Poetry and the Soul

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places….  Yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy.

                                                            Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, 58

            I just returned from the third and final of a series of “Soul Leaders” retreats.  These retreats were intended to provide space for the exploration of our souls as ordained or licensed leaders within the United Methodist Church in Minnesota.  We used poetry, music and art in circles of trust to welcome our shy souls, in methods based-in and inspired by Parker Palmer.

            For some, poetry is, at best, a tolerable method for exploring the soul.  For me, the opportunity to use poetry to explore my hopes, dreams, fears, longings and relationship to God is a delight.  I rarely leave a book of poems without having had my soul enlarged a bit.

            One of the delights of this Soul Leaders experience for me was that prior to each retreat some poetry was working on me already.  I brought with me some poetry that had been finding its way into my life in the days and weeks just prior to each retreat.

            In the winter, there were these lines from Rilke that I took with me:

                        How we squander our hours of pain,

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end.  Though they are really

seasons of us, our winter-

enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

                        (an early version of the Tenth Duino Elegy, tr. Stephen Mitchell)

            When we met in September, it was not long after Seamus Heaney died, and I was re-reading some of his work, and when I do that I often find something I had previously overlooked.  This time it was his poem “The Rain Stick” (The Spirit Level).  The lines that held me, in particular were these:

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop.  Listen now again.

At that retreat we did a lot of drumming

            This week, I carried with me Wallace Stevens.  I first encountered Stevens’ poetry while working on my doctoral dissertation.  My dissertation had nothing to do with poetry, but exercising late at night, I watched the PBS Voices and Visions series on poetry.  Wallace Stevens was one of the poets featured.  Stevens poetry can be challenging, but I find him worth the struggle.  Both his poems and his reflection on poetry are meaningful.

            I don’t know what drew me back to Stevens last week, just before the retreat, but something did.  Here are a couple of his reflections on poetry:

It is life that we are trying to get at in poetry.  Opus Posthumous, 185

One reads poetry with one’s nerves.  Opus Posthumous, 189

Things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions (poems) very often have meanings that differ in nature from the meanings of things that have their origin in reason.  They have imaginative or emotional meanings….  In short, things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain.  It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them.                                                             Opus Posthumous, 249

This latter helps me understand not only the potential richness of poetry, but also the potential richness of Scriptures which are often poetic.

            The Stevens poem that has been sticking with me most the past few days is a late poem, “July Mountain” (Opus Posthumous, 140).  It contains these lines that have been particularly moving within me:

We live in a constellation

Of patches and of pitches

Thinkers without final thoughts

In an always incipient cosmos

The sense of openness and adventure and creativity in these lines captures something important to me, to my soul, to my relationship with God.

            I am grateful for the poetry which opens my soul.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

A Prayer

             Earlier this month some words came together for me and they ended up forming a prayer that I share here.

            May my soul:

·        Be tender, gentle, vulnerable, yet not easily crushed

·        Be strong, yet not overbearing

·        Be courageous, yet not foolish

·        Be joyful, yet woven with the immense sadness of the world

·        Be attentive to beauty, yet seeing the hurt, pain and ugliness in the world

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Reflections on Being a United Methodist Elder

I was asked to be part of a panel for our Minnesota United Methodist Conference Board of Ordained Ministry, and to reflect on the unique ministry of an ordained elder. These were my reflections:

In a speech in South Africa in 1966, Robert Kennedy said that there is an ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Textual evidence has thus far failed to find a Chinese source for this curse, but there is something right about it, regardless of its origin.

We live in interesting times.  The church is living in interesting times.  Mainline or old-line denominations have lost their social position.  Some argue that this is like New Testament times, but I think that analogy breaks down quickly.  There may be fewer people in our pews and we may have lost some of our social location, but Christianity, in some form, is embedded in powerful places in our culture.  Hobby Lobby, which recently opened a store in Duluth, is suing the federal government arguing that providing contraceptive health coverage for female employees violates the Christian values of the store and its owner.  Those same Christian values greeted a Jewish shopper, who, when asking about why Hobby Lobby would not stock any Chanukah items was told: "Because Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he's a Christian, and those are his values."  We live in interesting times as a church.

