Abstract
Browsing in a London bookshop recently, I came across a volume containing the poetry of the Bible. It was a thick book. It didn’t just feature the Psalms, the poetry of Job, and the Song of Solomon, the lyrical outpourings of the prophets, Jesus’ evocation of the lilies of the field and the inspired visions of the last chapters of the Book of Revelation. The editor had found the pages of both Testaments brimming with poetic images and metaphor in epic narratives and short pithy stories, in prologues and prayers, in letters, sermons, and songs.
I didn’t buy the book, partly because it was a heavy hardback and I had a small suitcase, but mostly because the English translation the author had chosen seemed to me disappointingly unpoetic. Nevertheless, I warmed to the idea that had brought the book into being.
Poetry does seem to lead the way for a number of people who think about faith these days, wherever they may place themselves on the broad spectrum of religious belief and practice. We find this in the Faith in Poetry group I run in St Giles’ Cathedral. We use a recent anthology The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry by Mark Oakley, which contains an eclectic collection of poems that aren’t all overtly religious but which encourage us to sit with a poem in silence, and then to free associate, share insights, and often reach new understandings that can leave us both inspired and satisfied at the end of a session.
What is it about poetry that enables this sort of expansion of thought, whereas studying a worthy but more prosaic tome might cause us to stifle a yawn?
I’m sure it has something to do with the way good poetry opens up the mind—like a window. You have to look or listen carefully to a poem, concentrate on the words in the way that you might look intently through a pane of glass. Often when you do, the words open out towards new thoughts and understandings, towards a larger world than you’d previously inhabited. Good poetry invokes the imagination. It carries you on a quest that might land you in new places. It encourages you to go deep: into yourself; into relationship with the world around you, and perhaps to touch the fringes of the reality we call God. Poetry is the language of experience. According to Oakley in the introduction to his anthology, it’s ‘soul-language, a way of crafting words that distils our experience into what feels like a purer truth’.
This seems a good way of describing the function of Scripture: helping towards an opening up to ‘a purer truth’. Not trying to pin truth down like a butterfly specimen in a glass case, but to draw us towards a vision that is just out of our grasp but near enough for us to catch a glimpse sometimes.
‘Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,’ wrote Emily Dickinson.
Bring on scripture, telling it ‘slant’!