The Cloister Walk (10 page)

And once, when I was visiting a second-grade classroom and the children were showing me drawings they'd done in celebration of fall, a restless, untidy little boy reluctantly retrieved his from the bottom of a pile of papers. The drawing depicted a man throwing a football, with the ball shown in every stage of the arc. It was the way an engineer might depict a football pass, but the boy (and I suspect, his teacher) was convinced that he had done the drawing “wrong.” I wondered if his exile had begun, and where it would lead him.

Working with children on the writing of poetry has led me to ponder the ways that most of us become exiled from the certainties of childhood; how it is that the things we most treasure when we're young are exactly those things we come to spurn as teenagers and young adults. Very small children are often conscious of God, for example, in ways that adults seldom are. They sing to God, they talk to God, they recognize divine presence in the world around them: they can see the Virgin Mary dancing among the clouds, they know that God made a deep ravine by their house “because he was angry when people would not love him,” they believe that an overnight snowfall is “just like Jesus glowing on the mountaintop.” Yet these budding theologians often despise church by the time they're in eighth grade.

In a similar way, the children who un-selfconsciously make up songs and poems when they're young—I once observed a three-year-old singing a passionate ode to the colorful vegetables in a supermarket—quickly come to regard poetry as meaningless and irrelevant. I began to despise mathematics when I sensed that I was getting only part of the story, a dull, literal-minded version of what in fact was a great mystery, and I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them. If we teach children when they're young to reject their epiphanies, then it's no wonder that we end up with so many adults who are mathematically, poetically, and theologically illiterate.

Some teachers still require children to copy bad nineteenth-century verse as a handwriting exercise. And in most classrooms I've been in, the teacher assumes that she is “teaching” the students the ordinary tools of language that are in fact the basis of human intelligence. Once, in a fourth-grade classroom, after I'd talked about metaphor, made up some silly examples on the board, and also read and discussed several deeply metaphorical poems, I asked the students to come up with metaphors of their own. The teacher warned me, “This isn't a subject they've studied,” but I replied, “They'll know how to do it, they just don't know the word for it yet.” She and I had our own epiphanies that day, and that class turned out to be one of the best I ever worked with.

As children grow older and are asked to analyze poetry, they are taught that separating out the elements in the poem—images, similes, metaphors—is the only way to “appreciate” it. As if the poem is somehow less than the whole of its parts, a frog students must dissect in order to make it live; as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class. The metaphorical intelligence that has pulled disparate elements together to make the poem is of no consequence. Clearly it has not been taught, in most classrooms I've visited, as one of the more intriguing elements of the human imagination.

And do we do any better when it comes to the teaching of religion? The liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw makes a valuable distinction between theology and liturgy: theology is prose, she says, but liturgy is poetry. “If faith is about facts,” she writes, “then we line up the children and make them memorize questions and answers . . . But if we are dealing with poetry instead of prose . . . then we do not teach answers to questions. We memorize not answers but the chants of the ordinary; we explain liturgical action . . . we immerse people in worship so that they, too, become part of the metaphoric exchange.”

Metaphor has been so degraded in our culture that it may be difficult for people to conceive of worship as a “metaphoric exchange.” But as a poet I am willing to explore the implications. How would it change our understanding of worship if, from the time they were small, children were taught to value and explore the possibilities of Keats's “negative capability” in themselves? They might better understand faith as a process, and church tradition as not only relevant but strikingly alive.

The ancient understanding of Christian worship is that, in the words of the liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh, it “gives rise to theological reflection, and not the other way around.” We can see the obvious truth of this by shifting our attention to poetry, and entertaining the notion that one might grow into faith much as one writes a poem. It takes time, patience, discipline, a listening heart. There is precious little certainty, and often great struggling, but also joy in our discoveries. This joy we experience, however, is not visible or quantifiable; we have only the words and form of the poem, the results of our exploration. Later, the thinkers and definers come along and treat these results as the whole
—Let's see; here she's used a metaphor, and look, she's made up a rhyme scheme. Let's stick with it. Let's teach it. Let's make it a rule.
What began as an experiment, a form of play, an attempt to engage in dialogue with mystery, is now a dogma, set in stone. It is something that can be taught in school.

Let's return to our classroom setting, only this time we'll be exploring faith as well as poetry. A poem, as Mallarmé once said, is not made of ideas but of words, and faith also expresses itself through that which is lived, breathed, uttered, left silent. If faith, like poetry, is a process, not a product, then this class will be messier than we can imagine. To make the poem of our faith, we must learn not to settle for a false certitude but to embrace ambiguity and mystery. Our goal will be to recover our original freedom, our childlike (but never childish) wisdom. It will be difficult to lose our adult self-consciousness (here the discipline of writing can help us), difficult not to confuse our worship with self-expression. (All too often the call for “creativity” in worship simply leads to bad art.)

