Pastors as Poets 7 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

My friend Bill Jones, poet and pastor, comes to the house once every few months for what we call our “poetry teas.” Bill pastors a church in the countryside a couple hours from my city, but when he’s nearby on business we try to arrange a time to chat over tea about what we’ve been reading, writing, living.

Bill always re-connects me to poets I’d drifted away from. At our last tea-time, it was Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem sequence, Stations. Bill enthusiastically recalled in detail his favorite poems in the sequence—energizing me to pick up these poems again.

(With my poet-friends, the stock conversation-starter “Have you read any good books lately?” is truly the question we are together to ask and answer with eager anticipation.)

Then Bill read me one of his own recently composed poems, “Sky-borne.” The setting is an outdoor wedding and reception, and the poem’s closing image still haunts me:

but after, an aunt has to slip away still,
making her way stealth from tittering nieces,
hearing aids laid on the ground by her side,
to lie on the hillside and search out the star;
the one burned in heaven her daughter made leaving
when she, gathered first, pierced her way into night

and, who's to say, if there’s more love to find
than the arc a fifteen-year-old has left in her wake.

I’m guessing that some members of the wedding party discovered the aunt lying on the hillside and later mentioned this to the pastor, but her searching the stars for her lost daughter is where the action is for the poem: it is the poet’s entering the aunt’s experience with his imagination. And the resonance of the multiple meanings of the final word “wake” is of course a hallmark of the poet’s craft.

Not all of Bill’s poems spring from pastoring experiences, but of course some do. As Denise Levertov once said, a poet naturally writes about what she experiences. For Levertov, this was a statement in defense of her composing politically-engaged poetry during the time when she herself was politically engaged. Similarly, since pastors are pastorally engaged, some of their poems will naturally jump off from those experiences: weddings, funerals, confidences, even endless committees.

But not all their poems. I think of U.C.C. pastor and poet Maren Tirabassi, whose collection The Depth of Wells (Peter E. Randall, 2000) includes a poem like “At the Gallery” (a sharp reflection on spectators’ avoidance of a painting of a prostitute in a Picasso exhibit) along with a wry but touching poem about presiding at the funeral of a thirteen year-old boy: “The Boy in the Box at My Feet,” which

is all cinder and ashes, and a smile…

The funeral director asks
if she can put it under my feet,
behind the pulpit...

“Please don’t stumble on him,”
she says.

I think also of the Anglican Welsh priest R.S. Thomas, who died in 2000. Many of his poems pay homage to his tough, working class parishioners in the bleak rural community he served.

But many, too, meditate on theological motifs—and especially on Thomas’s sense of God’s absence as he, poet and pastor, waits and waits and waits in the “empty church” for a sign of the God whom he still never gives up believing in. Typical is his poem “Kneeling”:

Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God To speak....

The meaning is in the waiting.

Any of us can wait for God on our knees in an empty church; but pastors are more likely than most to pass time in an empty church between the Sunday gatherings.

They’re not more likely than anyone else to have more time to write poetry. But when they take that time—take it to process their experience through the craft of shaping language into poems—their pastoral vocation can feed into their poetic vocation in a way that nurtures us all.