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Praying the Gospels Through Poetry: Lent to Easter

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In "Praying the Gospels through Poetry," precursor to her equally compelling, post-9/11 "Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times," Peggy Rosenthal invites the reader to weave poetry and prayer through the portion of the Christian year commemorating Christ's road to trial, crucifixion and resurrection. So we begin on Ash Wednesday with a taste of poet Vassar Miller's "Love's Bitten Tongue", admixed with commentator Rosenthal's wondering whether the poem's title might be "the longed-for silencing of ego[,] perhaps a silencing of my tongue?" But Miller (and Rosenthal, who closed her more academically oriented "The Poets' Jesus" with Miller, as she opens with her here) is arguing silence not for its own sake only, but to lead us to an encounter beyond silence too.

Another taking to the tongue (or pen) of the word drawn from a listening encounter is presented in the half-dozen pages given over to the third Sunday of Lent, which opens (as does each of the book's ten chapters) with the gospel reading for the week, this time of a woman drawing water from a well for Jesus. If I may not be surprised to find a pope quoted in a book published by a Catholic publishing house, I am delighted at the poetry surfaced of one here -- in Karol Wojtyla's "Song of the Brightness of Water." And so too may find, with him, "my eyes more transfixed by light / than by sorrow" in a song such as this. Ripple upon ripple moves out from the surface broken by a woman's response to Jesus, propagated yet further on a poet's listening for a word, and a reader's taking it into their own experience. "Through the isolation of one moment...the poet transfigures the experience... out of a page into the heart of a reader" observes poet Sophie M. Starnes.

Brought thus along the way toward the deadly silences surrounding Good Friday, I am held now sharp to tongue, "bridled" even. As our guide leads us through Ku Sang's "Even the Knots on Quince Trees," inviting us to pause on each of its opening lines -- "A bridled," "foaming," "drooling" "cow" (!), we are brought, with the poet in his Buddhist surrounding, then-"Aged four, [to his] first revelation" of something like the existence Christ suffered; of something like the compassion Veronica reached to offer. Of something like the sacred witness poets, pray-ers, and those seeking to continue the sacred exchange offered by our guide reach to make. No matter the stifling others may prefer.

I don't like to be told how to live my spiritual life. I don't like to be told how to interpret poetry. This slim--in more ways than one--volume violates both principles of mine. I hated the book. However, it is so unrelentingly bad, and short enough, that I loved hating it. Quite a tonic, in the end, but not as intended.