September, 2024

by Reader John Simmons

“Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet. That’s what it is! You must suffer. You must love and suffer–suffer for the one you love. Love makes effort for the loved one. She runs all through the night; she stays awake; she stains her feet with blood in order to meet her beloved. She makes sacrifices and disregards all impediments, threats, and difficulties for the sake of the loved one. Love towards Christ is something even higher, infinitely higher."
―Elder Porphyrios

“A poem is a linguistic artefact that generates meaning through the indivisibility of form and content, meter and matter, intention and expression……On a broadly Orthodox understanding of theology, poetic modes of apprehension and expression are germane to theology because of the predominantly apophatic nature of our knowledge of God and, at the same time, because of theology’s primary embodiment or realization in liturgy, hymnody and prayer."

―Daniel Gustaffson (article linked below)

“Literature is news that stays news”

―Ezra Pound, founder of the “Imagist” school of poetry

“Beauty will save the world”

―Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

I spent a good part of four days last week at the 10th Annual San Jose Poetry Festival, run by Poetry Center San Jose. I enoyed hearing live spoken word performances, poetry of all kinds, workshops for writing, including haikus and other forms. I have connected with Poetry Center San Jose in and out since about 1985, and had a couple things published in their journal Caesura.

As much as I enjoyed the events, I felt that something was missing or off. The poetry represented varied in quality, but also in topics, tone and what inspired it. The poetry presented was a product of our current world in all of its facets, and I felt a longing for something more. What could have come over me? It was clear that I was looking for poetry that reached for higher inspiration.

Poetry is given a very important status in the Orthodox Church. It forms the backbone of our divine services, starting with the psalter, and then all of the forms of liturgical poetry and prayer. All of the divine services, and even private prayers are filled with poetic expressions and forms; canons, akathists and more.

Holy Fathers such as St. Ephrem the Syrian, wrote instructive texts as if they were poetry. St. Theophan the Recluse noticed this quality of St. Ephrem, and arranged selections of his writings in 150 chapters, calling it “A Spiritual Psalter”.

Poetry is an art form that integrates many things at once: meaning, beauty, artistic form, phanopoeia, the imagery that the words evoke, melopoeia, or the music contained in the words when they are spoken, and logopoeia, which Pound called “the dance of the intellect among words”. This indicates that the words go far beyond mere literal meanings, but contain allegories and evocations that defy simple categorization. We do not just read good poetry - we experience it, and we must learn how. The words do not always reveal themselves, until we consider them carefully. This is all the more important when reading the scriptures and other spiritual texts.

Love for poetry, especially that which inspires, is one of the things that seems to be missing from our contemporary data-driven world. An AI can mimic poetic form, but it cannot transmit the kind of deep integral communication from a deeply joined mind and heart, as a poet can. It is even more important to be in regular contact with those poetries that transform us from the inside out.

“In the sensual (or feeling) part of the soul, there appears a yearning and love for the beautiful. The eye does not want to tear itself away from the flower and the ear does not want to tear itself away from the song, only because the one and the other are beautiful. We go for a walk and select a place for the single reason that it is beautiful. Above this is the enjoyment received from paintings, works of sculpture, music and singing, and even higher than this, the enjoyment received from poetry."

―St. Theophan the Recluse

Poetry as Theology: Reflections on Ephrem the Syrian and Richard Wilbur

By Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann

The Church’s veneration of Mary has always been rooted in her obedience to God, her willing choice to accept a humanly impossible calling. The Orthodox Church has always emphasized Mary’s connection to humanity and delighted in her as the best, purest, most sublime fruition of human history and of man’s quest for God, for ultimate meaning, for the ultimate content of human life.

If in Western Christianity veneration of Mary was centered upon her perpetual virginity, the heart of the Orthodox Christian East’s devotion, contemplation, and joyful delight, has always been her Motherhood, her flesh and blood connection to Jesus Christ. The East rejoices that the human role in the divine plan is pivotal. The Son of God comes to earth, appears in order to redeem the world, He becomes human to incorporate man into His divine vocation, but humanity takes part in this. If it is understood that Christ’s “co-nature” with us is as a human being and not some phantom or bodiless apparition, that He is one of us and forever united to us through His humanity, then devotion to Mary also becomes understandable, for she is the one who gave Him His human nature, His flesh and blood. She is the one through whom Christ can always call Himself “The Son of Man.”

Son of God, Son of Man…God descending and becoming man so that man could become divine, could become partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), or as the teachers of Church expressed it, “deified.” Precisely here, in this extraordinary revelation of man’s authentic nature and calling, is the source that gratitude and tenderness which cherishes Mary as our link to Christ and, in Him, to God. And nowhere is this reflected more clearly that in the Nativity of the Mother of God.

This feast therefore is first a general celebration of Man’s birth, and we no longer remember the anguish, as the Gospel says, “for joy that a human being is born into the world” (Jn. 16:21). Secondly, we now know whose particular birth, whose coming we celebrate: Mary’s. We know the uniqueness, the beauty, the grace of precisely this child, her destiny, her meaning for us and for the whole world. And thirdly, we celebrate all who prepared the way for Mary, who contributed to her inheritance of grace and beauty…And therefore the Feast of her Nativity is also a celebration of human history, a celebration of faith in man, a celebration of man.

Sadly, the inheritance of evil is far more visible and better known (than the inheritance of grace and beauty!) There is so much evil around us that this faith in man, in his freedom, in the possibility of handing down a radiant inheritance of goodness has almost evaporated being replaced by cynicism and suspicion. This hostile cynicism and discouraging suspicion are precisely what seduce us to distance ourselves from the Church when it celebrates with such joy and faith this birth of a little girl in whom are concentrated all the goodness, spiritual beauty, harmony and perfection that are elements of genuine human nature. Thus, in celebrating Mary’s birth we find ourselves already on the road to Bethlehem, moving toward the joyful mystery of Mary as the Mother of God. Amen.