We will need a powerful catalyst. In any institution, while there's always the sacred “way we've always done it,” and certainly a place for the traditions that such an attitude reflects, there is also a spirit at work that has more to do with being than with doing.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a
discipline.
The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise—to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things—in order to make it come out right.

When it comes to faith, while there are guidelines—for Christians, the Bible and the scaffolding of the church's theology and tradition—there is no one right way to do it. Flannery O'Connor once wisely remarked that “most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow,” and Martin Buber implies that discovering that means might constitute our life's work. He states that: “All [of us] have access to God, but each has a different access. [Our] great chance lies precisely in [our] unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one [person].” He illustrates this with a story about Rabbi Zusya, who said, a short while before his death, “In the world to come I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not Moses?' I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not Zusya?” The rabbi is not speaking of a vague “personal spirituality” that allows him to be Zusya alone; he knows himself to be a part of the people of Israel.

For myself, I have found that being a member of a church congregation, and also following, as I am able, the discipline of Benedict's Rule, has helped me to take my path toward God without falling into the trap of thinking of myself as “a church of one.” I have also found that the Benedictines are a good illustration of Buber's point. Although their members follow a common way of life, monasteries do not produce cookie-cutter monks and nuns. Just the opposite. Monasteries have a unity that is remarkably unrestrained by uniformity; they are comprised of distinct individuals, often memorable characters, whose eccentricities live for generations in the community's oral history.

The first time I went to a monastery, I dreamed about the place for a week, and the most vivid dream was of the place as a chemistry lab. Might religion be seen as an experiment in human chemistry? And the breath of the divine as the catalyst that sparks reactions and makes our humble institutions work as well as they do, often despite ourselves? Imagination and reason, those vital elements of human intelligence, are adept at dismantling our delusions. Both bring us up against our true abilities and our limitations. But we've gotten ourselves into a curious mess in the modern world. We've grown afraid of the imagination (except as a misguided notion of a “creativity” granted to a few) and yet are less and less capable of valuing rationality as another resource of our humanity, of our
religious
humanity. We end up with a curious spectrum of popular religions, a rigid fundamentalism at one end, and New Age otherworldliness, manifested in “angel channeling workshops,” on the other. And even religious institutions—I'll speak here of the Christian churches, because they are what I know—often manifest themselves as anything but Christ's humble body on earth. What gets lost in all of this is any viable sense of the sacred that gives both imagination and reason room to play.

Can poets be of any use here? I believe so, though I'm not sure of the reasons why. I may be doodling. But the sense of the sacred is very much alive in contemporary poetry; maybe because poetry, like prayer, is a dialogue with the sacred. And poets speak from the margins, those places in the ecosystem where, as any ecologist can tell you, the most life forms are to be found. The poet Maxine Kumin has described herself as “an unreconstructed atheist who believes in the mystery of the creative process,” while my husband, who is both a lyric poet and a computer programmer, declares himself to be “a scientific rationalist who believes in ghosts.” If, as Gail Ramshaw has said, “Christianity requires metaphoric thinking,” if, as a Benedictine liturgist once said to me, the loss of the ability to think metaphorically is one of the greatest problems in liturgy today, maybe the voices of poets are the ones we need to hear.

I hear many stories these days from people who are exiled from their religious traditions. They, also, speak from the margins. Many, like me, are members of the baby-boom generation who dropped religious observance after high school or college, and are now experiencing an enormous hunger for spiritual grounding. One woman wrote to me to say that she felt a great longing for ritual and community; she said she wanted to mark the year with more than watching the trees change. She'd joined some political organizations and a women's service club but found that it wasn't enough. She was afraid to even think of joining a church—the Bible makes her angry, more often than not—but she thought she might have to.

There is no set of rules for her to follow, but only the messy process of life to be lived. Since what she's seeking is salvation, and not therapy, not political or social relevance, I suspect that she might eventually find what she is looking for in the practice of prayer and in communal worship. And if things work as they should, whatever healing needs to happen, whatever larger social dimension she needs to address, will grow organically out of those experiences, that community. But how does she get from here to there?

She may be closer than she knows. The Anglican bishop John V. Taylor has said, “Imagination and faith are the same thing, ‘giving substance to our hopes and reality to the unseen.' The whole Bible endorses this, and if believers talked about faith in these terms they would be more readily understood.” In the Book of Deuteronomy, the commandment of God is revealed not as an inaccessible mystery but as “something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out” (Deut. 30:14). And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is!' or, ‘There it is.' For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21).

The boy who wrote about his absent father had a story to tell. His heart was in exile, and the catalyst of poetry helped it come home. And what of the catalyst of faith? Drawing both from our reason and our capacity for negative capability, faith might help us see that our most valuable experiences are always those which leave us, as the sculptor and critic Edward Robinson has said, with “an unaccountable remainder . . . 2 plus 2 equals 5 experiences” that remind us that our relationships with each other and the world are more mysterious than we care to admit. In the universe God made, the real world we call home, love is bigger than Texas, and even death itself, and 2 plus 2 might be 0, 11, or even 4.