It is also an interesting time to be an elder in The United Methodist Church.  When I was ordained an elder in 1986, two years after I was ordained a deacon, and I still proudly display both ordination certificates, the language of our Discipline discussed ordination as “the specialized ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Order.”  Ordination was “fulfilled in the ministry of Word, Sacrament, and Order.”

The 2012 Book of Discipline has expanded the language of ordination.  Ordination is fulfilled in leadership of the people of God through ministries of Service, Word, Sacrament, Order, Compassion, and Justice (303).  Deacons are no longer “ministers who have progressed sufficiently in their preparation for the ministry to be received by an Annual Conference as either probationary members or associate members.”  Deacons are now “ordained by a bishop to a lifetime ministry of Word, Service, Compassion, and Justice” (328).  Elders “are ordained to a lifetime ministry of Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service” (332).

In distinction from Deacons, then, the unique ministry of the Elder could be located in Sacraments and Order.  What makes things even more interesting is that there are persons licensed to perform the same duties in local church settings as do those ordained Elders who are also appointed as pastors.  Licensed persons are licensed “to perform all the duties of a pastor” (313).  What is left of the unique ministry of the Elder?

Posing this question in this way carries with it some baggage.  As The United Methodist Church has added the order of Deacons, as the prevalence and power of licensed local pastors has increased, Elders have often been seen as trying to hold on to some of their power and privilege – guaranteed appointment, voting rights, sacramental authority.  How do we talk about the unique ministry of the Elder while avoiding maintenance of the status quo which has, at times, privileged Elders?  Can we get at uniqueness without arguing for privileges which seem unfair and unwarranted?

I am currently serving on the denominational Study of Ministry Commission. In the Study of Ministry Commission of the previous quadrennium the group concluded: The commission observes a lack of consistency in how the orders and roles in ministry are understood and supported across the church.  They suggested the following understanding as a way forward:

·        The elder connects the church and the denomination, chiefly through Order.

·        The deacon connects the church and the world, chiefly through Service.

·        The local pastor connects the church and the individual, chiefly through Proclamation.

As an Elder, I am not necessarily jazzed up by this understanding of the unique ministries of each order, particularly in a post-denominational age.  I get more excited about Word, Sacrament, Service, Compassion, and Justice.  I spend a lot of time trying to connect church with persons.  Yet the language that is unique to Elders is that we are “to order the life of the Church for service in mission and ministry” (332).  There is something potentially important there in these confusing, interesting, and dare I say, disordered times.

            Perhaps the unique ministry of the Elder in our time is by the Spirit and power and grace of God, to try and make our current disorder the creative chaos out of which a new order might be born.  There is something in that for all of us – lay persons, Deacons, licensed pastors – there is enough disorder to go around.  Perhaps Elders, though, need to muster the courage to enter our current disorder and make it the creative chaos out of which a new order might be born, and do this systemically.  Perhaps we are uniquely positioned to try and name the challenges, adaptive and technical, that face us, and to do so marshaling our best theological and other intellectual resources.  Perhaps we are uniquely called to flow from the balcony to the dance floor and back again.  Perhaps we are uniquely invited to monitor the temperature as change takes place. 

If we take these as our unique tasks, we do so knowing that many find in us a great deal of disorder.  The Call To Action Operational Assessment tells us “a large portion of the Church’s clergy has performance effectiveness issues” (25), and we are a large portion of the Church’s clergy.  Recently, a United Methodist economist, in a presentation to the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry arguing for the vital need for younger clergy, quoted an unnamed retired United Methodist bishop who told him, “We have not been recruiting the brightest and the best.”  I have been around long enough to hope that this bishop was referring to a time after 1986.  We live in interesting times.

