Which book comes before Amos in the Old Testament?

Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Dude Abides

Home
Progressive Christian

Last updated on: June 2, 2006 at 12:50 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-06-02T12:50:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

GODSTUFF:

‘THE NATURAL PRAYER OF THE SOUL’: POETRY

The moon had risen over the shores of Treasure Beach hours before the poet ascended the bamboo podium and began to read.

An occasional lazy breeze stirred the otherwise balmy torpor of the Jamaican night.

But the crowd of hundreds gathered to hear poet Kwame Dawes read was wide awake, as he spun a tale of tornadoes — the human kind.

I am a tornado child,
you can tell us from far,
by the crazy of our hair;
couldn’t tame it if we tried.
Even now I tie a bandanna
to silence the din of anarchy
in these coir-thick plaits.

Reading selections from his new volume, Wisteria: Poems from the Swamp Country, Dawes had our full attention.

His poetry had seized us. By our spirits.

Poems have a way of doing that.

Not in a high-minded, thee-thou-thine kind of way. Not in a manner that allows us to wrestle the elusive into the rational with our intellect.

A poem appeals to something deeper, eternal, transcendent.

There is an odd, peaceful power about it.

“The poem seems to have the capacity to contain and give voice to the spiritual,” said Dawes, the celebrated poet, author and co-founder of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, where I had the truly humbling honor of being one of two dozen authors and poets to read our work last week. “But the truth is, for me, that the poem is a mystery.

“Very often, poetry is about using language to articulate that which is difficult to articulate, which is the emotional space that we find ourselves in, and the things that have allowed us to reach that emotional space,” Dawes, the distinguished poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, said in his lush Jamaican accent.

Poetry has a peculiar draw. It lures me in when I am the most restless and offers an oasis of serenity.

Time stops. There is only the word.

The last year of my life has been more frenetic than any before it. I have more to do, more to not forget, more people to not disappoint, more responsibility, more joy and, some days, more chaos than I can handle.

Not long ago, I began reading poetry again. It started one night when I was fighting insomnia and downloaded an audio recording of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass onto my iPod. I listened until I fell asleep.

From there, I pulled out volumes of poetry I hadn’t opened in far too long. Paging through them felt like playing hooky from all of the books I should have been reading, all the things I should have been writing.

Eventually I turned, as I have so many times over the years, to Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate.

Heaney has long been a literary companion of mine. On my first trip to Ireland, the homeland my grandmother had left nearly a century before, I took a copy of Heaney’s Field Work with me.

I used it like a spiritual travel guide as I tried to figure out where I was, what I was feeling, and why this strange place felt so familiar, at times so exhilarating, and at others so profoundly sad.

Heaney’s poem “Homecomings” was one I read over and over again. The last stanza is one I can recite by heart because that’s where it has been written on mine.

Mould my shoulders inward to you.
Occlude me.
Be damp clay pouting.
Let me listen under your eaves.

Those lines speak to me of solace and grace. They could be a prayer. At times, for me, they have been.

Heaney’s latest collection of poems, District and Circle, published just last month, offered comfort in a turn of phrase from its eponymous poem:

Tunes from a tin whistle underground
Curled up the corridor I’d be walking down
To where I knew I was always going to find
My watcher on the tiles. . . .

Most recently, I’ve spent more than a few stolen moments reading the poems of Mevlana Rumi, the 13th century Sufi Muslim mystic.

In one of his more famous passages, Rumi writes:

Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us:
We taste only sacredness.

Every major world religion (and most of the minor ones, I’m guessing) have a tradition of poetry as a means of communicating the sacred. Psalms, odes, songs, haiku.

What magic is it that poetry can do?

“I think poetry provides a space for a spiritual lollygag,” Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein told me when I asked him the same question. “A place to dawdle, to dillydally. … It is that time in which you risk wasting time as a way to invest in yourself and your spirit and that which makes you human.

“Our lives are so hectic. We live in an age seduced by velocity,” Stein said. “Poetry rewards patience. So few things in our lives reward patience.”

Poetry gently demands our full attention. Or, as Stein said, quoting the 17th century French theologian Nicolas Malebranche: “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”

Another of my favorite poets, one to whom I return often like an old friend, is Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. Her poem “Banyan” calls to mind — at least to mine — that kind of attentiveness of the soul that Malebranche described.

Listen, said the voice.
This is your dream.

I’m only stopping here for a little while.
Don’t be afraid.

Last year, while I was writing a book — The God Factor, a collection of spiritual profiles of famous folks — I asked Heaney if he would allow me to interview him. He graciously declined, saying his faith was one area about which he was inarticulate.

Instead, the poet, a wonderfully generous soul, sent me a poem. I am convinced it is better than anything he could have said in an interview.

The last lines of Heaney’s great gift to me — he titled it “A Found Poem” — offer an apt description of poetry’s spiritual power.

In the poem, Heaney is, I believe, talking about his relationship with the religion of his youth.

But it could just as easily be a plausible explanation for why hundreds of people would be gathered under a tent in the middle of a tropical night, to hear poems read aloud.

“They have an undying pallor and draw,” Heaney wrote, “like well water far down.”

—————————————-
God Girl will read from and discuss her new book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People, at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Chicago’s Printers Row Book Fair, inside Grace Place, 637 S. Dearborn.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

June 1, 2006

Next Post

June 3, 2006

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A little happy ARCHIVED COLUMNS BECOMING FAMILY BelieberNess BREAKING NEWS! Disquiet Time DJ JEFF'S SPINTASMS falsani FILM from OCRegister From Sojo.net God Nods GODSTUFF I Take Requests incubatespirit LURKING IN THE NARTHEX On My Nightstand ONEMOMS Polling the Room PONTIFEXCELLENT Thru My Eyes TWO CENTS Uncategorized Upcoming Events VASCO VASCO'S HEART

Select a Month January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 July 2014 May 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 April 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 October 2003 March 2003 December 2002 October 2002 January 2001

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which book comes before Amos in the Old Testament?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Joel Micah Hosea Obadiah