Like Bernard McGinn’s multi-volume history of western Christian mysticism, a history of poetry in the life of the Church would necessarily comprise many books, beginning with one on the poetry of the Bible. The poetic element in the Church’s life has been a constant, vital factor, uniting the personal with the communal in liturgical, catechetical, exegetical, meditative, prophetic, and mystical forms. A history of Christian poetry would reveal a living tradition, the poets’ inspirations and varied forms of expression bearing witness to the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit of poets and their readers from age to age.
Perhaps someone someday will write such a history.
What is more needed today, however, is an infusion of the poetic element into the experience of Christian community, to heal, strengthen, uplift, and unite it more deeply in the mystery of the Word-Made-Flesh. Prominent Catholic poets such as John F. Deane, James Matthew Wilson, Anthony Esolen, Paul Mariani, Mark Amorose, Kevin Hart, Philip Kolin, and Dana Gioia have been calling for, and gradually effecting, such a poetic infusion, but religious poetry remains in great need of nurture for the good of the Church.
What sort of nurture? Needed is not only the artistic instruction given to aspiring poets by gifted models, mentors, and critics; and not only the encouragement afforded to poets by increased venues for public readings and publication in print, but also the personal formation in faith and tradition that makes it possible for a poet to write the kind of religious poetry that speaks to the hearts and minds of people today. Too often deprived of such poetry, the Catholic faithful have to an alarming extent lost their appetite for poetry, their joyful confidence in themselves as its hearers, readers, and writers.
Such confidence needs strengthening. Inspired by love and belief, contemplating the beauty of Christ in its countless epiphanies, meditating on the Word of God, the Church has constantly given poetry to the world, and she must continue to do so. “Beauty will save the world,” prophesied Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. Graced by the Church’s sacraments, Christians possess a heightened capacity for poetic vision and a special calling to evangelize, to proclaim the radiant beauty of the Gospel through holy lives and artistic expressions, words, and deeds of beauty.
Beauty attracts people and gathers them together. The pages of Church Life Journal cannot deliver the vibrant atmosphere of an evening’s poetry reading in a café, such as that recently organized by the Theology students in David Clairmont’s “God, Work, Poetry” class at the University of Notre Dame. But the journal can provide a kind of meeting place for poets to share with readers their poems and translations of poems, along with theological commentaries on them.
What Artur Sebastian Rosman and I have in mind is a poetry series in Church Life that would differ from the poetry pages of other journals in at least three respects. First, the series will be devoted to Christian poetry, broadly understood as poetry in and for the life of the Church. Second, with regard to form, it aims to be a “big tent” series, featuring translations of poems, alongside original poems by contemporary poets writing in a variety of poetic genres and styles. Third, every poem or poetic translation shall be accompanied by commentary, ranging from 1000 to 4000 words. explaining the poem’s way of participating in the life of the Church.
To start off the fest and the conversation with a humble offering: the following poem came to me this past Advent during my morning meditation. Handwritten at first, then typed and copied, the poem, like many other poems over the years, became a Christmas gift inserted into cards mailed to family and friends.
Prodigal Love
1. I shall descend and go from him,
My Father, to a country far,
To Bethlehem beneath the star,
A prodigal to save from sin.
Refrain: The angels heard and said: “Prepare
A wondrous feast, the robe, the ring,
And let us dance with joy and sing
The Father’s love beyond compare.”
2. I shall arise and go to him,
My Father—I now penniless
And hungry, I whom he once blessed
With riches, spent and lost for sin.
3. I shall arise and go to him,
My Father—climb upon the tree
As his love’s servant, cruelly
Mistreated, suff’ring for man’s sin.
4. I shall arise and go to him,
My Father, bounding up from hell
With captives freed! All will be well,
For grace is mightier than sin.
5. I shall arise, arrayed for him,
My Father, waking from the sleep
Of death, arising with a leap,
Good news to tell, defeating sin.
6. I shall arise and go to him,
My Father, from the mountain high
Ascending into sunlit sky,
Into his glory bright, undimmed.
7. Shall we arise and go to him,
Our Father, through the Father’s Son?
Then let us go, make haste, and run
To Christ who’s born in Bethlehem.
Commentary
The poem comes from prayer and invites to prayer. The angelic refrain, once sounded, can be repeated ad libitum, whenever the reader is moved to return to it at the end of a stanza. Its short stanzas rhymed and metered, the poem resembles a hymn. Anchored in the Scriptures, its title and repeated words and phrases evoke the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–31), but with a Christological difference. The Fathers of the Church saw the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-31) as an allegory of Christ, who, in assuming “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7), was prodigal in lavishing the Father’s love upon sinners. This exegetical allegory becomes the poem’s central metaphor. The poem links the penitent prodigal’s resolution to arise and return to his father with the tradition of the seven leaps of Christ, inspired by interpretations of Song of Songs 2:8—leaps of loving descent and ascent, exitus and reditus, going out and returning.
The “I” of the poem is the Augustinian totus Christus, the whole Christ, the Head of the Church who speaks in union with the Church’s members, identifying himself with them in their spiritual poverty and guilt in order to transform them, likening them to himself. Syntax allows the “prodigal” named in the first stanza to refer ambiguously both to the speaker who saves (the Son of the Father) and to the sinner to be saved (the prodigal son of the parable). In the second stanza we hear at once the voices both of the self-emptying Christ and of the wayward prodigal—a simultaneity expressive of the mysterious unity of divine mercy with human misery.
The repeated rhyme “him / sin” juxtaposes the Father with the sinful son and, at opposite ends of the respective stanzas, represents the distance between them to be crossed by Christ. Through verbal repetition, the arising of the penitent becomes linked in succession to Christ’s being raised on the cross, his rising from the dead, and his ascension into heaven. The chiastic ABBA rhyme scheme in the stanzas mirrors the pattern of the Son’s going forth from the Father into the world and returning from it to the Father; thus it forms, too, a subtle, hidden acrostic, the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15–16).
