There was a ritual I got to repeat with my daughter, every morning over the past summer. When she woke up, I would go into her room, scoop her up into my arms and ask, "Who is daddy's princess?" She'd wrap her arms around me, press her cheek into my shoulder, and answer, "I am," a smile in her voice.
There's just no way to explain what those moments meant to me -- I've tried. Every time I do, it feels like I'm standing in the entrance to some dark and unfamiliar room, groping for a light switch I'm sure must be there, but which always seems just out of reach.
There are experiences we have every day just like that. They are the core and color of our lives, yet they never seem to fit into the words we use to explain them.
The truths of those experiences can only be seen out of the corner of the eye, only brushed with our fingertips before they slide back into the shadows. We try to speak about them, but we are always left with the feeling that what we say isn't exactly what we mean.
...which is why one of my favorite things to teach is poetry.
Poetry has this unique ability to draw us up into those truths, to create in us the ability to experience them rather than rely on others to describe them. The most potent expressions of our deepest emotions -- of love and hope, of fear and disillusionment -- have all come down to us through poetry.
And, of course, the Bible is absolutely full of poetry...
...and not just the parts we'd expect -- Psalms, Lamentations, Songs of Solomon, etc. -- but all throughout the text. When the prophets declare the "Word of the Lord," they do so often almost exclusively in poetry. The New Testament authors make a consistent practice of quoting poetry in the form of ancient hymns and creeds. In fact, after spending ten long chapters explaining, in meticulous detail, the depth and ubiquity of human sinfulness and the overwhelming expanse of God's grace in response, even the Apostle Paul, like a mad-man chasing an ever-receding horizon, abandons all his logic and well-reasoned arguments and loses himself in a stunning flourish of soaring verse:
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
For who has known the mind of the Lord,
For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given a gift to him
Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever, Amen
The bible resounds with poetry. In fact, in the very first chapter of the very first book -- where God puts on full display the grandeur of his creation -- we find... poetry.
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Perhaps you've considered this before. Perhaps, nothing about what I've said so far seems all that controversial. Perhaps you're right -- at least, until we think about the way we read poetry. Consider, for example, the first stanza of Maya Angelou's poem Alone:
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Clearly, the water she drank wasn't thirsty. Clearly, she wasn't eating bread that was made of stone. Yet, how ridiculous would it be if we went around calling Ms. Angelou a liar as a result! Her words communicate truth -- that plain, material nourishment isn't enough, that water and bread alone, without human support or community, do not - no - cannot satisfy -- without requiring that we take those words literally.
It may seem unspectacular at first but, when we really think about it, that aspect of poetry actually forces us to reconsider the overlap between things that are factual and those that true.
Which brings us back to controversy.
Instinctively, we know that to be the case -- that poetry speaks figuratively rather than factually -- and we make allowances for it when we are reading the works of Keats, or Ms. Angelou. Yet, whenever anyone suggests that might also be a way we need to read portions of the bible? Watch out.
Just look at what happened to prominent Christian musician, Michael Gungor, recently.
The funny thing is, as Dr. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury (the leader of the entire Church of England), points out regarding the book of Genesis, for example:
"[F]or most of the history of Christianity, and I think this is fair enough, most of the history of Christianity there's been an awareness that a belief that everything depends on the creative act of God is quite compatible with a degree of uncertainty or latitude about how precisely that unfolds in creative time."
Even C.S. Lewis believed that some portions of scripture should be read this way. In Meditations on the Psalms, he agonizes over a particular passage where the Psalmist declares of the Edomites:
"Blessed is the one who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks!"
Listen, the point here is not that we have to read Genesis the way Michael Gungor or Dr. Williams do, or that we have to read the Psalms the way that C.S. Lewis does.
The point is that the scriptures are often so much more dynamic and alive than we want them to be.
We all, like the well-adjusted modern folks we are, prefer to read the bible as a compendium of facts to be learned, like a history or theology textbook -- but the problem is it simply refuses to be read this way. The scriptures, and the Spirit who inspired them -- just like the poetry of which they make such liberal use -- continually escape the tidy theological boxes we make for them and instead beckon us to experience the truths they convey, to taste and see that the One to whom they bear witness is good.
Yes, the way we read the bible has an influence on the way we understand our God and ourselves; but our relationship with that God, rather than being perfectly defined by them, explodes the seams of the very scriptures that inspire it.
True relationships are marked, not by lists of static - unchanging - knowledge of one another, but by struggle, by wrestling and reasoning with one another -- things which God, himself, invites.
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Can we be very clear about one thing? No one wanders from the faith because they fell down some slippery slope of scriptural misinterpretation.
The one who wanders away from Christ is the one who never knew him to begin with.
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So, if the scriptures speak to those deeper parts of human existence that defy our attempts at explanation, if God Himself invites us -- like Abraham -- to question and wrestle with him as we would in any other relationship of any value, if we readily admit that there are those who are quite capable of saying "Lord, Lord" but who have never really known him...
Isn't it time we stop devouring those who are at different points in their struggle than we are?
Isn't it time we stop condemning those who explain the inexplicable a little differently than we do?
Isn't it time we stop defining ourselves by our lists rather than our loves?
