I'd like to share a poem by Gregory Orr that I've memorized and have thus been carrying around with me for some time now. I'm not sure the order of the lines is the same as that found in the book, but you will no doubt get the point.
To learn by heart is to learn by hurt--grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue.
Song you sing, poem you are
Finger moving precise as a phonograph needle along the groove of scar.
These days I am a little hesitant and annoyed when it comes to relating everything to the Christian life. I'm not saying people shouldn't do it--see my friend Matt Milstead's daily notes on Facebook on learning Kung Fu and its relationship for him with God in Christ for someone doing it well--I'm just saying I don't think it has to be that way, and that often we can miss the beauty of nature or the art object or whatever the thing may be when we attempt to take something already clothed in God's wonder and beauty and truth and run it through the theological blender in an attempt to make it evangelical when it's simply not meant to be evangelical. I do not know what is meant to be evangelical, and I do not know if some things some days are meant to be evangelical and on other days are not. As of now, I am no preacher and I do not work in a church vocationally, though I do care about what we do as the body of Christ operating in this world. What I do know is that God delights in beauty and truth, and that this is evident in how much creation alone prods us toward the questions of faith and origin, right and wrong, and a host of other things.
All that to say, Gregory Orr's poem is hopeful to me in that if grief can and does inscribe its wisdom into our everything, then surely other things must do so as well. If grief contains wisdom, it goes without saying for me--a Christian--scripture must also do something when I interact with it. I do agree with Orr that grief is indeed full of great wisdom, and I believe my aforementioned friend Matt Milstead would tell you that without the grief, pain, and hardship he has endured he would not be half the person of faith that he is today. And believe me, he should know the wisdom that grief brings. There is little I have observed in this world more heartbreaking than watching Matt rise in the near-dark of our dorm room, slowly easing himself over the bed and shuffling to the bathroom to get ready for another day of hardship in living with Cerebral Palsy. Seeing Matt's hardship, the grief I've observed is wisdom enough in itself, and I cannot fathom what it must be like to operate under such circumstances. Grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue. My hope and my prayer today is that as I read Matthew 6:26-27 ("Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?") I will take Christ's words at face value, let them inscribe their wisdom into the (hopefully) soft tissue of my heart. I don't care how trite it sounds. That is all that I need. I do not think this was Gregory Orr's intention when writing this poem: to have me, a Christian, glean some additional meaning from it that simply did not originate with his work. But I know that his poem is true, and because it is true, he has encountered my God.
To learn by heart is to learn by hurt--grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue.
Song you sing, poem you are
Finger moving precise as a phonograph needle along the groove of scar.
These days I am a little hesitant and annoyed when it comes to relating everything to the Christian life. I'm not saying people shouldn't do it--see my friend Matt Milstead's daily notes on Facebook on learning Kung Fu and its relationship for him with God in Christ for someone doing it well--I'm just saying I don't think it has to be that way, and that often we can miss the beauty of nature or the art object or whatever the thing may be when we attempt to take something already clothed in God's wonder and beauty and truth and run it through the theological blender in an attempt to make it evangelical when it's simply not meant to be evangelical. I do not know what is meant to be evangelical, and I do not know if some things some days are meant to be evangelical and on other days are not. As of now, I am no preacher and I do not work in a church vocationally, though I do care about what we do as the body of Christ operating in this world. What I do know is that God delights in beauty and truth, and that this is evident in how much creation alone prods us toward the questions of faith and origin, right and wrong, and a host of other things.
All that to say, Gregory Orr's poem is hopeful to me in that if grief can and does inscribe its wisdom into our everything, then surely other things must do so as well. If grief contains wisdom, it goes without saying for me--a Christian--scripture must also do something when I interact with it. I do agree with Orr that grief is indeed full of great wisdom, and I believe my aforementioned friend Matt Milstead would tell you that without the grief, pain, and hardship he has endured he would not be half the person of faith that he is today. And believe me, he should know the wisdom that grief brings. There is little I have observed in this world more heartbreaking than watching Matt rise in the near-dark of our dorm room, slowly easing himself over the bed and shuffling to the bathroom to get ready for another day of hardship in living with Cerebral Palsy. Seeing Matt's hardship, the grief I've observed is wisdom enough in itself, and I cannot fathom what it must be like to operate under such circumstances. Grief inscribing its wisdom into the soft tissue. My hope and my prayer today is that as I read Matthew 6:26-27 ("Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?") I will take Christ's words at face value, let them inscribe their wisdom into the (hopefully) soft tissue of my heart. I don't care how trite it sounds. That is all that I need. I do not think this was Gregory Orr's intention when writing this poem: to have me, a Christian, glean some additional meaning from it that simply did not originate with his work. But I know that his poem is true, and because it is true, he has encountered my God.
posted by Ellis at 8:32 AM
3 Comments:
I'm a little confused. What do you mean "make it evangelical"?
I mean, basically, make some sort of Christian lesson out of it, to relate beauty, art, experience, etc. to something Christian or Biblical because we feel we have to as Christians. As if our lives alone are not a product of our faith, as if our perspective on the page isn't innately that of a believer because we do operate as people of faith. Does that make sense?
I'm saying I don't like doing that these days, though I have sort of done it with Orr's poem, while still acknowledging that he did not intend for me to do so. I don't want to take Orr's work, which is not meant to taken in terms of Christianity, and Christianize it. He's been open in interviews about his religious disbelief. But as a believer, I see his work through my perspective and it still speaks to me. I agree with him that grief contains great wisdom--maybe it's the Christian idea of the refiner's fire--but I also believe that there is great wisdom in the experience of scripture among other things. I have to if I call myself a person of Christian faith. And perhaps for me it's not the grief that contains the wisdom, but delivering wisdom through the experience of grief. I'm getting off the subject I do believe.
I think my friend Jimmy said it best. Christ was a carpenter, but he didn't carve Bible verses into the tables that he built--that's what I mean by make it evangelical. To somehow twist an experience, an art object, anything in such a way that it is somehow Christianized. For another example, I suppose I mean Christian fiction. I won't make some sweeping statement that all of it is bad, but a lot of it is simply cheesy formula fiction with Bible verses thrown in, and doesn't have near the religious impact as say something like the writings of Augustine, Dante's inferno, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry, or for contemporary literature Annie Dillard. I hope I've shed some sort of light on this topic.
typo--that's supposed to say "God delivering wisdom through the experience of grief."
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