Poetry. Prayer. People-skills. Have we worked out how to pull it off yet?
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
With so many new-ish forms of communication around, the phenomenon is easy to see. Someone starts a blog. (This one, for instance.) They know what kind of thing to say, but the question is how to say it. If readers spot it's a new blog, they're quietly looking for more than they let on. Can the writer pull it off, they wonder, as their reading antennae witness the unfolding navigation of self-awareness and professional intention.
That fourth wall shouldn't get broken too much. That's a given, isn't it?
Prayer. In fact, prayer meetings. Neither of these is new or new-ish. Decidedly ancient. But similar questions swim around, usually unspoken. Forgive me if I turn the spotlight on myself so I'm not pointing the finger when the issue starts on my own doorstep… "Lord," after every other word, sometimes. Squeezing impressive-sounding theological insights and buzzwords into public prayer (just like the parable tells me not to do). And those prayers that could double as the notices in disguise, as I deftly list fragments other people didn't really need to know about the thing, but they might like to listen in as I put God in the picture so He knows the context for what needs doing…
I don't say this to mock or to make anyone self-conscious. Actually, I think Jesus's parable does a more dangerous job at that, pitting two people's audible prayers against each other and pointing to one of them as better.
Even as a child I was turning up to prayer meetings, noticing that this kind of thing happens all the time, and learning the ropes: questions of when to speak, when to hold back, how long to go on. Whether to conjugate verb endings according to King James English — and how to process the logic behind that approach when other people do.
Then you do what the other verse says and go into your room and shut the door and pray there, one to one. And… see what I mean? The questions don't stop with public listeners do they? The Lord's Prayer? Freestyle? Jesus Others Yourself = JOY. And I've heard things like, 'The Devil isn't omniscient so don't speak out what you don't want him to overhear,' which is the kind of scientific spiritual wisdom that has no obvious source that I know about but has probably informed many people's quiet times.
And then this word. Higgaion. It's in the Hebrew Bible a few times, but you might have overlooked it as it's often translated. It carries associations of murmuring, muttering, whispering under your breath, as well as being some kind of musical direction for musing and meditation.
I've heard suggestions on how to get that right too — that we might like to try muttering and growling Bible truths and promises in faith under our breath to get them affecting the way we think. Perhaps so. But I think it makes a difference how this word works. For example when I read it, the phrase feels more in the region of "Whoosh!" or perhaps 'Mic Drop'. Now, if we replaced the word with 'Mic Drop,' you see how that might land in various rhetorical and literal ways that could enthuse the prophets and upset the crew in the headphones on the sound desk?
I can't help feeling drawn to the idea that those growls and utterances might be linked to Romans 8:26 about the Spirit interceding with groans too deep for words. That might be like the kind of rush and gush of noise that comes from the gut when we're grieving, surprised, happy, afraid, laughing, or in pain. I've noticed Romans 12:2 is often quoted these days with the three word summary, 'Renew your mind.' When I hear that, I have to be honest, it gives me the same pedantic shudder as when someone says, "Flogging a dead horse means it's pointless trying to sell a dead horse." That shudder is about thinking — wait, what? Don't let that become a widespread thought because although it sounds really insightful I think it misses the real point. It's not about the market for equine carcasses, it's about the fact that trying to motivate a horse that's not breathing means a lack of motivation is the least of its problems. Similarly, if we're renewing our own minds, using our minds to do the renewing, it's a bit like asking artificial intelligence to speak our wedding vows. I'm not a Greek scholar either, but it seems to me the words suggest a passive voice — not that we are passive, but neither that we are the ones actually doing the renewing in the course of refusing to conform. It sounds like it's a process that happens to us. That may be bad news if you're writing for the 'Renew your mind' market, but good news if the involuntary groans of anguish or pleading are saying something more real and gutsy about where you are in conversation with God than polite words ever could.
And all this brings me to an article by Declan Ryan I read in Literary Review recently, on Denise Riley's, A Chorus of Ears: On 'The Voice of the Poem'. I haven't read the book yet so I'm not attempting to review it, but a few things caught my eye.
Ryan talks about a "marketing-saturated climate," and about Riley's view that centring the poet instead of the poem is a mistake. The point is made about poetry, but that only serves to get me thinking about the relationship between poetry and prayer, poet and pray-er. Ryan notes Riley's position regarding placing the poet at the centre of the interpretation of the poem — perhaps like I'm doing above when I make the kind of references I have to people's prayers. Also reminds me of when someone heard a worship song I'd written once, and said, 'Yes, very pretty.'
(The worst kind of condemnation — the kind that thinks the writer just wants to have something complimented, as if that's why they wrote something.)
Although the speech act of prayer is different isn't it. It's a different kind of thing. Somehow…? Yes, like that — the review goes on to describe the lyric as a kind of a tussle between inner and outer worlds rather than performance. That gets me thinking. Some poems are performance pieces. Written for inaugurations and coronations. Others are found, stumbled over, blurted out, or arrive in the moment. But we frame them. Publish them. Identify them. Are prayers like that?
The article talks about the importance of the live listener to the speaker, that as they hear themselves say things that are being heard and listened to, the meaning takes on something of this. Poetry, that is. Prayer? "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Oh, wow. This is an extraordinary working example of the idea. Jesus is praying, so He's talking to God. But He's noting God's absence even while addressing Him. So there's that. Rhetorically powerful because He's addressing one who seems not to be listening. But then we add in that others are listening. So even though these are dying words, there's an extra element. Not preaching, exactly — although, totally preaching. Not performance art or a theatrical scene — although, again. So much more though, of course.
And how the others potentially hear all this is informing the meaning — including those who, like us, hear millennia later, and through the page. Whatever we make of it.
And then of course the fact that He's quoting Psalm 22. So it's not His line, in a sense. Borrowing to make a point. Or perhaps it always was His line, and David the psalmist was the one borrowing.
Remaining present. To all of these reverberations and cross-references. Not just consuming the rhetorical flourish and X factor flair. That IS the point, isn't it?
And the suggestion about the 'prior linguistic layers' — all the echoes and resonances in the speaker and the listener, through culture, history and associations. And how language can 'snag' on these.
Intriguing.
Lord. These themes run through my work, especially as I consider desert island scenarios and the prayer life of Robinson Crusoe — a reference from my current project, Stay With Me: An Adventure in Going Through It.
In that case the real life listeners are mainly coconuts (who make surprisingly good candidates for practising your people-skills), with the moot point being about prayer, church and God, in exile.
Or shipwreck.
And how our theologies and relationships can have strict inherited protocols that arose from questions of performance and being seen to be wise, just as much as the messier art of wisdom, I suspect. Managing to pull it off may be exactly what's stopping up our ears.
Want to say something back?
If this raises a question, reminds you of something, drives you to drink, or sends you somewhere I haven't thought of, I'd be glad to hear it.
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