Speechless and Renewed

You might ask:  How is the Book coming?  The one about God as a kind of poet that I wrote about in a post late last year?  Well, the Book abides, as the Big Lebowski might put it.  It rumbles, bumbles, grows.  I've been reading books, doing research, taking notes, and thinking thoughts.  Not much writing yet, except for the notes.  I'm not ready to write because to be quite honest I'm still not sure what I want to say, or if I have anything worth saying to anyone other than myself.


I think--I think, mind you--I have a beginning:  Jesus writing in the sand.  You might remember the scene from the eighth chapter of John's gospel, the one where the woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus as a test of his orthodoxy.  "Should we stone her, as Moses taught?"  Instead of answering immediately he stoops and begins to write on the ground.  The authenticity of the passage has been disputed, but I like the scene a lot because I like the idea of Jesus writing something--or drawing a picture:  the Greek word here is ambiguous--in a kind of delay between their challenge and his response.  Perhaps he was stalling, making random marks or even playing tic-tac-toe while he thought of how to answer the Pharisees.  Or perhaps he was writing a poem.


In his essay "The Government of the Tongue," the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney comments on this scene:  ""Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.  Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life.  In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank.  In another sense, it is unlimited.  It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed" (107).


Speechless and renewed.  It describes my experience at mass in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception at Conception Abbey, where I work.  Jesus' poetry is there--in the priest and the people, the Word spoken, the bread and wine.  His poetry also abides in the stone, wood, and stained glass, in the Beuronese murals of the life of Mary on the upper walls.  But he's outside the sacred walls too, sliding and slamming his poetry of everyday life.  It's all poetry, and that's what I want to write about.