            Perhaps the unique ministry of the Elder is to feel some of the pain of our disorder and yet, with courage granted by the Spirit, to lead us all, making the full use of all the gifts of all God’s people, so that disorder may become the creative chaos out of which new order can be born.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Democracy

The best I can recall, I first encountered Ernest Becker when he was mentioned in my “Abnormal Psychology” class in college. The teacher, a medical school professor who was teaching this undergraduate course, mentioned Becker’s name when we were discussing existential psychotherapy. He had a great respect for Becker’s work The Denial of Death. I think the book may make a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall.
In the coming years I read an interview Sam Keen had done with Ernest Becker following the publication of The Denial of Death and following Becker’s cancer diagnosis. That interview, published in a volume called Voices and Visions, a collection of interviews Keen did for Psychology Today, was fascinating. Keen pressed him on why he had so come to emphasize the tragic dimensions of human existence in his work. Becker took well Keen’s observation about overemphasis, and then went on to say, “If I stress the terror, it is only because I am talking to cheerful robots.”
As with too many authors I would like to explore, it took me years to return to Becker more fully. It took me until 2009 to read The Denial of Death. It is an experience I cherish. Becker writes with incredible insight, and with a genuine talent for the turn of a phrase. Wrestling with this work has deepened my own thinking immeasurably, and contributed something to the enlargement of my soul.
Fortunately for me, being the book magnet that I am, I had over the years managed to collect a few other of Becker’s book, mostly used copies. Not long ago, I read the second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning. Becker, throughout his work, wanted to combine insights from psychological, sociological, political and theological sources. Though not quite as rich and fecund as The Denial of Death, The Birth and Death of Meaning has a lot of wonderful moments, and the insights have lost little for being written over forty years ago.
In the face of the shutdown of our government, here are a few of Becker’s reflections on democracy.

Democracy needs adults more than anything (163).

So how are we doing? But if you just want to look at Washington and blame less-than-adult behavior on those we have elected, you miss the richness of Becker’s thought. True, our elected officials don’t always act like adults, but often we elect them because we have not exactly come into our own adulthood.

Becker argues that society teaches us lessons about what it means to be a success, a hero, and that we absorb such lessons at a very young age, in part, to ward off the anxiety that comes from being human, which means to “live in the teeth of paradoxes” (177). These lessons may not always be helpful. They often cut us off from seeing reality more fully and richly. When one becomes too rigid in adherence to cultural hero-systems you bring up people who are closed against the world, armored, brittle, afraid, people whose last resource would be easy adaptability to new choices and challenges (163). Is part of our political problem the deeper problem of too many of us being armored, brittle and afraid?

But democracy needs adults more than anything, especially adults who bring something new to the perception of the world, cut through accustomed categories, break down rigidities. We need open, free, and adaptable people precisely because we need unique perceptions of the real, new insights into it so as to disclose more of it (163).

All of this seems fresh and relevant to our world.

And Becker addresses me as a person of faith. Might faith help us develop into the kind of people more open to the world, more adaptable and free?

Religion, like any human aspiration, can also be automatic, reflexive, obsessive. Authoritarian religion is also an idol. (197)

Not terribly comforting, but true to life. Aren’t we seeing in some part of our political life today the mutual reinforcement of political and religious rigidity? Yet there is more. Forgive Becker’s lack of inclusive language here.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they seem. The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox, and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism, and narcissism, but with openness and trust. Religion itself is an ideal of strength and of potential for growth, of what man might become by assuming the burden of his life, as well as being partly relieved of it. (198)

Someday, I hope soon, the government will re-open. It will be business as usual, but business as usual isn’t getting us very far. Democracy needs adults.


With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Thinking About Truth

And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
Jesus, John 8:32

I have been thinking about this for a while, the nature of truth. A few weeks ago someone linked to Facebook a blog posting in which the writer, someone unknown to me, was arguing that one of the significant problems plaguing modern humanity is our loss of a sense of objective truth. His sentiments were echoed in today’s Duluth News Tribune where the pastor of a church writes about the twisting of words, mostly by “those on the left.” Here is how this pastor thinks truth has come to be defined: Truth: The view, opinion or position held by me or the group(s) with which I associate. Truth cannot be known as an objective reality even though I fully expect you to accept this definition of truth as objective reality.
So is the most significant issue in discussing the nature of truth a distinction between a notion of objective truth as against a notion that truth is subjective and thus always relative? Without denying that there is a discussion to be had here, I have been wondering if the more interesting and significant discussion about the nature of truth is about its richness.
So here are a couple of quotes which I find intriguing.

