Dear Friends,

Sunday is poetry Sunday! Why is that important? What does poetry do?
As a church is it important to us because roughly a third of our Bible is poetry. It’s amazing that the poetic verses in scripture written over 2000 years ago continue to evoke meaning and promise in our contemporary world. In addition, as one of my most memorable high school English teachers taught me, poetry does NO-THING. Yes, in other words, poetry does nothing. Think about that. Its vast mystery is revealed in unique ways to each person who encounters it. Herein lies its power and promise: in that space of wonder and personal discernment, poetry can lead us closer to God, who, as the mystics remind us, is also “no thing.” Most of all, good poetry has never quite lost its power to capture our deep longing to find sense in a bewildering universe.

This resonates with me. When I read great poetry, I find myself moved beyond utilitarian conceptions of language. In poetry, language is not treated as if it exists to achieve some human consequence, to make me buy a product or even to make me feel or react in a particular way. It doesn’t exist to harry me into a specific political or emotional response. Rather, it will always be allusive, and it will always gesture toward mystery and something beyond the words that provide its scaffolding. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said, “If
poems do not change the outside world, they change the landscape of language so that space appears.”

While poetry will always be too vast to reduce to any one angle, this Sunday we can celebrate what it means to us. For me, poetry puts me at the intersection of wisdom and wonder, a place that beckons the spirit, the psyche and the lived human experience. Join us on Sunday where we open up this amazing space anew. I look forward to seeing you – and don’t forget to bring your favorite poem.

Love,
Cheryl