Buried in a pulpit near you
This week will see National Poetry Day marked in the United Kingdom. It may also see the silencing of a courageous and unusual poet – Victor Zamora. Victor was elected by the Chilean miners trapped in the San Jose mine as their ‘official’ poet. By all accounts his messages are amongst those most eagerly awaited by people on the surface. They certainly have an agonising poignancy to them:
Under the earth there is a ray of light, my path, and faith is the last thing that is lost… I have been born again.
The thing is, great poetry, like great Blues music, is often born of suffering. Will Victor’s poetic voice be lost, I wonder, when he breathes the sweet air of freedom?
In many churches the poetic voice in the pulpit was lost a long, long time ago. It was drowned out in favour of theologically precise, cerebral prose which closes meanings down rather than opening them up. And yet, surely, this has been to everyone’s loss? Prose may feed the mind but poetry feeds the soul. Prose draws borders but poetry blasts a road through the mountains of indifference and borders be damned. Poets choose words for their creative ambiguity and their many-flavoured meaning. In his book Finally Comes The Poet, Walter Brueggemann says that the deep places of our lives can only be reached ‘by stories, by images, by metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently.’
Do we fear poetry as preachers, I wonder? Are we uncomfortable with its bar-of-soap-like tendencies to avoid clear definition just when we think we have it pinned down? We should note that in the days of the Exile God’s great prophets rarely outlined any new theology. Instead they talked about the theology people were born with and made them feel differently about it. In order to do this they had to be poetic in their language.
Does poetry have a place in your preaching?
preachersa2z
.
Richard Littledale's Preacher's A - Z 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 5, 2010 at 10:19 am
Gareth Hill
Perhaps it’s the Welsh blood in me – as the phrase says, “to be born Welsh is to be born privileged/ not with a silver spoon in your mouth/ but with music in your blood/ and with poetry in your soul” – but I find that often poetry helps great preaching sink deep.
Perhaps that’s why I write hymns/songs too.
I frequently use Gerard Kelly’s work – especially from his book Spoken Worship – in services and am often asked how people can get hold of it.
Perhaps we preachers fear poetry because it’s not easy for us to shape to our own satisfaction: the poet will always leave a door for uncertainty or the ‘other’ to escape through … or come in by.
October 5, 2010 at 10:30 am
preachersa2z
Gareth. I love what you say about our fears of poetry. As preachers we like to feel quite ‘in charge’ of what is going on when we preach ( to say nothing of what that might imply about our relationship with the Holy Spirit!).
Would love to hear more about your hymns and songs…
October 5, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Gareth Hill
Thank you Richard. My website needs a major overhaul but most of my hymns are there although the songs are not. It’s at http://www.cybervicar.com
October 8, 2010 at 8:36 am
preachersa2z
Note Philip Collins, former speech-writer to Tony Blair, on Barack Obama’s speaking style: “he combines a poetic form of expression with a compression of meaning, while rarely straying from ordinary language. His speeches do take wing, but the flight comes from the rhythm of tthe sentences as much as the elevation of the language”.