The Slow Work: On the Poetry of Faith

A while back in this space, I told a story about my first really significant encounter with a personal faith.  It was an experience that came about via the medium of stories, more specifically the stories of this particular person named Jesus who lived a long time ago in a far off place.  I wouldn't have had that vocabulary at the time, but it was a "poetic" experience and encounter.  It wasn't like I read what was said in the Gospel passages and concluded that the "arguments" it was making or the facts that were laid out seemed correct.  Instead, my reaction happened in a different key, on a more emotional and symbolic and abstract level.  Indeed, the reaction occurred at a moment when I was very consciously and very explicitly struggling with the "prose" dimensions of the faith I was being taught.  And nothing in that experience really changed that struggle, except in the sense that it pointed to some other dimension to this whole faith thing, some reason to sit and struggle with the prose parts instead of just writing them off.

It is always a dangerous thing to universalize your own experience.  So, forgive me as I do so--I think religion exists, or perhaps more to the point should exist, primarily in the domain of poetry.  That's not to say there is or can be no prose dimension, but the more you can approach the topic from a poetry perspective the more meaning and fulfillment you will get out of religion.  By contrast, most of the bad experiences that people have of religion come from treating it entirely or primarily as a prose experience--a set of declarative statements that we approach on the same plane as we approach, say, a weather report or a technical manual.

This is particularly a problem, I think, because we live in a culture that overly prioritizes prose thinking and denigrates poetry and poetry-oriented ways of thinking.  There is a temptation in this culture to assert that only a journalistic account of the world communicates "truth," and everything else is "fantasy."  We allow people to be moved by art, albeit grudgingly, but we ghetto-ize and somewhat stigmatize that as some sort of frivolous diversion from "reality."  But if you read a book or watch a movie or listen to some piece of music that moves you, I believe you are being moved by some measure of truth that the work is communicating about yourself or about the human condition.  It may not be on the same wavelength as the truth expressed in science or journalism, but it is a kind of truth nonetheless.  But I think this view has become a minority one, at least in the mainstream.  And religion, wanting to be seen as something serious and not frivolous like the arts, has tried to get with the program and de-emphasize the poetry in favor of the prose.

This trade of poetry for prose manifests itself in two seemingly opposite, but I think ultimately related, trends.  On the one hand, you have the fundamentalist trend, in which the prose of a particular religion attempts to command the entire field of prose discourse.  Sometimes this involves displacing the non-religious prose discourse entirely, substituting in a set of "alternative facts" that must be held to in order to be a believer--the Earth was created in seven days, etc.  Another version is to assert that religion must or should exercise a gatekeeping function on non-religious prose discourse, where that discourse can only function within the umbrella created and monitored by religion.  Radical Orthodoxy, obsessed with re-establishing theology as the "queen of the sciences," is the best example of this move.  Either way, the idea here is to have the prose of religion go toe-to-toe with the other sorts of prose, on the terms agreed to by the broader society.  

I am of the view that the fundamentalist move, in all of its forms, is at a basic level a sucker's bet.  It just doesn't work.  And the primary reason it doesn't work is that there is a basic and unbridgeable gulf between the origin of our religious traditions and the associated prose stemming from that origin point, and our modern situation, stewing as we do in a host of ideas and concept wholly foreign to that word.  I've talked about this before--we are modern people, living in a modern word, and that is constitutive of who we are.  No matter how complicated and intricate you make the system that justifies and informs why your religious prose must trump the accepted facts out in the world, you cannot help but form an alternate reality, protected bubble to keep out the modern world.  All roads lead to some variation of the Benedict Option, and all Benedict Option projects are doomed to fail.  Again, it just doesn't work.

But the flip side of fundamentalism is the bedrock of most versions of "liberal" Christianity, and it has echoes in other religious traditions. Rather than force the prose of the broader secular world under the orbit of the religious prose, the liberal move does the opposite and forces all of religious experience to exist within the parameters defined by the secular prose.  It is, in its essence, a newspaper editor pulling out their red pen and removing all of the adverbs and expressive statements to reduce the religious experience down to a tidy eight inches of newsprint that communicates a dry set of facts, in a manner that is considered acceptable according to the AP Style Manual.

Unlike its fundamentalist counterpart, this form of liberal religion "works," in the sense that you can do it in a way that maintains a sustainable, intellectual coherence.  Liberal religion has a different problem--it's not very, or I would even say not at all, compelling.  Once you are done with your line edits, there's really not much left that would compel or entice you to engage or participate, except insofar as it drafts off of other political or social causes.  But, as one can engage with those political or social causes without the overlay of religion, even that doesn't really provide much in the way of engagement or raison d'etre.  This sort of liberal deconstructionist religion, in my opinion, fails not because it is bad, but because it is boring and kinda purposeless.

