Myself and some nerdy friends are slowly combing through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in a reading group. A lecturer in college wouldn’t let a lowly undergrad like me join his post-grad reading group so I made my own up out of unemployed archeologists and weirdos who cut up dead people as a job. I am taking many more notes than I did the first time around and it is a lovely discipline, much more satisfying than the shallow depths of my undergrad tasks.
Re-reading sections of Chuck’s magisterial work brought my thoughts around to the Gospels. I have re-read them literally without count. And still details that I never picked up on appear to me. I can give the Gospel of Mark a decent read-through if I have a spare hour. I have set aside 28 hours over the next few months to do A Secular Age justice. There is no comparison between the depth I find in Mark and the depth I find in Taylor.
Now you may expect me to extrapolate from the inverse proportional genius at work in these two texts that one is obviously inspired by the Holy Spirit directly and the other is a very fine work of socio-philosophy or whatever you want to call it. But that is not where my thoughts went.
I love poetry in theory. But in reality the only poetry books I have ever pored over are the ubiqituous fixture of the Irish adolescence, Soundings, and some of the early books of Séamus Heaney. I am obliged as an Irishman to love Guinness, to have opinions about military neutrality and to like Séamus Heaney.
But in all honesty I don’t read much poetry and nor can I. Sometimes I pick up books I bought for my wife, poems of Eavan Boland or Rita Ann Higgins and I find myself turning to short poems, scanning for any hint of a rhyme. I appreciate deeply the habit of Jason Goroncy has of posting poems like this beauty, but I know that if I bought the collected works of R.S. Thomas, I’d end up leaving it in some untouched corner of my living room.
So my thought is this: are those who are able to savour poetry more naturally inclined to be able to read the Gospels with insight? Has my tendency towards reading novels and essays left me without the appropriate tools to read the texts I am most interested in- the Gospels? I can digest 50 pages of Taylor before breakfast but I can’t regurgitate a single parable without days of work. Is this in part because I shy away from reading the densely coiled lines of a long stanza?
Your Correspondent, How can life be so complex, when he just wants to sit here and watch you undress?
I’m not sure if reading and loving poetry would give you loads of extra insight into the Gospel’s as they seem to be based round stories, but I reckon its good help for reading the Prophets and Revelation
After I had gone through my songwriting phase a few years back I felt like I could understand the Psalms more, especially as it was easier to imagine the feel of music and guitar chords David and chums might have used for the words..
I’d say poems are about stories too- its just we’re not good enough at reading them to see that.
Mercy! I probably would have died without ever considering the damnable Soundings again.
Anyway, I see that On Evil is on the shelf. I’d love to see a review if you get the chance. I’ve just finished Reason, Faith and Revolution and I found it to be an enjoyable and eminently quotable read.
I am tragically unable to sit at one thing today FC. I had hoped to read it in one sitting this morning, got to page 17 before life intruded. Review will be up next week unless someone puts something shiny in front of my eyes and I forget what I am meant to be doing.
A fine blog 🙂
Ever read John Donne?! he wrote the famous “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. He’s 19th Century free spirit who wrote racy erotic poetry until he experienced a conversion to Christ and wrote some of the most beautiful poetry – and it ryhmes! For example:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
I think I had a question on Donne in my junior cert though hadn’t studied him
Question was to compare his “No man is an island” to Paul Simon’s “I am an island”. Think you skipped transition year Kevin? So you might have come across it in the past papers.
One of my favourites is by George Herbert, but it probably goes to show poetry can sometimes just be read rather than studied too:
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/love3.htm
I wonder has the difficulty with reading the gospels got more to do with historical context than anything? I’m sure you took that into account mind you. I guess we’d have to list out the skills involved in reading poetry and figure out how useful they would be for reading the gospel. That would give you the answer to your question, but you’d then need to weigh these skills against other factors to see how much of an impact it has, eg compared to essay skills or state of mind etc.
Maybe you need a different state of mind from both essay and poetry interpretation to get the most out of the bible. Personally when the bible speaks to me I generally don’t get past more than a few verses. Maybe it’s more about lectio divine type thing
I know your thoughts didn’t lead you there but I’d be inclined to agree with the holy spirit thing: the bible invokes a change of heart in so many verses and passages that you can’t really get many things out of it in one sitting even though there is so much there to get.
A poem would also have many strands but usually isn’t asking the reader to change on more than one level if at all. Poetry is generally about expressing the whole whereas the bible is about requesting the whole. So I think you can discern deeper meaning quicker if you’re used to poetry but you will continuously discover you didn’t fully appreciate or understand this meaning
“Poetry is generally about expressing the whole whereas the bible is about requesting the whole.”- Sweet.
Suess: I went back over John Donne and it is good stuff. So old. So very ancient.
Paul Simon wrote “I am a Rock” at 16. I turn 30 next year. Woes.