Post Script | April 25, 2023

On poetry (and grace)

I wrote several weeks ago about my recent MFA residency, and I had a reader email with a follow-up question. What writerly habits and practices have I learned from the MFA that I might suggest to others?

An answer to her question could be the subject of an entire letter, and truthfully, I got started on that letter but didn’t finish. For now, I want simply to write about the habit of reading poetry, which I think of as both a writerly habit AND a spiritual habit. Reading poetry is a habit that teaches us to read slowly, to read carefully, to pay attention to imagery and figurative language. All of these are helpful skills for reading the Bible.

(May I say that in our digital environment, these skills are on the obvious decline?)

In my own case, reading poetry has been a more recently established practice. It’s still a spotty habit, and it still feels like a discipline. I don’t think of discipline as a bad word, of course. I don’t mean I grin and bear the experience of reading a poem; I simply mean that poetry requires a little more effort than binge-watching a Netflix show and painting my nails. The efforts involved in this discipline are also transferable, I think, to the spiritual life. It’s a way of nurturing a commitment to do things that don’t always immediately gratify, things that pay off—but in the longer run.

I read one particular poem in a new collection last week that I immediately felt I had to share with anyone who would listen. It made me think to share it here with you. The poem is “Quid Pro Quo” by Paul Mariani, a contemporary Catholic writer. It tells the story of a man who, after his wife suffers her second miscarriage in four months, is asked by a friend what he thinks of God now. To his friend’s surprise (and his own), the speaker shows his disgust by giving God the finger, quid pro quo.

But then the poem takes a turn. The summer after those tragic losses, the speaker has been hired for a job at a boys’ camp. In a “creaking cedar-scented cabin off Lake George,” he and his wife make love:

“In the great black Adirondack stillness, as we lay

there on our sagging mattress, my wife & I gazed out

through the broken roof into a sky that seemed

somehow to look back down on us, and in that place,

that holy place, she must have conceived again . . .”

Nine months later, his wife gives birth to a son; in thirty more years, the son becomes a priest.

“ . . . How does one bargain

with a God like this, who, quid pro quo, ups

the ante each time He answers one sign with another?”

I am not doing justice to the poem by excerpting these few lines. I hope you’ll read the whole thing. But that image—of the couple gazing through the broken roof and seeing a sky stare back at them—took hold in my mind. That’s what poetry can do, of course. Catch in your hair, reverberate off the surfaces of your mind, tug insistently at your shirt. The broken roof was an image that helped me imagine the character of Christian hope.

Hope never denies the reality of evil. Hope does not say all is perfectly well now, not when the doctor says it’s cancer and the prodigal doesn’t come home and a marriage ruptures and finally breaks. But hope also insists that there is more to see than a hole in the ceiling. Hope can see beyond the war in Ukraine and police brutality and school shootings to a sky—a God—who stares back.

All is not perfectly well now . . .but it shall be. It shall be.

“Quid Pro Quo” does not give us an explanation for evil. It does not defend God’s goodness or wisdom in any kind of theologically systematic way. And that’s to say that it’s a poem, not a sermon. It engages the readerly appetite for experience, effect, and emotion and achieves more than simple “information transfer.”

We don’t always know why the roof opens—and leaks and sometimes caves in—but with a mustard seed of faith, through that brokenness we might catch a glimpse of the sky. The hole might provide a way of understanding we are seen, held fast. We might begin believing in the illogic of grace, which says that God is generous with the undeserving. That he who sees is also he who has suffered.

And maybe, with a little practice, we can train our eyes to see more than leaky roofs—but stars.