The sadomasochistic fantasy of truth… truth, that is, as something to which we are obliged to submit
Adam Phillips, “Introduction” to The Electrified Tightrope

To love God is to rejoice in the richness of truth, to enjoy the counterpoint of the absurd and nonsensical, to engage in the conflict of ideas and the history of human argument.
Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and Forms of Love, 300

To be sure there are some obvious and objective truths. If I leap from the tenth floor of a building, I will fall and the results will not be good. If I wake in the middle of the night and bang my toe on the bed as I head for the bathroom, it will hurt. These are truths to which we seem obliged to submit.
There are objective truths about our lives – when and where we were born, to whom we were born, where we attended school. We cannot change such things. Yet so much about our lives is richer in a way that the distinction between objective and subjective truth does not seem to capture. I experience something as beautiful. One might ask if it was beautiful in any objective way. The more interesting questions and truths about my experience may be what drew me to this object and how did my experience of it as beautiful change me. There are all kinds of ways we could discuss that, and many of those ways would contribute to understanding the truth of my experience. I would even argue that trying to understand my experience from multiple perspectives enriches my understanding. If I simply submit to one perspective, I may miss some of the richness of the truth of my experience.
I think we are more helped when we expand our vocabulary for truth, not limit our discussion to objective and subjective, objective and relative. There is a richness to the truth about our lives and our world that these terms fail to capture. That is not to say these terms are not part of the discussion of truth, only that they should not be the only ways we talk about truth.
I think there is a lot of truth to Williams’ statement that “to love God is to rejoice in the richness of truth.”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry… both for being itself and for being a help.
Seamus Heaney, Nobel Lecture, “Crediting Poetry”

Seamus Heaney died yesterday. I think it was sometime in 1996 when I first “met” him. I was driving along Minnesota 169, either between meetings or perhaps going to the hospital to visit a parishioner. Minnesota Public Radio was broadcasting the Guthrie Global Voices lecture from that year (1996) – and it was then I heard that magnificent voice. Heaney, who had been awarded the Noble Prize for Literature the previous year, used the Guthrie Lecture to read some of his poems and offer a few comments in between. To my delight the program was also being broadcast later that evening, 9 p.m., and I recorded as much of it as I could get on one-side of a ninety-minute cassette tape. He has been a companion in the car through the years, and one regret I have about newer vehicles is that they no longer have tape players. I can no longer listen to Heaney’s rich Irish voice coming from the tape player in the car.
That reading led me to Heaney’s books. Many of the poems he read at the Guthrie were being published that same year in his book The Spirit Level, and it remains one of my favorites. There one finds the poem dedicated to his brother and in praise of the virtue of “keeping going.” It is an underappreciated virtue in the complexity of our modern world. The book also has Heaney resurrecting the myth of the Irish saint, Kevin, who, while praying with his arm extended out the window of his small monastic cell, has a blackbird come and make a nest and lay eggs. The image of nurturing life feeds my pastoral imagination.
The Spirit Level contains poems with memorable lines:

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open (“Postscript”)

So walk on air against your better judgement (“The Gravel Walks”)

For Heaney, poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. (Crediting Poetry, 10)

One poem that particularly grabbed hold of me in the Guthrie reading was a chorus that Heaney had added to a Sophocles’ play he had translated. I could not find it in print at the time, so I transcribed it from his reading. While I have since found it in print, his reading of it that day was slightly different, for in the reading he repeated the chorus’ most famous line twice:

