Traces Remain: Poetry & Theology & Our Very Human Hearts

By Susan Baller-Shephard

For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos; he formed it to be inhabited!): I am the Lord, and there is no other. I did not speak in secret in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, “Seek me in chaos.” I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right. – Isaiah 45:18-19 (NRSV)

There are times we seek someone to speak into the void, to bring order to chaos.

Remember the parting of chaos

Deep in the darkness, before the first Fire

Falls from the stars, ’ere the first day is

Born in the mists of the mind of Desire.1

That February, I held our four-month-old son, Drake, as his breathing resembled the sound of milk glugging from a plastic milk gallon into the sink, how suction pulls on the plastic with the effort of emptying. Other times that month Drake’s breathing became shallow enough I stayed awake to make sure his chest was still rising and falling. Medications weren’t cutting it, and in yet another Emergency Room trip, Drake was admitted, hospitalized with the respiratory virus RSV. Between the twelve nebulizer treatments a day at the hospital, worry took up residence with us. Drake needed to be able to take deep breaths, to get more air moving through his virus-coated lungs. It was a matter of breathing, and for Drake, breathing was laborious.

As a poet, I take language seriously. In that hospital room I was wordless with worry.

My friend Wendy came to visit us one afternoon, when Drake had just thrown up the steroid medication he’d been given. Wendy parted the swirling sea of gowns, masks, and booties. She entered that wordlessness and sat with us. We eventually talked a little. She’d brought a shamrock plant and laughter, both offered oxygen.

Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes of this same kind of overwhelm, this wordlessness, in her poem, “Blood,”

I call my father, we talk around the news.

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.2

Poetry and Christian theology enter into wordless spaces and work their best to open the portals of our “cold, cold hearts.”3 Poetry and theology, like my friend Wendy, give us safe breathing space to let our guards down, to feel for a moment in the chaos. They have the power to resuscitate us. Not always, but often. Something or Someone has to step in. Something or Someone has to staunch the bleeding heart.

Entering into wordless spaces, the very act of supplying something in place of nothing, is what poetry and theology do best. The particularities of one, mentioned in a poem, or in lines of Scripture, can be akin to the particularities of us all. At their best, these sisters Poetry and Theology show us we are not alone, others have been here before, have felt this, too. Then we can see how words connect us to the Word, and the bigger story of time and space and history, how we came to be.

Go back, go back, before there is until:

melt the rocks, evaporate the seas,

put out the stars, and bid the wind be still—

’til Light is all that only Light can see.4

In both Hebrew and Greek scriptures, God utters creation into being. Both Genesis and the Gospel of John exhibit creative power in language, in speaking, and in the breath behind it. One who writes poetry might tell you it’s what a poet tries to do with their smaller power, to name things, to breathe life into them, cause a person to look, then look closer. At their best, poetry and theology send fresh air and language into the chasm where everyday language and “close countable lines”5 fall short.

In our lungs, the alveoli are where life-giving exchanges take place. Carbon dioxide releases, oxygen diffuses into the body. The breath of life. Spirit, in Hebrew ruah or in Koine Greek pneuma, involves moving air. The Spirit moves in, through, and among us. The breath of life moves free as a breeze.

I wrote of the Spirit, “Paraclete,”6

A thing with feathers

rare bird—

conspiratress of

winged things,

perches in the soul’s spire

drops white feathers

of desire.

Using the word “conspiratress” in the poem was an attempt to get at this notion of the breath of life, although presently, “conspiracy” has other connotations. “Conspiratress” etymologically is connected to inspiration, to conspire, which means collective inspiration, to breathe together.

Poetry and theology provide solace when the disconnection of a world torn asunder feels heavy, when we see the distance between what could be and what is. Somehow, through the diligent employment of the right word, through Christ-the-Word supplying visions of hope for the world, we are able to offer our “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”7 These provide a haven when a beach is stormed, when towers fall, when crisis surges. At such times, theology and poetry are desired because they provide meaning, concision, and figurative language. When people of faith are called to walk in darkness, we do not go into or reside in the darkness alone. The Word and words can offer provision in the absence of visible light.

