MATT FITZGERALD is the senior pastor of Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ in Chicago. He hosts the Christian Century magazine’s Preachers on Preaching podcast and is a contributor to the Stillspeaking Daily Devotional.
I am a preacher who has benefited greatly from reading poems. Poetry’s forcefully expressive language and capacity for concise intelligence could benefit any minister, pressed as we are for time and inevitably lacking wisdom adequate to the odd and intense task before us. But there is another, far better reason for Christians to read poetry. Poems are often impenetrable, even baffling. The best poems seem to half grasp their own point, stretching past the limit of words into the place where language fails. Consider, for instance, this poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei:
On the branch tips the hibiscus bloom.
The mountains show off red calices.
Nobody. A silent cottage in the valley.
One by one flowers open, then fall.
“Magnolia Basin,” translated by Barnstone et al.
What does the poem mean? Perhaps it says that death’s hold over life limits our perspective, rendering us unable to experience even a decent trace of the wonder all around us. But the poem seems to stretch toward something more than this. It refuses my analysis, just sits there and shimmers and points past itself. I find it remarkable that language at its most sublime exposes its inadequacy most plainly.
And here, I think, is where poetry and Christianity share a powerfully true dynamic: both recognize a basic elusiveness; both testify to the fact that we see and don’t see, seize and don’t seize; both acknowledge a greater reality pulsing just beyond the boundary of the page, the poem, or even life itself.
Christianity rests on the belief that Jesus reveals God. And in contemporary America, Christianity’s right wing has defined my religion as an arrogant sort of certainty. So it might sound odd to describe Christianity by its inability to reveal the whole of God. Yet this is the truth of Jesus Christ. In the thirties, in the face of Nazism’s insistence that God was revealing His will through German history, Emil Brunner wrote: “Even Jesus Christ is . . . as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘an indirect communication.’ For direct communication is paganism. Direct communication cannot communicate the message of God, but only that of an idol.”
We are too limited to understand the limitless. The only gods humanity can know inside and out are the ugly little pretenders that we shape to our own image, then send on our rotten errands. It is no accident that Christians convinced of their direct line of communication with God are always the first to draw the sword and bless our wars.
The Gospel of Mark says Jesus did not speak to his followers “except in parables.” The one who came to reveal the truth of God did not speak except in riddles that bewilder even as they clarify. Jesus comes to show us who God is, yet in the very act of revelation he hides himself. As Karl Barth said, “God veils Himself precisely when he unveils, announces, and reveals Himself.”
Veiling in the act of unveiling; truth revealed in a way that bewilders, even as it clarifies: to my ears, this sounds like a good definition of poetry. Or at least a definition of good poetry. For who wants to read a poem that is too easily understood? Such poems are like easily grasped gods, capable of carrying a message, perhaps, but not capable of pointing toward the truth. It seems to me that the beauty of the form is all tied up with a poem’s refusal to be completely known.
We ache to know God completely, yet we cannot achieve such knowledge, and God does not give it to us. This is frustrating, but the alternative would be worse. Imagine how dull religion would be if we were able to understand every intricacy of God. Imagine how dull poetry would be if we were able to understand each poem in some exhaustive, ultimate way.
But there are dangers much worse than dullness. To know something completely is to control it, to command it, to subject it to our own ends. Just think of the horrors humanity would unleash were we able to master Divinity. Consider all the blood being shed by those who think they have—by a president who thinks he knows the mind of God and by terrorists who believe they are agents of heaven. They are all wrong, of course. But even something so flimsy as blood lust, projected onto heaven and confused with God’s will, is strong enough to tear the world apart.
Poetry represents language at its zenith. And at their zenith, trying mightily to describe ultimate truth and beauty, our words grow thin and come gloriously undone. For ultimate truth is beyond our fallen capacity. And so, in an age of increasing religious certainty, poetry could be the very best thing for religious people to read. For even as they stun us with their power, great poems remind us of our inability to ever truly understand.