Experiment 15: Read a poem.
Photo Credit: Chuttersnap on Unsplash
The other day, I was sitting at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles with my three-year-old son, waiting for our ticket number to be called. In the midst of people in sneakers and people in suits, people balding and people in braids, I was reading him “I Am the People, the Mob,” a poem which gives voice to ordinary folk forgotten in history books yet essential to life. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. / I forget. Standing up to leave, the woman in front of me who’d been sitting with her own small child, asked, “What’s that you’re reading?”
“Poetry,” I said. “Carl Sandburg.”
“ I like it,” she responded, before maneuvering her daughter’s pink fold-up stroller onto the aisle. Something about the words had resonated.
Poetry is often dismissed as obscure scribbles only the elite can decipher, but it rejoiced my heart to see that an ordinary mother like me connected to a poem written about and for people like us.
Lately, I’ve felt God inviting me to meet with Him through poetry. Reading a poem is not at all efficient. It’s not like skimming an article for three key takeaways. Forget bullet points or numbered outlines. Finding a poem’s heart takes meandering time.
Practicing Prayer through Poetry
Good poems are crafted with intense attention to each word, each sound, each period. They’re meant to be read carefully (and aloud!). There are ruby-bright truths buried in the rhythmic, painstakingly-constructed lines, and you often have to read the poem slowly, again and again, to find them.
This slow, careful reading helps me cultivate a heart of prayer.
Digging into a poem forces me to be attentive to each syllable, each comma. It is an exercise in practicing the single-hearted attention prayer requires, an attunement to an unseen force beyond the self. In a world where pocket screens can volley our attention to six unrelated things in sixty seconds, reading poetry offers practice attending to the only necessary thing (Luke 10:38-42).
The discipline of attention also helps cultivate eyes to see divine grace hidden in everyday quandaries. Grace gleams in every detail of daily life, if only we have eyes to see the glimmers.
Reading poetry is also an exercise in faith: that there is meaning in the mystery. That there is a creative, good mind behind the finite, and sometimes puzzling, words of the author. That if I pause to listen, I’ll hear.
What is more, poetry-reading can itself be an act of prayer.
Praying the Psalms
The Psalms in particular have become for me a sanctum in which to pray. Friends of mine have shared their practice of reading through the whole book of Psalms each month. And in Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes how the Psalms are prayers that teach us how to pray. Inspired, I took the challenge to read through the Psalms in a month according to the lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer. There is often not an easy takeaway after the first reading. Like any morsel of Scripture, there is depth beyond depth, richness beyond richness to savor. Fresh water to drink, new beauty to behold. Hidden rubies to be unearthed.
Writing about how reading the Psalms twice daily has shaped her, Julie Lane-Gay observes, “Month after month, I have begun to hear God’s call to me, speaking my name, not with a list of divine instructions or divine insight but drawing me to Himself.” Divine instructions are essential, and many books of the Bible, like Leviticus or Paul’s letters, are weighty with their essential wisdom. But biblical poetry offers a different way to know God. A way of attention and attunement, of beauty and pause. A space where unkempt emotions are validated: mourners can weep and the jubilant can rejoice and the bewildered and wounded can ask heavy questions.
A space where words, and silence, both speak of God.
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Because reading poems can be daunting, I offer these exercises inspired by poet Marilyn McEntyre’s When Poets Pray.
Carry a single psalm or poem with you for a week, taking it out to read when you’re waiting in line or might be inclined to pull out your phone. At the end of the week, see how much of it you’ve memoized. See what little buds of feeling and growth it’s produced–how, for example, it's inspired gratitude or awareness of God’s presence or hope.
Reflect on how an ancient psalm or poem connects you to the long line of believers. Receive it as a message from the communion of saints.
Collect a few favorite words, phrases, lines, or images from a psalm or poem. Linger over what you’ve noticed and ponder what drew you there. Allow one to become an anchoring word or phrase in some moments of prayer. Or write a prayer inspired by the words.
Please feel free to share the psalms or poems you’ve read and how the experience has been for you!
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