We’ve watched healthcare providers persevere with their healing work in the midst of this Covid-19 pandemic. They continued to work when the work got harder, more dire. They carried on. It’s in this messiness of human life where poetry and theology roll up their sleeves, offering words as salves, offering prayers as slings to hold up and support what broke, and supplying challenges for us to do better, to be better. The pandemonium of life stretches people, stretches language, too. Sometimes only the sound of sheer silence matters.8

We see language strained when it comes to the Divine. Religious and spiritual traditions have long wrestled with how and what to call the gloriousness and presence of God. Sometimes things are too ephemeral, too big for our language.

Since my friend João Magueijo9 studies the cosmos, I thought I’d ask him about the limits of language. I asked him, “You deal with such huge concepts, is there ever a situation where something is too big to be named?”

He replied, “Well, we have mathematics. Not that that does not break down, but it certainly does so much further along the line than words. Words are terrible.”

Words can be terrible. To speak of poetry and theology is also to mention bad poetry and rotten theology. We’ve all seen examples of these, poetry and theology opaque as mud.

Alice Oswald,10 Oxford Professor of Poetry, in her Inaugural Lecture said, “I’d like you to trust your ears and your memories and your imaginations and to trust in fact that a poem isn’t always what happens in the words but is the trace that the words leave inside you as it vanishes.”

What are these traces? What remains? The Holy Spirit is in many ways “the trace” Jesus leaves when he departs, the One left after the Word has spoken with his life.

“The words are purposes. The words are maps,” Adrienne Rich wrote.11 They are. They always have been.

It is early yet

to divine the way

to limn the shape of pleasure, pain,

to hear the melody of fear or faith, and so

I hope.12

Our Words of Institution13 are traces resounding within us at communion. These well-worn words linger as we offer thanks, as we remember a body broken, sins forgiven, a world recovered by God.

Older still, the poetry of the Psalms has spoken to generations for thousands of years, about the Presence of God in the midst of existential angst.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,

who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,

will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress;

my God, in whom I trust.”

For the Lord will deliver you from the snare of the hunter

and from the deadly pestilence;

the Lord will cover you with pinions,

and under the Lord’s wings you will find refuge;

the Lord’s faithfulness is a shield and defense.

You will not fear the terror of the night

or the arrow that flies by day

or the pestilence that stalks in darkness

or the destruction that wastes at noonday.14

As a poet, there are times I use poetry to figure things out, to try to contain an emotion or something that happened that I’m struggling to plumb. As a clergyperson, I know God is One no theology, no poem, no container can hold. God busts out of any tomb or home or box with which we work to capture and hold onto God. Like the Hindu Vaishnava story of Krishna and the milkmaids, the milkmaids can dance with Krishna, but once they claim Krishna as only for them, they find they are dancing alone. God is both within our grasp and beyond it too.

The Holy busts out of all confinements. Even our best theological efforts fall short. With the human-made clay pot of poetry, can it contain what it means to be human? Can it contain the horrors of having been a slave, like poet Phillis Wheatley? Or the mourning of Anne Dudley Bradstreet for her deceased grandchildren? What about Kazam Ali’s shame of being born gay in a Muslim family?

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God will still welcome you.—15

Can it contain joy, like July Westhale’s Bright News of Gladiolas?16 Or the exuberant listing of delights in Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude?17 Walt Whitman declared, “I contain multitudes,”18 and poems can, too. We can read poems centuries after they were written and feel traces reverberate within us. Poems can move our souls like scripture can.

Poetry and theology allow for both/and. We see in both poetry and theology room for remembering and for forgetting, holding on and letting go, in life and in death.

“And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.”19

Dickinson, on AppleTV, incorporates poet Emily Dickinson’s writing, like these words of hers to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”20

The year Drake turned eight, I taught a poetry unit to his class, teaching some famous poems including free verse and form poetry. A well-written poem with lines that rhyme, like Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” has a resounding resonance. Form poetry’s meter and rhyme make it easy to learn, while its meaning may take years to grasp. My kids learned Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” via osmosis, as kids do, listening to me try to memorize it by reciting aloud at bath time.

In Drake’s class, I put a clear bowl of water before the students and asked them to write poems about it. Poems emerged from the kids about a frog in a pond, about ice skating, a girl going swimming, and one about a student losing a sibling.

The Reverend Dirk Ficca said, “Symbols work for all ages. The very young can grasp a symbol, as can the very old.” Water in a bowl became countless things as kids squirmed in their chairs, their minds brimming with what else the bowl of water was or could be.

