Last week, I wrote about our family Lent book and this week, I want to open up the book that I will be reading this Lent. Between Midnight and Dawn by Sarah Arthur is described as a literary guide to prayer for Lent, Holy week and Eastertide, but perhaps it sits most comfortably on the shelf with other literary anthologies. It is a volume of collected poetry and prose – ancient and modern and everything in between. Arthur divides the work into themed weeks, and each week is held together within a structured practice of prayer, scripture, reading, personal prayer and reflection followed by closing prayer. I like the beautiful solidity that this kind of practice offers.
But I haven’t been able to do it.
It’s so hard to find the time, and of course that’s an ancient excuse, but it is. My time comes in snatches. This kind of practice asks for routine and quiet, and I’m finding that hard to manage in this season of my family life. I might read an opening prayer and a verse or two of the scripture, but then someone’s out of toilet paper or really needs a sharper pencil. Or a glass of water. Or something nice to think about while trying to fall asleep. My time alone – even my post-kids’-bedtime-in-my-office-with-the-door-closed time – is so often interrupted.
All of which might be why I’m drawn to literary anthologies. Within a collection, I can wander. I can peruse. I can pick up and put down whenever the next interruption comes. But Arthur’s book isn’t just any collection of verse. Its weekly chapters create fences between fields. They catch me and keeping me from running on too far. They also give me focus, helping me to see what is present in the chosen texts.
Which is what poetry can be, too, when we let it. Poetry slows you down. You can’t skim poems or gobble them up or gulp them down. They ask you to be careful, considered, measured. When we do find the time to read a poem slowly, the careful, intentional words of the poet draw our deliberate focus to a moment or a single image. And that can change everything.
Poets invite us to pay attention to the ordinary moments of our lives. They name them for us, and make the familiar newly strange. They reach past what can be easily described into what is elusive and sacred. They point to the mystery that sits in our midst. They show us holiness.
If Lent is a time to make room, then perhaps these carefully chosen words can help me make room in my crowded days to look more closely and perhaps more clearly.
These are a few of the lines that spoke to me this week.
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, – In Memoriam A.H.H.
When I still lived at home, my dad kept a volume of Tennyson on the living room shelf. It had come from my grandparents’ house and I remember reading it one summer in the backyard, finding it strange, old and important. I also remember feeling relief at this assertion that none of our theories of religion could come close to summing up God. I didn’t really have to understand everything because God was bigger than that. Reading these lines again this week, I am struck that so much of our fumbling in any field might be summed up by “our little systems have their day” yet Tennyson also gently reminds us that our efforts to create order are a reflection of God’s creative force.
How comforting, the smudge on each forehead:
I’m not to be singled out after all
From dust you came. To dust you will return.
Anya Silver – Ash Wednesday
Our solipsistic perspective makes us feel as if we are the only ones feeling wrung out and tired, up too late for too many reasons and walking on the edge of life, But nothing could be more absurd. We all are. The smudge of each forehead. Dust. It’s good to see and hear that truth at the beginning of Lent.
And this one, too. These words spoke to me of making space, so I leave them here for you to find the space around.
A hand must pass the strings for them to sound.
The absence of the touch is what resounds.
Amit Majmudar – Seventeens: Acoustics
