Two Poems on the Bible

 

Paul Gaugin The Vision After the Sermon, 1888 (source: wikipedia PD:US)

 

Writing poetry hasn’t been coming easily.  I’ve had other things to write – papers, reports, journals.  And I’ve lost a little confidence, but that’s ok.  These two poems are not wonderful, but they are a part of the road back to creative expression.  They go together, and spring from my studies in hermeneutics this year.  They are before-and-after snapshots of a process of struggling to say something constructive about a particular text, namely the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22.  In this passage, you may recall, the great patriarch Abraham is reputedly ordered by God to burn his son Isaac to death (rationalised in the passage as a ‘test’); yet God himself intervenes through his angel to ensure Isaac’s safety.  It’s a puzzling and troubling passage – undoubtedly the reason for its being set in a hermeneutics class.  Perhaps the most famous meditation on this passage is Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.  Though I didn’t end up anywhere very close to Kierkegaard’s position, I did feel a dim kinship with the famous philosopher’s agonising over meaning and its ethical implications.  Working on the paper became a kind of personal ‘test’ for me – how to read and appropriate the Bible with integrity and responsibility?  It was a fair old trudge, but I got there in the end.  At least I got to a solution that worked for me in the moment, and led to a felt peace which I can only describe as a new ‘thereness’ of God.  This has faded a little; but the whole experience might be viewed as another trip round the spiral toward that enigmatic thing called Christian maturity.

The titles of these two poems refer, in the first place, to the dreadful mountain of Isaac’s near-sacrifice; while the second comes from the ford in the river by which Isaac’s son Jacob wrestled with a mysterious figure until dawn (Genesis 32:22-31.)  For the feminist scholar Phyllis Trible – and doubtless many others – Jacob’s wrestling became a powerful metaphor for what it means to relate to God through this thing Christians call Scripture.  Of course, I recognize the added complication that, as a priest, I’m going to have to bring a message of hope from just such passages most weeks (indeed, days) of my life – and I’m committed to doing so.  But I’m just as committed to keeping on wrestling, and, like Jacob, not letting go until I am blessed.  So these poems are hardly my final word on reading the Bible; they are reflections of how I’ve felt at a couple of related points on the way.

 

Two Poems on the Bible

1. Moriah

Jesus I want to love you

To preach you, to fill everything

With you

To have you on my lips like a plume of sacred smoke

But my mouth is dry

Old certainties once sweet

Are burned and bitter pages

The book I once gobbled down with glee

Is hard to swallow.

Its vestiges of pagan hate

Stick like phlegm in my throat

So I cough and hawk

Spluttering hoarsely at an uncaring world,

And all the gargling of the academy makes nothing clear.

So I cling to you

The one Word spoken and speaking

With the pure silver voice of a child

Asking with dread naivete:

“Where is the lamb?

…Daddy?”

 

2. Jabbok

Coming back

Not so much changed

As changing

Gripping tales

With slipping fingers

Held and re-held

Adjusting my grasp.

Do I wrestle with you,

Dear Lord,

Or with your shadow,

An eerie embodiment,

Or fictitious figment?

The long night

Drawn like a knife

Alone, perspiring

Embrace of wills –

Who will yield?

Something blasts at my hip

Is it love; or some lover’s blow?

The painful identification

Of self with the Other?

I stagger, try to straighten up

Inside wounded, outside limping

Joints ache

Ball and socket fit less likely

Than they used to

And yet in friction I find you

Slightly to the right – over there

Kindly and circle-shaped

Love’s round low laugh

Spreading over me like the dawn.