So, the solution is more poetry, less prose.  Fine.  What does that mean in concrete terms?  Well, for one thing, I believe that this is the ultimate and proper justification for "high church," liturgically-focused expressions of faith.  Liturgy is poetry--it is a symbolic, experiential encounter with the stories of the faith.  All of the things that anti-liturgy people raise as objections to liturgy--its rote nature, its archaic forms, the way it has different meanings to different people in different contexts--are the best things about liturgy, the things that make liturgy powerful and relevant.

As I write this, it is Easter Monday, which means we just finished with Holy Week.  For those of us of a liturgical bent, that means we just went through the liturgical sequence of the Triduum liturgies.  Analyzed from the perspective of prose, they are a walk through the story of Jesus's death and resurrection.  But if you have even a passing knowledge of the Christian faith, you know that story already.  And if you don't know the story, then you could read it in the Bible.  If you read really slowly and really carefully, you can take in this story in about 30 minutes.  By contrast, the three Triduum services that I attended at my parish lasted a combined total of six hours (90 minutes for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, 3 hours for Easter Vigil).  Not a particularly efficient way to take on the prose story, especially if you already know how it turns out.

OK, but we have to go to do something for Holy Week, right?  Even if it's not totally clear why, the prose religion advocates tend to avoid the obvious logic described above and want to have some event marking this story.  But the prose advocates almost cannot help themselves in making every event into a didactic experience, an opportunity to communicate some universal take-away that would apply to everyone who is a part of the experience.  For some, that universal take-away is that Jesus's bodily functions ended on Friday afternoon and then restarted at some point before Sunday morning; for others, the universal take-away is that this did not actually happen.  For others, the universal take-away is that Jesus's death is a single (and, perhaps, not particularly noteworthy) example of imperial power exercising the tool of imperial power on persecuted minorities.  For still others, the universal take-away is the necessity of self-sacrifice.  And there are other possibilities, but in any event what we have is a fight over which one or ones of a set of universal messages we are going to communicate to people.  In fighting over these messages, the combatants hope to be able to control the discourse surrounding the Jesus event, to shape it into the form that they believe to be the correct one.

I would be lying if I pretended that I don't have preferences and perspectives regarding these messages, which ones I think are better or worse than others.  But I find myself thoroughly bored with all of these conversations.  Everyone who cares about this stuff knows what the various talking points are, so I see no need to annually restate them.  Moreover, I don't think it is possible to actually control the discourse around the events of Holy Week.  Holy Week isn't important because it is providing us information, but because it is providing a vehicle to experience something.  The true magic, the true poetry of the Triduum liturgies is that while the text is the same every year, the subjective experience of them is different; different for different people and different for the same person on successive years.  

I think the truth of the liturgies of the Triduum is a poetic truth, an experiential truth.  For me, and for this year, the truth was found in accepting and coming to grips with my own weariness and exhaustion, free of the self-judgment and self-criticism that is one of my most persistent crosses.  My resurrection came an hour or so into Easter Sunday, as I watched myself on Youtube, my face half-covered in shadow, give a short exhortation about God always providing a light even in the midst of darkness, and realizing that this really was true, and that I believed it because I have lived it.  For the people who sat beside me, the truth of the Triduum was different, and that's OK.  More than OK--it's the liturgy working as it should.  For me, Thursday and Friday were a blur of rote actions without much in the way of emotional impact; it was only on Saturday night that the Triduum came home, and then only in retrospect.  I am sure that there was someone else at All Saints Episcopal Church New Albany for whom the Triduum was entirely the opposite.  Our differences are neither oppositions to be harmonized nor problems to be resolved, but rather manifestations of grace to be celebrated.  

Again, this is not a call to ignore more constructive analysis of faith.  The constructive piece helps us understand and contextualize the experiential piece, deepening the impact of the experience.  But I think the prose dimensions of faith should be the servants of the poetry, when far, far too often they are the master.  At the end of the day, I don't go to the Triduum liturgies because I believe specific things that they teach, to me or to anyone else; I go to those liturgies because they make me feel something, experience something, live something.  I can analyze what those somethings are--after all, this is what I am doing here.  But there is the point beyond which the analysis, the prose, can't go.  And if we lose that, I think we lose the whole point of religion.