That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So Heaney’s voice has now gone silent, but not in my heart. In his poetry and voice, one believes that hope and history can rhyme (something I understand to be the work of God’s people in the world – working with the Spirit to help hope and history rhyme).
Thank you Mr. Heaney. Your poetry is a help, a help in keeping going, a help in moving me to walk on air against my better judgement. Perhaps if we all did that just a little more, hope and history could rhyme just a little more.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

Christian Communities

On Sunday July 21 I experienced three gatherings of Christian community. I preached and led worship at the church where I am the appointed pastor – First United Methodist Church. The sermon for the morning was in response to a question about myth and truth in the Bible. The sermon was entitled “Mything the Point” (click here). I am now in my ninth year as pastor here and have found this a wonderful Christian community. I appreciate being a part of the adventure of the journey of faith with this group of people. My experiences the rest of the day helped me reflect on some of the journey that has brought me to this place and this place in my life.
In the early afternoon Julie and I attended the funeral for Steve O’Neil, a St. Louis County Commissioner, who was also a person of deep Christian faith. I ran into Steve quite a bit over the years, though we were not close personal friends. His work for the hungry, the poor, the downtrodden, the homeless in our community, often working with communities of faith, made him a very special person. His service was a wonderful celebration of his life, and you could not leave the service without knowing that Steve’s concern for those on the margins of society was rooted in his Christian faith. For Steve, following Jesus had everything to do with caring for the poor, with compassion, with kindness, with reconciliation. There was a sense in which his service was an expression of that ecumenical Christian community that connects following Jesus with working for justice and peace in the world.
Following that service, Julie and I went to a reunion of a group called the Christian Fellowship Workers – often just known as the CFWs. The Christian Fellowship Workers was a Christian community that emerged out of the Jesus People movement here in Duluth. When I was 14, I found Jesus or Jesus found me in a profound way. I was part of a United Methodist Church, but in trying to figure out what it might mean to be a passionate follower of Jesus, I found myself as part of the Christian Fellowship Workers. I was part of this group from age 14 to age 17. While at the reunion, I saw a picture I had not seen in years, a group picture at the farm owned by the CFWs. I am in the middle of the picture. This Christian community was passionate about Jesus and the focus of the passion was having people come into a person relationship with Jesus. It was about salvation understood primarily in terms of one’s existential condition and one’s status in the afterlife. I don’t remember a lot of connection between being a follower of Jesus and caring for the poor and hungry, though there were folks on the margins who were part of this community.

Being at Steve O’Neil’s funeral and experiencing that Christian community, and then being at the CFW reunion and remembering that Christian community I thought about the variety of Christian community that has been a part of my journey of faith and that has helped make me the disciple of Jesus I am. I still believe in the importance of a relationship with Jesus, or with God through Jesus, that decisively shapes one’s existential self-understanding in such a way that one is “saved.” I also believe that this Jesus in whom we are saved moves us to care for the world, to work for justice and peace. This more comprehensive understanding of salvation is well-articulated by one of my theological teachers and mentors, Schubert Ogden: By “salvation” is properly meant, first of all and fundamentally, the redemptive activity of God whereby the whole of humankind, and thus each and every human being, notwithstanding the universal fact of sin, is accepted into God’s own everlasting life – the theological term for this divine activity being “grace.” And then, secondly, and in absolute dependence on God’s grace, salvation is the activity of a woman or man through which she or he accepts God’s acceptance – the theological term for this human activity being “faith” and, more exactly, “faith working through love,” a love that, as I like to say, incarnates itself as justice. (The Understanding of Christian Faith, 123).
And that makes me think about yet another Christian community that has had an impact on my journey of faith, the Christian community I experienced in seminary. There I discovered that a passionate Christian faith could also be a thoughtful Christian faith, one that deeply engaged the intellect. My first year in seminary, I tried growing a beard. I hope my intellectual development outpaced the growth of my facial hair.

A passionate, compassionate and thoughtful Christian faith – that is what I seek to grow and nurture in my life. That’s what I hope to help others develop and nurture as a pastor. I am grateful for the Christian communities that have been and continue to be part of this adventure.


With Faith and With Feathers,

David