The Church That Reads Poems

I was on a father-son trip with my eight-year-old son, Hank, when my hair started falling out. 

While taking a quick shower in the hotel room, I felt something running down my back. It was my hair. Coming out in globs. Clogging up the drain.

My life had been suddenly interrupted by an entirely unexpected cancer diagnosis about a month prior. Sharp stomach pains keeping me up at night turned out to be two tumors in my abdomen that had already grown to the most advanced stage and attached themselves to vital organs, which landed me the unfortunate title of being both the youngest patient in this particular oncology practice and also the recipient of the most violent form of chemotherapy.

After returning from our trip, I enlisted my three boys to shave my now patch-spotted head in the backyard, trying to make a fun memory of what I feared could be confusing and traumatizing—watching their Dad deteriorate rapidly. For the most part, it worked. But when my beard and eyebrows fell out a couple days later, it was another story.

I had left for work early that morning, and I picked up Hank from baseball practice in the evening. He hadn’t seen me yet, and he’d never seen me without facial hair in his eight years of life—a fact that was not on my mind as I strolled up to the field. Hank was playing third base. I cheered him on, calling his name, but he looked back at me with a confused expression on his face. That’s when it hit me: My own son didn’t recognize me.

That happened on a Thursday evening, and the following day was not just any Friday, it was Good Friday: the annual occasion for grieving the crucifixion of Jesus, when the entire church stares in wonder at a God who suffers.

I sat in prayer at dawn on that morning of holy grief, still thinking about the night before—about a man you’ve always known suddenly being unrecognizable, like a father turned into a stranger because you never thought you’d see him so weak.

As I attempted to process that experience with my son in light of the holy grief of Good Friday, I surprised myself. Slowly, I began scribbling a poem in my journal, braiding the two images together: a son unable to recognize the father to whom he’d grown so familiar, now seeing him so unexpectedly weak, and a disciple struggling to recognize the rabbi whom he’d known in miracle-working divine strength, now cross-strewn and draped in weakness.

And that—the careful crafting of a prayer is some amateur poetic form—turned out to be a slippery slope of the very best kind, a delightful drift back to an ancient and mostly forgotten way of recognizing God’s renewal disguised among the events of my ordinary life.

Genesis 1 is a divine poetry slam that results in all we know and experience. The creation narrative that opens the biblical story depicts Yahweh speaking creation into existence in the form of poetry. When man and woman are created in Genesis 2, Adam spins a verse of his own: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The first words of dialogue in the biblical story—from the mouth of God and the mouths of people—are both poetic.

The Bible is approximately one-third poetry. That includes the typical books categorized as such: the Psalms, Song of Songs, and Lamentations. But to limit it to those few biblical volumes betrays a misunderstanding of the form of the Holy Scriptures. Many Old Testament narrative books, particularly the Bible’s first five books, contain lengthy passages of poetic prose too.

Biblical poetry is a hallmark not only of the Old Testament but also of the life of Christ. It spills from Mary’s lips in the Magnificat at the incarnation of Jesus. John employs poetic form and language to describe the wonder of Christ’s birth, culminating in identifying Jesus as the Word—poetry spoken forth from the Creator’s mouth into human flesh.

Jesus’ teaching is also poetic, in both form and style. His Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, a poem shaped by the prophetic tradition of lyrical verse and figures of speech. Jesus’ primary method of teaching in our four Gospels is not strict biblical exposition but parabolic storytelling—a rabbinical teaching method designed to awaken the imagination to see what is hidden in plain sight, the identical aim of poetry.

Later in the New Testament, the apostle Paul—arguably the Bible’s most logical and linear-thinking author—quotes the Greek poets of his day, showing knowledge and admiration for literature, and when describing the death and resurrection of Christ, Paul frequently opts for the term mystery. In his lengthiest description of the incarnation in the Book of Philippians, he goes full-blown Shakespeare and writes a poem. And Revelation, the Bible’s final book, is a masterclass in the sound and symbol of poetry.

It is almost impossible to understand Jesus, and the story of which he claims to be the living fulfillment, without at least a cursory understanding of and respect for the art of poetry. There is no era in biblical history devoid of the language of beauty—but our moment in church history threatens to become the first. When the church loses its taste for poetry, it becomes blind to many beautiful truths. Might a robust return to poetry be like scales falling from eyes grown too old, tired, and familiar for wonder?

From the early days of church history, poetry has been a crafted form of language that feels clunky at first, like any foreign language does to the beginning learner. With consistent engagement, though, we grow fluent until the words flow off our tongues like second nature. Poetry trains our eyes to see from God’s point of view, until one day we realize, I’m no longer occasionally recognizing heaven invading earth. I can now see heavenly, and that frees me to live heavenly—even here, even now.

“Poets have a double sense of reality; behind the material world they feel another realm of existence—invisible, eternal, and divine—to which they also belong,” writes Catholic poet and author Dana Gioia. “One purpose of religious poetry is to make that hidden world tangible.”

