Reflection by David for August 1, 2010

Let me begin this morning with a quote from Ellen Davis, a teacher at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. She wrote an article in the Christian Century magazine that I've mentioned before. It is called "Our Proper Place: the poetry of care and loss." She begins her article:

Likely no culture has been so ignorant and contemptuous of place as is contemporary industrialized society. We may not even qualify as a culture, since that word generally connotes a form of social organisation that connects people and places through time. By that criterion, industrialized society fails miserably. Its practices of blowing away mountains to extract coal or razing forests on a continental scale to grow animal feed reveal its essential characteristics: disregard for time and contemptuousness of place. Indeed, the global economy depends fundamentally on ignoring the particular character of places and violating their physical limits.
By contrast, one of the functions of poetry is to help us discover and keep our proper place in the world. By 'proper place' I mean not our various arbitrary social locations, but rather the place of the human species within the created order. Keeping one's place entails keeping in health the places that we physically occupy. ¹

As a closet poet, I found these words very powerful. After spending time in Banff National Park camping, poetry helps give shape to the sense of awe that one feels. There is a powerful sense of place in Banff and that draws people from all over the world. "The World is charged with grandeur of God..." as Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote, and indeed it is.

Who of us do not remember poems from our childhoods and the power of place that they evoke. What about:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.  ²

You can see the northern lights in your head and feel the cold.

I well remember reading another poem, one by Earle Birney called "David." It's a long poem about two friends who mountain climb together; David, the stronger of the two, falls to a ledge while saving his friend and then begs his friend to push him over the edge as he is damaged beyond repair. I yet still can't read that poem and not be moved to tears. I'm right there on that ledge. I'm right there in the mountains. I'm right there facing that ethical dilemma: should I push my friend over and end his misery?

I struggle with depression from time to time as some of you know; and one of the few things that has kept me going is poetry—writing my own and reading others. Sometimes, it is the psalms and sometimes other poem by other poets. I love to read Psalm 8, "What are humans that you should be mindful of them... yet you have made them little lower than the angels... O God, how exalted is your Name in all the world." Or Psalm 46, "Be still and know that I am God." Or even Psalm 23 in all its familiarity, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..." I've read over my father's poetry in his darkest days after his stroke. I've read poems by Mary Oliver, Hopkins, and many others. And I feel grounded. I feel God's presence. I feel part of a community of the living and the dead, a community that is full of love and encouragement.

Our psalm this morning is full of praise to God, "for God is gracious. God's steadfast love endures forever." I know that not everyone loves the psalms; there are some harsh words in the psalms and some difficult texts. But this idea of steadfast love is repeated over and over. God's presence is affirmed again and again. God's relentless pursuit of justice is proclaimed strongly and powerfully.

And if, as Ellen Davis affirms in her article, that industrialized society is bereft of a sense of God, culture and place, we need poetry to ground us and root us in community. We need the poetry of the likes of Julia Esquival to proclaim God's cry for justice. We need poetry to evoke new images within us of something more than what we see around us. We need poetry to give us a new vision for a new future. If some of the values of industrialized society are built on a sense of scarcity, poetry opens us to a fundamental value of God's Commonwealth, and that is abundance. The parable—which one might argue is a form of poetry—that Jesus spoke about, the one about building bigger barns, which I'll only mention in passing, is all about the problems of scarcity and where it leads... to greediness and to miserliness. But abundance leads us into God's steadfast love; it leads us out of ourselves, out of our industrialized, oil glutted ways to ways that enhance and promote life, justice and freedom for all. Poetry gives us a sense of abundance, a sense that there is enough!

And so, I leave you with one of my poems:

God's steadfast love endures forever!
So the psalmist says.
"Forever?" I wonder.
Forever!
Love bubbling over rocks on the way to the oceans;
Love caressing the leaves and the boughs of the trees;
Love gathering in dark thunderheads across the sky;
Love swooping in the eagle's dive to touch the water;
Love in the spider's intricately woven web.
Love in the touch of a lover, a mother, a friend.
Here and now, in this place,
in the midst of this gathered people,
in the elemental things of the earth,
and in the soaring of our spirits
is God's steadfast love.
Love on, O Spirit, love.

Amen.

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¹  Ellen F. David, "Our proper place: The poetry of care and loss," The Christian Century, June 15, 2010, page 28.
²  Robert Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee."