The Potter’s Hand 3 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

It was delightful to find three old friends among the poets in the current issue of Image (#62). None are people I’ve met personally, but I’ve met their work through poetry networkings over the years.

Eric Pankey was introduced to me by poet Mark Jarman, when I asked Mark some years ago to suggest new poets who were writing out of a Christian faith. Sarah Klassen I first came across when I was collecting poems for the anthology Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers. I included her poem “Waging Peace”; and then bumped into Klassen again a few years later when I was interested in poetry about the great philosopher of suffering, Simone Weil. Klassen has written an entire volume of poems following Weil’s spiritual journey called Simone Weil: Songs of Hunger and Love. Finally, and most recently, I’ve come to know and treasure the work of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, as my husband was in close touch with him while we were co-authoring a book on beauty as the grounding of Muslim-Christian dialogue.

So for this post I want to put into dialogue these three friends as they speak through their poetry in Image #62. And what I hear from this dialogue is three poets who speak of the divine in human terms—or is it the human in divine terms? How close are we to God, they make me wonder.

Klassen is most explicit about the divine-human mingling in “The Potter.” Taking her epigraph from Jeremiah 18:3 (“So I went down to the potter’s house, / and I saw [her] working at the wheel”), Klassen creates her poem as an imagining of this visit to the potter. Since in Jeremiah the potter is famously a metaphor for God (“Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel”), Klassen’s potter is at once human and divine.

In the poem, after shaping the clay into a lovely bowl, the potter suddenly squashes it without a word, implying that it didn’t meet her mind’s vision…but then she spontaneously treats the onlookers to a meal of tea and cookies. So the poem becomes a thought-provoking reflection on creativity’s unpredictability yet also its graciousness—as well as on the mystery of how divine and human creativity might merge.

Pankey’s poem—simply called “Prayer”—also leaves us wondering about the nature and extent of divine/human mergings. Whenever I see a poem entitled “Prayer,” I assume it will be addressed to God. But Pankey deliberately subverts this assumption here. The “you” to whom his poem is addressed might indeed be God. But in the series of powerfully dramatic metaphors for a sense of loss which comprise the poem, the “you” could just as well be a human beloved. For the poem is so much about the feeling of loss—whether the loss is by abandonment or betrayal or death—that the identity of the one lost comes almost not to matter.

Similarly for Abdal-Hayy’s “Grace Descending.” Not at all similarly in tone—for this poem is a celebration of the omnipresence of grace, not a mourning of its absence. But “the sound” of grace descending, for which the poem offers a series of discrete images, implicitly mingles the divine and human.

The sound of a baby’s gurgles
God’s angels happily memorizing....

A beloved voice in the dark
the sound of his near assistance

For Christians, any divine-human mingling is incarnational. But Abdal-Hayy is a Sufi, a Muslim. So “incarnational” is not a concept in his imagining of the divine-human relation. Though Sufis are fond of quoting the Qur’anic line that “God is closer to you than your jugular vein,” God’s basic stance in the Qur’an is magisterial and distant. God for Islam does not enflesh Godself by any means; rather, God’s overwhelming love for his creatures is poured out on them in mercy. One of God’s most frequent names in the Qur’an is ar-rachim, The Merciful One.

The Qur’anic God hovers tenderly over the world like the Holy Spirit at the end of Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” who “over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” I bring Hopkins into the discussion because this line blurs the neat distinction I was just making between Muslim and Christian concepts of the divine/human relation. I think that’s the job and calling of poets: to blur our theological distinctions for us. None of the poems I’ve brought together in this post (or rather lifted from their companionship in the pages of this issue of Image) is doctrinal. All three are rich presentations and developments of images.

There is no “answer” to the question of how close we are to God. There are only reachings of the imagination toward the question. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to poets.