Let the Poets Prod You
On developing new spiritual metaphors
When it comes to poetry and faith, there are some who primarily view poetry as a balm. They want it to confirm their view of the world and provide some comfort in hard times. I don’t think this is wrong—after all, what Christian hasn’t had the famous lines of Psalm 23 come rising to their mind or lips during a trying time as a prayer?
The other edge of this sword, however, is that the familiar and the comforting can often become cliche, and the cliche becomes a dull edge that is incapable of piercing our imaginations.
As a poet, I think about the nature of language and metaphor a lot, and particularly so these past few years as I’ve been working on my most spiritual collection of poetry yet. Having gone through some pretty significant faith shifts, I’ve been forced to reexamine the ways in which my spiritual imagination and language has become dulled by familiarity. I’ve been driven to consider things like whether the Bible is supposed to be our only source of language and imagery about God, or are we tasked as each new generation to develop new language for our experience of the Divine? The Bible mostly refers to God in masculine and fatherly language, but what if God is also motherly and gender-full? What if God is not just a “rock” but a tree, or a group of children running through the forest? What if the Holy Spirit isn’t just a “dove” but a flaming red cardinal?
Now, I understand that to some people of faith, just reading these questions might shut you down. Such curiosity feels out of bounds and dangerous. I know that feeling because I’ve been there. And I don’t want to push anyone beyond what they’re comfortable with.
All I will say is that I’ve found fresh vision and expression for my faith in exploring new language for God, and one of the ways this has happened is reading other spiritual poets, in my case in particular, Rainer Maria Rilke (who I’ve written about elsewhere).
Former philosophy professor Peter Rickman says of Rilke’s images, particularly in The Book of Hours:
There is…an avalanche of metaphorical references to God; some still picture Him as a person: a peasant with a beard, the heir to whom the poet’s soul offers herself as a woman. Many more do not. There are passive images: the tower around which birds circle; the forest in which we wander. Others are active: God is the great breaker of walls of a besieged town; He is the turning wheel, the axis about which the poet turns. Particularly challenging to the intellect is the image of God as the cathedral we are building. Obviously He is no longer just a human figure or a trinity.
In exploring why Rilke employed so many new metaphors Rickman explains:
I personally consider Rilke’s view of the poet’s task a valuable clue…..The poet is on a holy mission for his poems which in Rilke’s own words sanctify and celebrate…..Reality requires our articulation of it in language. The empirical world is partly the result of linguistic structuring. The next step in his argument is to show the poet as the creative pioneer of language seeking ever more precise and illuminating expression of our experience.
If we believe God is reality, then God also requires our articulation within human language. As I see it, the biblical writers were doing this very thing in their own times and places, coming up with metaphors that made sense to them as they tried to give words to the Divine Mystery. When David wrote “The Lord is my shepherd”, he employed an image and metaphor from his time and place that would have made sense to his readers. If you were asked to complete the sentence “God is my ______” today, without any reference to the Bible, what would you insert in that blank spot?
This, I think, is in some part the task of the modern spiritual poet, to imagine new ways to fill in that blank—to respect the language and the metaphor that has come before, but to prod us into imagining our experience with the Divine in fresh and illuminating ways for our time and place.
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