The day is coming closer for “A Spring Celebration of Poetry
and Art”—it sounds so lovely, doesn’t
it—as indeed it sounded when I initially agreed to participate. It’s at Bethany House of Prayer, a retreat
center alongside the Order of St, Anne, a tiny convent where my husband Noah and I have
said the Eucharist once a month for just about as long as we have been priests--more than eight years. I love the chapel
there—it’s all white washed stone and cool, and embodies hospitality in the
most generous way. When Isaiah was born in 2007, we bundled him up at 10 days
old and brought him there for church for the first time on Easter Sunday. It’s
a holy place for me, for which I am all the more grateful.
It will be lovely. But, of course, I'm terrified.
Alex at Back Pages Books in Waltham helped me publish the
work I did on sabbatical (with Christ Church’s own Kristin Harvey’s cover
design), so it’s now a real chapbook—with color cover art and ISBN number and
everything—it’s so REAL. And it costs $10.
$10!
I picked up my books from the printer this morning. I know I
wrote the poems—I stared down blank pages and an empty computer screen all
fall. But something about poetry more than prose seems so vulnerable—it’s all
me on the page, my joy and my anxiety, my sense of blessing and my sense of
lack. It’s out there now—I can’t take it back and
edit one more time. “Ordinary” writing feels much safer; one wrong word out of
500 is less risky than one wrong choice out of 40. And,
of course, poetry isn’t for everyone. My
spouse, for example: not a poetry person.
Poetry is about experience, in any case; not so much
argument or idea, which is the attraction and the danger. There's nothing to hide behind. It just is what
it is. Beautiful, ugly, or irrelevant. The title, “Ashes/What remains” is an
allusion to the idea that the life of faith involves a certain stripping away, layer
upon layer yielding to what’s most important.
After not working for three months last fall, I felt shadowy, but
whatever was left over was just as much me as a sunny face at a kids’ sermon or
a groggy opening prayer at the early service.
Sabbatical time is Sabbath time: abstaining from traditional work, you
can’t hide from yourself anymore with all of those “crucial” tasks. Staring down into not-doing can feel awfully
close to staring down into not-being, which is terrifying, and certainly a big
part of the reason I try to be busy so often.
What came up for me at the center, what the poems are mostly
about, are my different vocations—of being a priest and a parent. I
recently got my kids’ names tattooed in a half-sleeve of my upper right arm
(along with some birds and flowers, as children are wont to do it took up more
space than I’d planned—see “Re Entry” for more on that), which I jokingly
called my “mommy tattoo”—some of these are definitely mommy poems. And they are all priest poems. Writing is a sacramental knock-your-socks-off
pay attention gift. When we celebrate the Eucharist, we take very ordinary
things and ask God to come into them, to make Christ alive and to feed us with
his body.
In my poems, I feel something similar; I’m taking very
ordinary things—a sibling squabble, a bird staring at a pond—and asking them to
translate God’s presence in the world. Something about the action of looking
carefully makes anything seem possible. I see the heron; she lets me recognize my
instability, inviting me to shut up for a moment and realize how noisy I am. I see my kids complaining at each other; they
show me all the traps of self-absorption and scapegoating we never seem to grow
out of. A fair number of “first world problems” are
catalogued in there, too—that’s where I get a little more self-conscious. Packing
school lunches is a drag, but it beats no lunch at all.
Anyway—it’s Sunday at 3pm, 181 Appleton Street, Arlington.
Also buy the book. I’ll put links up when they’re ready.
