Inspiration!

Just as spring brings us a fresh – and exhilarant – experience of the world and newly minted lenses through which we can see more deeply and fully into lives and landscapes around us, I propose we also try out new lenses to see ourselves and our own mission for inclusion and ministry in a similarly innovative way. 

I propose we try poetry. 

We read and hear so much prose – all the time – every day – our imaginations, our inspirations can sink and smother in its vastness or suffocate in its debris. But poetry promises a different experience. It offers to take us on the kind of rhythmical word journey in which we will see the extraordinary in the ordinary, hear the possibilities in the mundane, and find the insights and freshness we may have overlooked because we were looking with weary eyes, overburdened hearts, and submersed souls.

And, it’s spring! It’s time to renew the spirit. Let’s give it a try. After all, April – in its role as “National Poetry Month” – is calling us.

In case you need to be further convinced, here’s Emily Dickinson to remind us: 

There is no Frigate like a Book

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

Contemporary poetess, Jane Hirshfield, writes a series of haiku’s and then weaves them poignantly together at the end to describe what I can see as us:

Engraving: World-Tree With An Empty Beehive on One Branch 

A too beautiful view rejects the mind.
It is like a person with a garrulous mouth but no ears.

When Basho finished his months of walking,
he took off his used-up sandals,
let them fall.

One turned into the scent of withered chrysanthemum,
the other walked out of the story.

It’s only after you notice an ache that you know it must always have been there.
As an actor is there, before he steps in from the wing.

Another of Basho’s haiku:
a long-weathered skull, through whose eyes grow tall, blowing grasses.

They look now into a photograph,
a scraped field in France, September 1916:
men bending, smoking, gleaning the harrowed rucksacks for letters.

War, walking, chrysanthemum, sandal, wheat field, bee smoke of camera lens, war.

They’re in the past, yet we just keep traveling toward them, then away,
carrying with us the remnant, salvageable,

refugee honey.

I think of us, especially in that last line, but also in the terse descriptions that precede it.

We have been through the struggles of our own mission; we have walked and witnessed and weathered; we have turned our journeys into beauty and, when we had to, we have also walked away; we have longed to see sweet grass through empty skulls of tradition; we have torn through messages and turned to loved ones for comfort and solace. And we have continued to make our way, both toward and away from the past, always preserving the essential life-giving honey, the fruit of the refugees we still are in a Church that does not universally welcome us.

Finally, I present America’s esteemed Black male poet, Langston Hughes. Listen closely as you read. The poem is jazz itself: 

Jazzonia

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

I read this and I feel breathless – and happy – and inspired. The men play, but all eyes are on the women as they dance.  Their sexuality is a celebration, not a damnation. Their boldness emboldens. They have challenged the greatest: Cleopatra, the mighty Caesar, and Eve, well, the ultimate Authority, Himself. Those old civil and religious dominions do not have to be only male, not anymore. The floor can be shared. The dancers can be everyone. And when the music works together with and not against the dancers, look at what it creates: “silvers of the soul!” 

This poem is said also to refer to the passage in Psalms 137, 1-4:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when 

we remembered Zion.

We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;

and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us 

one of the songs of Zion.

But how shall we sing, sing the Lord’s song, in a foreign land?

Carrying with us our “refugee honey”, enhancing within us our boldness and beauty, we know, if we can keep seeing with new eyes every day, we can create a Church that is not a foreign land to anyone ever. Then we can all sing.