John’s Gospel thematically distinguishes between two ways of seeing. On the very first page, Jesus calls those who would become his first disciples with a simple invitation: “Come and you will see” (1:39). The English translation “see” is horao in John’s Greek, and it translates literally as “pay attention to.” It seems that Jesus is inviting these two disciples to take more than a glance, to observe him and his ways attentively, a point Jesus drives home throughout the unfolding of his ministry.

A poet sees a world of insight in the ripples made in a pond after a fish jumps, or sees all the world’s suffering held in the face of a single hungry child, or all the world’s joy in the resilient smile of that same child. A poet is simply someone who sees through what most of us tend to look at. Poetry is the art of seeing through the autumn leaves, the outstretched hand of the beggar, the wrinkled and weathered face of the old woman, to witness the image of the Creator.

The work of poetry is to connect the visible and the invisible, the natural and the supernatural, heaven and earth. Poetry is not the only practice through which we attune to the majesty of the Creator disguised in the veil of creation. But it is certainly one tried and true way to do so, meant to form every apprentice of Jesus, peeling open our tired eyes to see what the Father is doing and beckoning us to join in.

Poetry has at least that much in common with prayer. Both do their deepest and slowest work on the individual immersed in its practice by training them to see through creation to the Creator and his beauty. Both train us to horaro, to see attentively like Christ—to perceive beauty amid the ordinary.

As George Herbert writes in “The Elixir”:

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the Heavens espy.

Prayer, like poetry, refines the vision of the praying person until he or she lives a slow, attentive life in this hurried world, responsive to God. Surely this is what Jesus and the writers of the New Testament had in mind when they quoted Isaiah 6:9 four separate times—more frequently than any other Old Testament passage cited in the New Testament: “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.”

The fruit of prayer isn’t only about miraculous intervention and inspiring stories of divine action. Even more than that, the fruit of prayer is about what happens within the praying person over time, after all their amens. The slowest growing and sweetest tasting fruit of a praying life is the way it reforms the vision of the praying person to see through the eyes of Jesus. Prayer is an exercise teaching me to see, and subsequently live, my ordinary life from the vantage point of heaven—to do, in the simple rhetoric of Jesus, only what I see the Father doing (John 5:19).

If the church wants to regain the vision of zealous prayer needed for fruitful, ordinary living, then it must once again turn its attention to the art of poetry. We cannot forsake the poetic heritage of our faith, for in doing so, we might lose what we are so desperately trying to regain.

That Good Friday morning, I beheld the sun rising—nature’s iconic image for the biblical promise of Christ’s return as “a bridegroom bursting forth from his chamber” and “a champion rejoicing to run his course” (to borrow a couple lines from David’s poem in Psalm 19). I contemplated the bewildering beauty of divine strength so wrapped in human weakness that even Christ’s inner band struggled to recognize him. 

As I attentively saw the unfolding events of my own ordinary life, my eyes were peeled open to the very crucifixion story with which I’d grown too familiar. I saw Christ crucified through poetic eyes, and when I did, like David beholding the sunrise, I instinctively strung together a few words to capture that attentive glimpse: 

Good Friday?

“Is that my Dad?” Hank asked from the third base line,
as I approached the field where the boys practiced. “He’s got 

the same shirt as my Dad, same shoes as my Dad, 
but that doesn’t look like my Dad.” Losing the hair on 

my head was one thing, but now I was unrecognizable to 
my own son without a trace of hair left on my 

face, save the quickly thinning eyebrows—the last remaining vestige after
another round of chemotherapy’s cruel pillaging, not just defeating but humiliating

its subject in the process. “Is that my Dad?” The boy
struggled to make sense of the familiar voice coming from the
unfamiliar man who cheered him on as he approached third base.

“Is that my Rabbi, Savior, Messiah, King?” The disciples must’ve asked.
As the one they’d seen stump the priests with every word

suddenly sat silent in the courtroom of their accusation. As the
one they’d seen slip away from the angry mob countless times

lay taking a lashing. As the one they’d seen strong staggered,
too weak to carry the beam. As the one they’d seen

raise the lame was himself raised on a cross—a death
of cruel pillaging, not just defeating but humiliating its subject in the

process. “Is that the one over whom we shouted, ‘Hosanna’?” Surely
that question ran through at least eleven minds, reduced from men

ready to reign in glory to sheepish boys with their tails
tucked, squinting quizzically from the ancient equivalent to the third base

line. Squinting at the God-man who’d suddenly become unrecognizable—beard ripped
out by hand, thorns rammed down around his scalp, saliva of

the crowd’s spit mingling with the blood and sweat running down
his naked body. Dying, yes, but not just dying—pillaged, humiliated.

“Is that my God? I ask, squinting from the crowd. And
if it is, can he make this—even this—good news?
Or are there some places on earth his Kingdom cannot rule?

After composing that prayerful poem, I looked up from my journal with eyes to see and ears to hear all that God was doing today. I rose, intending to join in.

Tyler Staton is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Kirsten, and their sons Hank, Simon, and Amos. He is passionate about living prayerfully and relationally. Tyler is the author of After Amen; The Familiar Stranger; Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools; and Searching for Enough.

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