This National Poetry Month, I’ve been reading and rereading favorite poets, muttering a few verses I’m newly memorizing, and resting in the consolations of non-literal language. In my own life, poetry has been the balance against philosophy and theology; its terms slippery and evocative compared to the technical nature of constructing defensible intellectual arguments. Both poetry and philosophy are dear to me, but my religious life exists on the bridge between them, moving back and forth among the figurative and the literal, stopping now and again to peer over the side like a child.

A recent book by poet Christian Wiman caught my eye for its consideration of faith through the eyes of a poet. In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman struggles with faith and doubt, presence and absence, and what, if anything, holds in the face of a life-threatening illness. The book is unusually philosophical and poetic all at once. One particular passage recounts the author’s own wonderings about his faith tradition and the strangeness of its vocabulary:

I have tried to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don’t mean that Christianity doesn’t seem to “work” for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and re-formed within the life of God, and dogma is a means of making this happen: the ropes, clips, and toe spikes whereby one descends into the abyss. But I am also a poet, and I feel the falseness — or no, not even that, a certain inaccuracy and slippage, as if the equipment were worn and inadequate — at every step. And that’s in the best moments. In the worst, I’m simply wandering through a discount shopping mall of myth, trying to convince myself there’s something worth buying.*

Wiman’s engagement with, and skepticism of, our tradition resonates with me. He’s looking for something deep without always knowing how to find it; the restlessness and the search sound familiar. As does the struggle with language.

I think many of us are looking for language that is true to our own experience. So much of what passes for religious language these days is thin and knowable, bandied about as if everyone knows exactly what “God” is or can define the mystery of its referent. Yet good poets remind us that we need not settle for the most basic definition or first synonym. Rather, we could descend a bit deeper, to borrow from Wiman, and search the shadowed corners of our existence without forcing them into the words we already know.

The invitation, this National Poetry Month, is to think and speak in new words and ways. Beyond dogma, let us speak of doubt and devotion as poets do. And let us trust that in our honest speech some mystery will out.

It raises the question of the poets to whom we turn as guides. I invite you to share the poets whose words have resonated with you.

With aloha,

J

*Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 117.