the green of Jesus
is breaking the ground
and the sweet
smell of delicious Jesus
is opening the house and
the dance of Jesus music
has hold of the air and
the world is turning
in the body of Jesus and
the future is possible
When you repeat the name of Jesus four times in ten very short lines, you mean it. You mean for that name to be noticed and reckoned with—not turned to metaphor or buried behind romantic diminishments of resurrection to the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la-la . . .). Clifton does conflate spring and resurrection here, but not by conceding to abstraction. The green of spring grasses and budding branches is “of Jesus” not only in the sense that it belongs to him, but in the sense that he is the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
African-American hymns and spirituals, a tradition Clifton claims as an African-American poet and upon which she rings bold changes in this 1987 poem, sing out the name of Jesus in unabashedly intimate, playful, insistent, sometimes wild ways: “A Little Talk with Jesus” will “make it right.” “Did You Hear My Jesus” issues a wide invitation to all who are called, because all are called. “Give Me Jesus” claims the only inheritance that matters “when I come to die.” “King Jesus” rides in a chariot but walks with those in trials, troubles, and sorrow who sing “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” Jesus sits “on the waterside” and listens “all day long to hear some sinner pray.” And the dying trustfully “steal away to Jesus, . . . steal away home.”
To this tradition of trust and full-hearted, full-throated song, Clifton adds “spring song” and other poems that invoke Jesus as the image and likeness of the Creator, who brings forth the fruits of the earth and their fragrances, their buzz and bark and birdsong. Significantly, especially for this gender-aware generation, Jesus is also like a mother, in whose ample womb a new heaven and earth are waiting to be born.
In certain seasons over my years of learning to pray, I’ve had a hard time addressing myself to Jesus. I could go to God, Creator of the Universe, as I lay under the stars camping, or to the Holy Spirit, in my quietest times, to the intimate, immanent, only a breath and a thought away and not quite so scandalously particular. But Jesus I wrestled with. I grew up with a very culture-specific version of Jesus. The first lullaby I remember was “Trust and Obey,” which concluded with the assurance that “there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.” I stood at my mother’s side and sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on prayer-meeting night and “Fairest Lord Jesus” when Easter drew near and “Tell Me the Story of Jesus” before Mom gave one of her lively talks about mission work. I sang “Jesus Loves Me” as a toddler and loved our old 78-rpm record of a men’s quartet singing a rousing version of “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.” I learned the word “prostrate” from that hymn, and “diadem.” All of that singing was, I now believe, good faith formation. But, perhaps inevitably, it came to a point where I felt a distance between the Jesus I imagined as I learned Bible verses and pored over the Gospels and the Jesus I encountered as I learned to read more critically and my questions accumulated. Unlike God the Creator and the Holy Spirit, Jesus had a human history recorded in a story full of gaps and strange tonalities and apparent contradictions.
More problematically, the name of Jesus was being used and claimed by televangelists and other very public people in alienating and troubling ways. Their Jesus wasn’t my Jesus, whoever mine was. I registered with belated shock the obvious fact that Jesus wasn’t white, but born into an ancient, somewhat alien culture whose norms I found puzzling, and that Christians of a certain bent were inclined to airbrush out his inconvenient edges, oversimplify his message and the meaning of his life, and make him in their image.
Part of the grace of Trinitarian faith is that we can address God under more than one aspect, taking refuge in one when another is undergoing theological scrutiny. But eventually that same Trinitarian doctrine requires that we come to terms with whatever aspect of God, or particular claims about God, we’ve been avoiding. I was summoned back in very specific ways to Jesus.
One moment of summoning came when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Tired of graduate studies, I had taken the train into the city for an unusual afternoon of solitude. I found my way to the special exhibit of Russian icons, having been told it was not to be missed. I was looking at one after another, trying to recall what I had learned about them in my art history course, about how they’re meant to be looked at not aesthetically, but devotionally, how they’re meant to become portals to divine encounter. Ready to move away from one of the many figures of the divine Mother and Child, I turned and suddenly found myself riveted by a face of Jesus across the room. It was, I still believe, the most striking—no, stunning—experience I’d ever had in an art museum. I walked across the room as though I had been summoned by name and stood in front of the image of Jesus, meeting the dark eyes and finding that they indeed opened a way into what felt for a moment like direct encounter with divine presence. I didn’t levitate. I didn’t even kneel and pray, but I did stand there for quite some time, consenting to whatever mysterious bidding was being given. I remembered Jesus’s words to Paul: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” I wasn’t, I hasten to add, persecuting him, but I was avoiding him. And that image troubled me into changing course. I began intermittently—between exams and research papers—to read the Gospels again slowly, a little more open-heartedly, asking for guidance and grace.
Those came early one morning when I had risen to do the exercises I wish I still had the stamina and will to do regularly. Right in the middle of bending and stretching, I “heard,” though not in my ears, “Read the Gospel of John.” The imperative was so sudden and forceful that I stopped the music, went to the bookcase, and pulled out the Bible that had again languished for some time. “In the beginning was the Word,” I read, “and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” An image of Jesus not unlike the icon in New York seemed to occupy space in the room. I realized I was being called, and Jesus was doing the calling.
The third experience came in my practice of centering prayer. I was breathing slowly, waiting for a word to come that would be my centering word, trying out “peace” and “here” and “open heart,” but what came was “Jesus.” I have to admit, I had been veering away from it. The name of Jesus was too fraught with personal history, theology, and oblique associations I imagined would be distracting. But insistently the name came back: Jesus. You want to enter into centering prayer today? This name is your anchor.
And so it is. Lucille Clifton’s poem delights me in its unabashed joy in Jesus—“delicious” Jesus! In all my years of singing and speaking and reading about Jesus, I had not encountered that descriptor, or the notion that Jesus music “has hold of the air,” though African-American gospel choirs have certainly justified that vivid, palpable description of what happens when a sacred song takes over the whole body and becomes a dance. The poem is a testimony to the power of that “Jesus music,” and to the hope that Jesus people have borne into the world in every generation, despite the Inquisitors and the Crusaders and the punishers and the warmongers and the next-generation pharisees who use his name as a market label. In this poem, the name of Jesus isn’t an instrument of division, but something like a drumbeat, summoning all those within its hearing to dwell in divine possibility.