I have been reading the book
The Cloister Walk (Penguin) by writer and poet Kathleen Norris. (It won NYT Notable Book of the Year when it came out.) Given the loss of metaphor in the modern world view, and the corresponding lack of value attached to it, the impact on Christian worship (and other areas of Christian practice) and especially faith has been quite profound and devastating. At least that's my opinion. I include below a some paragraphs--rather lengthy, I know--where she explores worship from a poet's perspective. Let me know what you think.
The ancient understanding of Christian worship is that, in the words of the liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh, it "gives rise to theological reflection, and not the other way around." We can see the obvious truth of this by shifting our attention to poetry, and entertaining the notion that one might grow into faith much as one writes a poem. It takes time, patience, discipline, a listening heart. There is precious little certainty, and often great struggling, but also joy in our discoveries. This joy we experience, however, is not visible or quantifiable; we have only the words and form of the poem, the results of our exploration. Later, the thinkers and definers come along and treat these results as the whole--Let's see; here she's used a metaphor, and look, she's made up a rhyme scheme. Let's stick with it. Let's teach it. Let's make it a rule.
What began as an experiment, a form of play, an attempt to engage in dialogue with mystery, is now a dogma, set in stone. It is something that can be taught in school.
Let's return to our classroom setting, only this time we'll be exploring faith as well as poetry. A poem, as Mallarme´ once said, is not made of ideas but of words, and faith also expresses itself through that which is lived, breathed, uttered, left silent. If faith, like poetry, is a process, not a product, then this class will be messier than we can imagine. To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery. Our goal will be to recover our original freedom, our childlike (but never childish) wisdom. It will be difficult to lose our adult self-consciousness (here the discipline of writing can help us), difficult not to confuse our worship with self-expression. (All too often the call for "creativity" in worship simply leads to bad art.)
(Skipping a paragraph)
Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline
. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't.
But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.
When it comes to faith, while there are guidelines--for Christians, the Bible and the scaffolding of the church's theology and tradition--there is no one right way to do it. Flannery O'Connor once wisely remarked that "most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow," and Martin Buber implies that discovering that means might constitute our life's work. He states that: "All [of us] have access to God, but each has a different access. [Our] great chance lies precisely in [our] unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one [person]." (skipping the rest of the paragraph)
The first time I went to a monastery, I dreamed about the place for a week, and the most vivid dream was of the place as a chemistry lab. Might religion be seen as an experiment in human chemistry? And the breath of the divine as the catalyst that sparks reactions and makes our humble institutions work as well as they do, often despite ourselves? Imagination and reason, those vital elements of human intelligence, are adept at dismantling our delusions. Both bring us up against our true abilities and our limitations. But we've gotten ourselves into a curious mess in the modern world. We've grown afraid of the imagination (except as a misguided notion of a "creativity" granted to a few) and yet are less and less capable of valuing rationality as another resource of our humanity, of our religious
humanity. We end up with a curious spectrum of popular religions, a rigid fundamentalism at one end, and new Age otherworldliness, manifested in "angel channeling workshops," on the other. And even religious institutions--I'll speak here of the Christian churches, because they are what I know--often manifest themselves as anything but Christ's humble body on earth. What gets lost in all of this is any viable sense of the sacred that gives both imagination and reason room to play.
Can poets be of any use here? I believe so, though I'm not sure of the reasons why. I may be doodling. But the sense of the sacred is very much alive in contemporary poetry; maybe because poetry, like prayer, is a dialogue with the sacred. And poets speak from the margins, those places in the ecosystem where, as any ecologist can tell you, the most life forms are to be found. The poet Maxine Kumin has described herself as "an unreconstructed atheist who believes in the mystery of the creative process," while my husband, who is both a lyric poet and a computer programmer, declares himself to be "a scientific rationalist who believes in ghosts." If, as Gail Ramshaw has said, "Christianity requires metaphoric thinking," if, as a Benedictine liturgist once said to me, the loss of the ability to think metaphorically is one of the greatest problems in liturgy today, maybe the voices of poets are the ones we need to hear.I know this is long, and I want to type even more. (I've probably already gone beyond the limit allowed under copyright law. Forgiveness please, and thanks to Ms. Norris and Penguin.)
But what do you think?
I think the modern church and modern science are both suffering from the same problem.
Let me know.
The next several paragraphs are stunning. Perhaps I'll post them later. In the meantime...
Grace and peace,
Owen
