While listening to a Mars Hill Audio: Friday Feature, I heard a brief description of a book title When Poets Pray. This title is the latest book release of a praying theologian Madelyn Chandler McIntyre. After a quick search, I found an article from McIntyre that first appeared in The Christian Century (9–9–2008, pp 30–35) titled, “Learning to Pray.”
In that article, she instructs us in prayer by beginning her essay with a full citation of George Herbert's poem “Prayer.” The classic and anthologized poem sketches prayer with hopping frogs of metaphors in a list. The poem ‘defines’ prayer and simultaneously prays. Himself a priest, Herbert walks the tightrope of ‘faith and/as art’ (a theme I’ve written on here).
This incredible poem has inspired the Poet Theologian, Malcolm Guite to write whole response sonnets to each phrase of Herbert’s poem. Canterbury Press published Rev Guite’s work as After Prayer. Guite also kindly published all his sonnets as hypertext links from Herbert’s “Prayer,” on his blog. Here’s that:
Prayer
the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
The list format of this poem makes each image a moment unto itself worth rumination and for that reason conducive to memorization. “Christ-side-piercing spear” bleeds into one’s memory! “The bird of Paradise” comes to mind whenever I see a Heron at Town Lake. “Heaven in ordinarie” meanders to me when I make my bed and remind myself of God’s spirit brooding on the primeval, pre-cosmic deep (Yes, my bed’s always that messy).
“Prayer” is so memorable as a list. As an inviting form, I often find myself adding to the list. One such occasion came to me while reading Nathanial West’s Miss Lonleyhearts. While the novella shows the title character in, clinically speaking, bi-polar flights of recklessness both religious and irreligious, this particular moment he finds himself in prayer, surprised by Joy:
Miss Lonleyhearts was very happy and inside of his head he was also calling on Christ. But his call was not a curse, it was the shape of his joy.
Now, the story overall tells a mostly tragic tale. The section, from which the above is excerpted, ends with Miss Lonleyhearts (the male title character) running from a potential second-occasion affair with a married woman. Yet, in spite of the character, story, and possibly its teller, Joy makes a Bill-Murry-type cameo appearance.
Joy must surprise when Death acts so cruel, familiar, and yet an alarming intrusion when we encounter it. We can’t help but feel or at least know sadness at the end of Miss Lonleyheart’s story. More profoundly we’re surprised that the author himself died an untimely (always untimely) death. It turns out that Nathanial West was killed in a car accident on his way back from Mexico to grieve his friend F Scott Fitzgerald’s death.
West’s own grief was cut short by Death. Joy must interrupt Death and grief. But usually, it interrupts in a non-coercive way. Joy interrupts the way a potter, at her wheel, is surprised by what contours emerge from the clay and her own participative hands.
If prayer is the shape of joy then prayer is formation; human persons being formed from a lump of clay into a (dare I say) holy vessel is joy. Formation reminds me of my friend's borrowed phrase. Himself a martial artist and a Bruce Lee fan, my friend rephrased Bruce Lee’s sage advice of, “Be water, my friend,” into the more biblically charged, “Be clay, my friend.”
