at last, understood the poet’s place within the Church as inseparable. My husband and I recently made the choice to become Anglican, where we have beheld the integral beauty that God has endowed the Church with. Our universal Church history is brimming with poetics to be savored from the breadth of sacrament, architecture, and liturgy to the details of fabrics and melodies.
Beauty is far from mere lavishness, it is the very nature of God. Beauty begets itself, as God the Father begets His beloved Son. To omit this from our understanding of the Church and our God is to omit a component of His very self. We suffer malnourishment if we conceive of beauty as disposable. The Church has understood and protected this for centuries—if we do not value beauty, we must ask ourselves how this might bleed into our assumptions of God.
I am a poet and a pilgrim that, for many years, could do nothing but dutifully follow a trail of divine beauty. My fingertips adored the softness of flower petals, my eyes entranced by spectral sunlight dappling their folds. I would have never anticipated that, one day, I would look up from this path and behold the golden domes of the Church, gleaming in light unfiltered. As I run my fingers over the engraved mahogany doors and catch a whiff of incense from within, my breath catches.
— Might our Lord be a poet too?
Although this has been a three-year personal journey, I found my experience satisfactorily contended for in my recent reading of this book. Gibbs does a marvelous job of assessing the our modern appetites and fixation on the future by redirecting us towards the past. His argument has colossal connotations, of which I only scratch the surface of in this brief article.
A Latin expression meaning “by the work worked.”
Page 253.
Oh, I think He definitely is a poet.
This feels so similar to my spiritual journey, so this was so encouraging to read. I'm inspired to let my love for beauty continue to draw me into my own, unique expression through my writing. Thank you for sharing your heart as always!