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Scott Cairns, Philokalia: New and Selected Poems, Zoo Press, 2002

There is an unspoken assumption among modern-day Christians in America that poetry is passe. It is like old-fashioned baseball games played with broomstick handles and without gloves. It is like churning your own butter. It has our mild interest as a sentimental pastime but not much more than that. We tell ourselves we don’t have time for circuitous speech. We want direct speech, pointed speech. In our fast-paced, practical world, words are used to do things. They are tools to persuade and inform. And poetry doesn’t seem very useful to those ends. We give it its place in greeting card verse and in ceremonial occasions. But that is where we leave it.

When we read the Bible we discover that God is not only concerned with what is said but with how something is said. The writers of the individual books make extensive use of literary artistry to communicate their messages. There are riddles and paradoxes, metaphors and alliterations. There are puns and parables. And then there is poetry. Lots of it. In fact, much of the Old Testament is written as poetry. (See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry.)

We'd do well to consider how something is said shapes what is being said (Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman). We’d do well to consider why God so often expresses Himself in this round-about way. We’d do well to restore poetry to our regimen of reading (see Eugene Peterson’s essay in Subversive Spirituality). The poetic craft carries on with the conviction that language is holy. And so poets becomes attendants to the mystery of words. They train us to see. They train us to hear. They awaken our capacity for wonder at the world that is and the worlds that may be.

The poet, Scott Cairns, is one such custodian of holy speech. His latest work, Philokalia, is a collection of poems similar in approach to the midrashic tradition of the rabbis, a meditative reading of the ancient texts of the Bible. The title, Philokalia (Greek for "lover of good things") is borrowed from the name given to a collection of Eastern Orthodox texts gathered from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. Cairns, a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a convert to Orthodox Christianity, locates the good and the beautiful within the landscape of creation, especially in unlikely places -- in broken bodies, bloody crucifixions, bothersome church members, and our half-crazed psyches. The poems open up the reader to an apprehension of God’s presence in this world.

Here’s a sample:

Salvation

-- after Jonathan Holden

Granted, the choir
is an embarrassment. Those faces
are too simple to be true. Take
Mrs. Beamon, our soprano, whose
perfect smile might warm some
into admiration, if they can forget
how she daily cows her skinny
alto daugther into tears.
The choir master himself
is ridiculous; the way he stands
tells everyone how short
he thinks he is. That alone
could help you like him,
but when he takes every solo
like a general at war, you’ll
probably change your mind.
Those two alone can make forgiveness
a nearly impossible thing. And each
of these singers has a similar story,
a sad quirk that tries each week to shape
those smiles into something honest.
If you glance over this scene
too quickly, or without enough
real humor, you might write off every other
scene it touches, every peripheral
kindness that allows such comic abuse
to abound. You might see the hilarious
faces and believe they are
the whole show; you could miss
the real act. The comedy
is this: despite the annoyance
of grace, and this tired music
of salvation, it is
what we have come to expect.