In her poem “Good Bones,” Maggie Smith concludes her poem with these lines,

Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.21

Smith’s ending feels like the insufflating action of poetry and theology, like a fitting benediction about humanity’s role in the world, “This place could be beautiful, right? We could make this place beautiful.”

Our son Drake survived his week in the hospital. His lungs healed over time. I’ve sat with families where this was not the case. Daily somewhere nearby the wordlessness of the hospital segues into the wordlessness of grief. Every day someone we know, often someone we love, gets a dire diagnosis, or cannot pull through. There are those, too, who grieve the-still-living, with the loss of a loved one to an intractable medical condition, grieve the loss of the dreams and desires which never will come to pass.

At the time of this writing, children in Uvalde, Texas, have been shot and killed while at school, not long after others were shot grocery shopping in Buffalo, New York. The war in Ukraine is one hundred days old, with maximum shelling in the Donbas region. Meanwhile, a short plane ride from Miami, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, children die daily of malnutrition. Poet Lucille Clifton wrote:

come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.22

We are still here. While we have breath, perhaps this is our challenge, to find something to savor and celebrate amidst the losses, to watch for the traces of God in the world and in ourselves, and to give thanks. To roll up our sleeves, if we are able, and to help where there is suffering, to sit in silence when and where words are empty husks.

Sometimes when I hug Drake, my head at chest level on him now, I listen to his breathing, like I listened when he was a child. He doesn’t know I’m listening, he’ll put his chin on the top of my head. But, I listen. In the dark expanse of his chest, there’s a steady lub dub lub dub of his heart, a circuitous echo of air in his lungs. As poet Jane Kenyon wrote, “It might have been otherwise.”23

I give thanks his breathing happens effortlessly, there’s nothing he consciously has to do to catch the next breath, nor the one after that. I give thanks for that easy exchange.

NOTES

1. Paul Hooker, The Hole in the Heart of God: Stories of Creation and Redemption (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2021), 37.

2. Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48602/blood- 56d229f9da8a9

3. “Cold, cold heart” is a lyric sung by Dua Lipa and Elton John. John, Elton, Taupin, Bernie, and Dua Lipa. “Cold Heart (PNAU Remix).” Track 1. The Lockdown Sessions. Mercury Records Limited, 2021. CD.

4. Hooker, The Hole in the Heart of God: Stories of Creation and Redemption, 4.

5. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Looking up from my book,” Uncollected Poems trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 1996), 85.

6. Susan Baller-Shepard, “Paraclete,” Doe (Georgetown, Kentucky: Finishing Line Press, 2019), 83.

7. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself,” The Treasury of American Poetry: A Collection of the Best Loved Poems by American Poets. Ed. Nancy Sullivan (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1993), 256.

8. I Kings 19: 11-12

9. João Magueijo, one of the pioneers of VSL (varying speed of light theory), is a cosmologist and professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London.

10. Alice Oswald, Inaugural Lecture “The Art of Erosion.” University of Oxford Exam Schools, December 9, 2019. http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/professor-poetry.

11. Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” Poems Selected and New, 1950-1974 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1975), 197.

12. Paul Hooker, “Four Poems at Sunrise,” Days and Times: Poems from the Liturgy of Living (Resource Publication, 2018), 64.

13. Liturgy for Presbytery Celebrations of the Lord’s Supper https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/ media/uploads/sharedcelebration/pdfs/liturgy.pdf

14. Psalm 91:1-6 NRSV modified with inclusive language

15. Ali, Kazim, “Home.” Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), muse.jhu.edu/book/450.

16. July Westhale, Bright News of Gladiolas (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021).

17. Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

18. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51. https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51.

19. Christina Rosetti, “Song [When I Am Dead My Dearest].” https://poets.org/poem/song-wheni-am-dead-my-dearest

20. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” The Atlantic, October Issue, 1891. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsons-letters/306524/

21. Maggie Smith, “Good Bones,” Waxwing magazine. Issue IX, Summer 2016.

22. Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me.” Book of Light (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1992), 25.

23. Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise,” Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1996), 214.

Susan Baller-Shepard is a poet, activist, and Presbyterian pastor. Her words and photography have appeared in national print and digital platforms. Her poetry collection Doe (Finishing Line Press, 2019) was featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She has worked on development programs internationally and taught at the college level.