The more I study theology, the less confident I feel about doing evangelism. If that sounds disheartening, please be assured that I remain committed to both. To explain: at earlier stages of my faith, I was bold in declaring the gospel in quite mechanistic ways; but gradually, these rather brash versions of Christian proclamation have seemed less and less adequate. I want to share the beauty and mystery of God and his relations with the world – but beauty and mystery don’t fit so easily onto bumper stickers. I’ve found myself casting around for help. One sphere I’ve reached out to - or which perhaps has reached out to me - is the sphere of poetry.
What thoughts come into your mind, dear reader, when I use the word ‘poetry’? Perhaps you think of something pleasant but rather frivolous at best, somewhat ornamental to the real stuff of life. Or perhaps the term dredges up memories of dire afternoons in high school English classes trying to work out what on earth some author was on about. It is my assertion that poetry need be neither a distracting frippery nor an impenetrable enigma. What I want to argue in this article is based on a hunch – a hunch that poetry can be of great service as a tool, and indeed as an end of the gospel itself.
To bring my discussion into focus, I shall be sharing the work of two very different contemporary Christian poets. The first is Anglican priest, poet and scholar Malcolm Guite, whose theological writing and literary criticism underpins and informs much of my own thinking; the second is Kenneth Steven, a poet whose work draws on the Celtic tradition and the landscape of his native Scotland.
The Way of Poetry
We might begin by asking: what is poetry? Despite being woefully under-qualified to do so, I will offer a hesitant definition to get us going. What we can say is poetry is a form of ordered language that is distinct in some ways from prose. It exhibits a certain intensity of language, often employing strange or unusual words and combinations of words to bring to bear fresh or recovered insight to the world. Expressing a similar set of ideas, Rowan Williams calls poetic language ‘language under pressure deployed as a means of exploration.’ [1]
Now there are all sorts of further issues raised by these working definitions, but for now, let us ask a related question which is no less mysterious, but is more germane to the discussion at hand: how does poetry ‘work’?
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[1] Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 133.
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