When God Writes Poetry

Propositions and poetry are vastly and beautifully different.

Propositions state facts as they are and, often times, as we see them. Straight and resistant to the flow of culture, political and social opinions, propositions form the pillars and ground of our faith, beginning all the way back in time with: God created the heavens and the earth.

Propositions are the voice of objective truth. They sound forth across the fog of drifting opinions and subjectivism, reasserting as if for the first time, the virile truth to which we are so often blinded. 

Poetry is different. Poetry states facts behind a veil. Shimmering, subtle, gentle, emotional, moving, and powerful, poetry drapes beauty upon truth and thus enables us to see it differently. If propositions are the voice of objective truth, poems are its melody and its song.

Poetry is the grand culmination of the essential spirit of all the stories in the world, and just like a story – fiction, fantasy, fairy-tales, legends and myths – it’s power lies in showing us what something is more clearly, by taking us into a world that is not.

We are in desperate need of both propositions and poetry. They work together. There is no such thing as a good story that is missing one or the other. And the most beautiful thing, the thing that gives propositions their validity and strength, and poetry its fulfillment and beauty, is God who is the Source of both.

The Grand Word

Many times we are attracted to either propositions or poetry at the expense of the other. Some of us cling, as to a bulwark of strength, to the cold, hard facts, blinding ourselves to the fragile chaos of emotional subjectivity. Others cast themselves blindly on the sea of wish-fulfillment and spiritual experiences without being grounded in truth.

Both tendencies are a prostitution of a God-given gift – our God of both propositions and poetry, who formed both the solid trunk and the fragile flowers; our God who hardened the ground of the earth and who scattered the stars within the heavens; our God who is pure, ethereal, holy, perfect Spirit, and who became also for our sake, a man with physical flesh, with a heart that pumped blood, and lungs that breathed air, and nerve endings that felt sweat, and bread, and blood, and stone, and the perforation of iron nails.

To truly understand the world in which we live, we must be inculcated in both logic and wonder, because when we follow each to their source and fulfillment, we find both in the Same Thing. Both the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud reveal and come from and culminate in the Same Person. The two paths converge on Something solid and outside themselves, on Something above and beyond themselves.

They look to the Greatest Reasoner and the Greatest Poet. They also look to the Greatest Reason and the Greatest Poetry of which all other reason and poetry are but a dim and beautiful reflection.

The Distorted Word

It is the job of the poet to express the inexpressible.

There are so many things for which we don’t have words. Human language is a wonderful, liberating tool constantly found inadequate. Poetry is the overflow of this limitation. When the poet finds his nose pushed up against the stiff and structured barrier of wooden prose he climbs to the top, and sees poetry in the stars.

The most important thing to be expressed, however, is also the hardest thing to be expressed. So, just like the poet wields his craft to help us conceive the inconceivable, God, the Great poet, uses this entire world as His poem – as a Grand Expression of the Great Inexpressible, and the Grand Word for that which no word can describe.a

I once read a poem that began with a little boy walking along the banks of a river. The boy was skipping and laughing and singing and the river was skipping and laughing and singing with him.

The next stanza had the same boy, a little older, walking along the same bank. Just as before, the river reflected the growth and character of his person. As the boy grew into manhood – as his skipping mellowed into deep calm, as his laughter shimmered more softly and more brightly, and his song swelled into power and purpose, so did the river, until at last the man himself stood at the edge of the sea, old and weary but full of hope, and the river emptied herself and became filled all at once, into the great deep of the ocean.

The theme of the poem was the journey we all take in life and it was likening that journey to the river, with all its swirls and eddies and currents and rapids and swells always coursing toward its final destiny, where it would lose itself and find itself all at once in the ocean at the edge of the sky.

Of course, if you read the poem and only focused on its description of this very real river, or this very real boy, you would miss the Ultimate Reality to which it pointed – its Grand Theme that surmounted all the others, the Real Drama in which the whole story was encompassed.

It’s the same with this world. We must see through and above and beyond this world to the One to whom it is pointing. God, as the Great Poet, uses this world as the lens to reveal Himself, allowing us to know Him and wonder. He made something other than Himself, in order to better show us Himself.

The Discarded Word

But, what if we used the poem in another way? What if we tried to look beyond the description of the river and the boy and attempted to embrace the high theme of the poem itself? What if we tried to discard the physical and the tangible in trade for the spiritual and abstract?

Well, then the whole poem would be gone, along with all the possible benefits and pleasures that we could have gained. That’s because we were never meant to be purely spiritual beings just like we were never created as merely physical beings. We are souls with bodies. We are matter with spirits.

We must not stare in blind fascination at the dim outline of this world and miss the infinite Glory to which it points. And we must not try to understand that infinite Glory apart from the world which reveals it. God will be best revealed and admired through His reflection in the world He has given us. And of course, the world is best revealed and admired by seeing it as a reflection of God.

As Theologian and Author, John Piper said, “This world is most honest and most true when it is pointing beyond itself…The key to the deepest meaning of this world lies outside in what this world is not.” (1)

Why? Because this world is a poem. It’s the Ultimate Truth, the Ultimate Reality, The Ultimate Proposition, cloaked in a veil so that we can better see it for what it really is.

C.S. Lewis entreated that we must, “Come out, look back, and then you will see. This astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes, and toads. How could you have ever thought that this was ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that is was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt.”(2)

Don’t try to worship the world (or the poem) and lose sight of its Theme. Don’t try to grasp the Theme without the revelation of the poem. Lewis concludes: “To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her.” (3)

The Incarnate Word

Of course, all this grand poetry that points to God has a name – theologians call it General Revelation. It refers to the things about Himself that God reveals through His fingerprint in the world – this world points the longing in our souls to the Only One who can fulfill it, and who is clearly revealed, though men suppress in unrighteousness so that they are without excuse (Romans 1). General Revelation tells us about who God is.

The heavens declare that God is glorious. The earth tells us of His creation. The day speaks. The night sings. The sun rises in the sky each morning with all the joy of a bridegroom to meet the day, and runs its course with strength and might to its western grave, only to be resurrected again in the east with the dawn (Psalm 19).

The world is the Word. It can enlighten and confound us with all its potency and validation and mystery. It can tell us who God is. But it can’t tell us what He has done.

So Christ came, as the culmination of the Great Poem, as the crown of the Grand Theme, as the Incarnation of the Word Itself. And He unveiled God’s glory in human flesh. 

The Incarnation is the culmination of the two roads that we saw earlier – the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire join to make a glorious sunrise. Poetry meets Proposition. Grand Theme meets Glorious Matter. God becomes Man. Perfect Spirit is joined to Physical Flesh. The Word meets the Incarnate Christ.

There in the manger, where scratchy straw meets infant skin: the Word is made flesh. It is Jesus Christ, Immanuel: God with us.

Soli Deo Gloria,

 

 

 

 

1 John Piper, C.S. Lewis, Romantic Rationalist: How His Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry, 2013 National Conference

2 C.S. Lewis, Miracles

3 Ibid