God Is Still Speaking in the Words of Poets Self Portrait, by David Whyte

Transcription

1 Rev. Kathleen McShane August God Is Still Speaking in the Words of Poets Self Portrait, by David Whyte It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. I love that poem. In the years since I first heard it, its words have led me down winding paths and dropped me off someplace different than where I started. It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods the poem begins. As I read those words I wonder, Who is this poet? What does he believe, if he is not concerned with this most central truth? But he is not uninterested in important things: I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others and I want to raise my hand and say, Yes, that s what matters to me too! 1

2 The poem goes on: I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. Something inside of me leans in. This is the challenge: to find your place and sink your roots in deeply. This is what it means to live fully human. There s a truth here. I too want to be willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love, to be so committed to something that I can bear what any commitment will almost certainly bring: the bitter unwanted passion of [my] sure defeat. And then the poet turns and looks back at where he began: I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. He too has been cracked open by the authentic life the poem describes. He is moved to a truth that is bigger than whatever he had in his head and declared he was interested in nor not. There is a reality that is so universal, so deeply truthful, that even the gods speak of God. Like much good writing, there are layers of meaning in this poem. For a long time I imagined that the title, Self Portrait, suggested the poet s own questions of faith. Later I wondered if its words are so true that Jesus might have spoken the intentions of this poem; I measured how its words match up to the clear-eyed compassion I see in the Gospels. And much more recently I heard David Whyte tell the story of how this poem was born: out of a visit to the museum in Amsterdam where many of Vincent Van Gogh s 36 self-portraits are hung. Van Gogh s way of reflecting on his troubled life was to paint himself. Some of his paintings dare to show the bandage that covered his missing ear cut off in a moment of remorse after he fought with his close friend, the artist Paul Gauguin. The portraits reveals Van Gogh s shame, his unsureness about who he was. From this series of paintings, the poet imagined Van Gogh s own movement from being trapped in other people s questions Do you believe? Do you believe there is one God? to finding his own questions, the 2

3 questions that made sense of his life, the ones that finally returned him to the God he belonged to. I will confess to you that this poem, and others, often feel to me like easier sources of inspiration than what I read in the Bible. The current poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, says that poems connect us more fully to our own inner lives and to the lives of others. A poem can sometimes catch for me a feeling or a flash of insight, that I had not yet put into words, something I too have felt. In the poet s snapshot of that moment, I too feel known and understood. Sometimes even changed, altered in some way. The Bible, our Christian holy book, has a similar intention: to invite us into relationship. But today, much of what we read in the ancient texts of the Bible seems slightly foreign. Inaccessible enough that it has to be explained, its meaning argued for. And most of us, honestly, are not changed by arguments and explanations. We are moved into understanding, seeing differently by metaphor, an image that opens our eyes to see what was blurry just a moment ago. Poetry can do this, or music, sometimes even a scene in a movie. A truth delivered through poetry, Mary Oliver says, can feel like fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes. My faith is fed by poetry. By Rumi s sentence: There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Mary Oliver s: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Another by David Whyte: Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you are alone Put down the weight of your aloneness. So what are those pieces of poetry, or music that feels like it holds the voice of God? How shall I think about the words of a wise teacher or a philosopher whose voice cracks me open and fills me up in a way that I don t always find in the confusing words of the Bible? Is it OK to collect those poems and things that have power for me personally and say, These are my scriptures, the writings that carry holiness to me? Is it a betrayal of my religion to call myself a Christian and still find great inspiration maybe even the voice of God outside the Bible, the official Scripture of Christianity? 3

4 I m not really sure, but I ll tell you what makes sense to me. Our United Methodist tradition says that there are four places we look for who God is and what God asks of us. If you ve been a Methodist for any length of time, you have seen this before: the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which says, simply, that the core of Christian faith comes to us from four sources: first always Scripture (the Bible); tradition, which means the teachings of the Church and its great thinkers, lessons that have been passed on to us and tested over time. And then two things that are by definition personal to each of us. Reason meaning what makes sense in our minds; and experience what moves us, stirs our hearts, speaks to us in that way that is often hard to put into words. This quadrilateral is one of the things I love most about the Methodist way: it acknowledges that both our internal, spiritual, experiences and our rational thinking process have a full place in our faith. But all four of these sources Scripture, tradition, reason, experience were not created equal, our tradition says. Wisely, it knows that what happens in my head, my thinking, can be influenced by many things, and I can wander far off the path of Jesus. I am regularly inclined to re-create God in my own image. My experience too can mislead something new and interesting captures my attention and sweeps me away for a minute or two, and then turns out not to have much substance to it. And even the traditions of the church like any institution made up and controlled by humans can lead us off track, away from truth, from God. And so always, always, the quadrilateral says, the Bible is our first and ultimate reference. This is the book that people of the Jewish and Christian traditions have always found to hold the most truthful and reliable stories about what God s voice sounds like, and what God says when he speaks. For people who follow the path of Jesus, the Christian way, even the things that inspire us do not replace the Bible, the words that we know to hold holy inspiration, God s continuing breath. I and perhaps you we have planted ourselves in a religious tradition; we are not making this up for ourselves as we go along. This is our Scripture the words that have carried meaning not only to me but to generations of people who have walked in this same tradition. The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth said that reading the Bible is like looking out the window and seeing everybody on the street shading their eyes, looking up at the sky toward something we can t quite see. They re pointing up. Speaking foreign words. Something has happened, or is about to happen. To read 4

5 the Bible, Barth said, is to try to understand God from the expressions on their faces. To try to catch just a bit of the strange, compelling word they seem to be hearing. 1 These are the words that connect to me to those who have looked up before, searching for the same God I seek. This is the book of wisdom that becomes the truth-telling mirror for everything else the poems that speak to me, the stories we are writing with our lives. So what about those poems that crack me open and let new light in? Or the music that makes me feel like my heart is expanding? Or the writings of teachers from other traditions altogether the Dalai Lama, or Stephen Hawking, or Dr. Phil? These too can open us to God. Other instruments can carry the voice of God to us in ways we are able to hear. Offer us openings through which the holy can enter. Move us closer to God, to other people. All of this is part of the creation that was not finished after seven days, a truth that didn t stop coming once the Bible was published. A story of holiness reaching out for humanity that continues even now. No doubt some strands of Christianity would find this a dangerous thought, but I think God is big enough, strong enough, generous enough, to use anything, invite many voices, to carry truth into this world. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. 1 From Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p