This, of course, is precisely why poetic expressions of faith and theology are so suited to the task. The One of whom we speak and to whom we speak and listen is not flat, not resolvable, and is irreducible. Therefore, we cannot speak of God in such a way that misleads us into assuming we have captured and controlled God, and so we are finished with God. Poetry, much like humor, is never served well by being explained, but only by being encountered and experienced and confronted by and enjoyed. The same could be said of God.
The word “mystery” is so useful here because it leads us to encounter the holy as something knowable but never fully known or explained. Mystery is something to be enjoyed and experienced, but not explained, at least not in any final, dogmatic way. It is the truth of things that cannot be approached directly, but only sideways, tangentially, with peripheral vision at best.
These poems are, I hope, a way of enjoying the mystery and wrestling with it a bit, and it with us. It is not an attempt to use reason to capture God, but to move beyond reason as the primary category of truth. It is poetry without rhyme or reason, and therefore, maybe in the smallest and most humbling of ways, worthy of its subject.
A note on names for liturgical days: For Sundays outside of particular seasons like Advent or Lent, I am using the designations found in Evangelical Lutheran Worship. These days are called, for example, “Lectionary 23 A,” and correspond to the “Ordinary” days as named in the Roman Catholic and other lectionaries. The number scheme corresponds to the “Proper” designation by subtracting five. For example, “Lectionary 23 A” corresponds to “Proper 18 A.”
Hope Is a Blue Note
Advent 1 A
Isaiah 2:1–5
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD! (Isa 2:5)
Hope is a blue note on a jazz-worn clarinet
a chromatic piano chord dissonant and handsome
a minor modal song sung diaphragmatically strong
a silence between hymn and homiletic
puzzling it holds the day in a miter-cornered frame
setting off the eyes of the hopeful like sapphires
a run-on sentence waiting
for some punctuation to signify an end or a pause
or an unknowing or an exclamation of what is yet to come
that is better or more beautiful or at least makes what is now
worth the long, melodic, sorrowful, endless wait
This Advent
Advent 2 A
Isaiah 11:1–10
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Isa 11:1)
You light candles and you wait,
not like waiting at the bus stop
with the rain soaking your day
and the time passing like tree growth.
You light candles and you wait,
not like standing in line at the grocery store
with your parsley dripping on your shoe
and the woman in front of you
writing a check like a novel.
You light candles
as you sings songs of joy in minor keys,
and you wait
like a man sitting at the restaurant table
with the calla lilies in hand
and the diamond ring inside
the death-by-chocolate dessert,
looking every direction every moment
to see his beloved appear.
You wait like this
even without anyone coming
to take your flowers,
year after year
war after war
death after death,
lighting candles one by one.
Quiet Dismissal
Advent 4 A
Matthew 1:18–25
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. (Matt 1:18–19)
Quiet dismissal is what we do to you
when you are close,
because you flush our faces red
with your pregnant unexpectedness,
invading our strategies and medicaments,
ruining our safe careers and nest-egg certainties.
We would have you sent off Joseph-like
to a small town halfway house clapboard grey
where you can birth your ways behind windows
inaudible, isolated, and irrelevant,
and we can move on to another love and another.
So what singing angel will come to us in reverie
to save us from ourselves and our best intentions,
head off our ego-preserving diplomacies,
and gospel us with the message we dread
and always in need of in our sterile barrenness?
Sympathy for the Emperor at Christmastime
Nativity of Our Lord / Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1–20
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. (Luke 2:1–3)
The outbreak of newness was contagious as a song
containment was unmanageable
even with the emperor’s stranglehold of peace
The first case was reported in a barn where
people and domesticated animals share germs
and misery and hunger and cold and labor
From there it was thought to spread to a small band
of sheep herders and a rustic village pub where
they drank pints and harmonized, that may have been where
the traveler was infected with the joy virus
and spread it upstate to an unsuspecting pessimist