Why Then Aren’t We Talking? 3 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

I’m always sorry to see Advent go. I love its hushed attention to the coming of the God who has in fact already come, the God who is present with us, in us, in me. During Advent, the poems I seek out for quiet reflection are ones that help draw me into God’s presence.

But now after Advent I realize: hmm, God hasn’t gone away just because that blessed season of the liturgical year has passed. God is as present as ever. It’s my attention to the divine presence that tends to drift away when I don’t have the liturgical season to keep me anchored to it.

So I’m trying to extend Advent’s attentive spirit into these subsequent days of gratitude for the Word made flesh. A poem in Mark Jarman’s collection The Green Man (Sarabande Books, 2004) helps. The poem’s title is “As Close as Breathing,” and its epigraph from a Delphic Oracle is “Called or not called, God is present.”

Actually the main stanzas of the poem describe birds. Particular birds in their various particularity: the flicker who “lifts his beak / To show his black bib”; the mud daubers who “fall asleep there, suckling”; the hummingbird “with a ruby wart on her neck.” So this is a spring and summer poem.

But between the stanzas depicting the birds’ goings and comings, their calls and their flutterings, are single italicized iambic pentameter lines voicing the poet-speaker’s response:

If God is present, why then aren’t we talking?

Does God assume our silence is a call?

Words too can be as close to us as breathing.

Everything says back, “I am present, too.”

Advent questions, Advent speculations, evoked by watching and listening attentively to spring and summer birds. The birds are busy going about their business. But we? the poet asks. What is our business?

With his usual gift of jolting us into awareness, Jarman asks utterly unexpected questions. The first question makes my head spin: we are always talking, aren’t we… but are we talking to God? If God is present, it’s downright rude not to talk to him. That’s where Jarman’s line leads me, anyway. Leads me into an Advent/Christmas wondering about what difference it makes that God is indeed present, always.

The second question assumes “our silence”: that we simply ignore God. But there is silence and silence: that is, silence can derive from indifference or from an inability to articulate what our heart is crying out to say. Jarman has God generously lean toward the second option. And as I read and muse with this line, it leads me into wondering about my own heart’s silences. Do I put God on hold while I go about my day? Or do I call on God in constant silent prayer (praying unceasingly, as we’re exhorted to do in 1st Thessalonians)?

The poem’s third italicized line reminds me that—yes—this is a poem that I’m reading. Just words. But what wonders words can accomplish. To bring them “as close as breathing” is to make of them the very breath of life. How can I not recall the Word made flesh? In my words, Christ can live—if I let him. The line leads me into the entire Advent-Christmas season’s focus on Christ’s closeness to us, his breath as my breath, mine as his.

Advent is truly all about Incarnation, and the poem’s final line shouts this out loud and clear. Not only the birds, but everything announces its fullness of presence. Everything. That must include me; how can I not join the answering chorus?

I am present in God’s presence. Advent in springtime, in summer, at all seasons. I know this already, of course; I repeatedly read it in Scripture and pray it in my daily Liturgy of the Hours. But sometimes I need a poem to re-enliven for me this core incarnational truth, to give me anew God’s Advent-Christmas-Easter gift.