What Happens When a Pastor Reads Poetry?
Tears that come from a well of gratitude
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Doug Basler
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.— Gerard Manley Hopkins
When my English professor read us “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins she warned us that she would not likely get through it. Her daughter has freckles. She made it through the “couple-colour” sky and the “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” But, sure enough, when she got to “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?),” she broke down in tears. I thought I understood why. Maybe I did, at least to the extent that a twenty-year-old was capable of understanding.
She was often moved to tears as she read passages of poetry or prose out loud to our class. Her pauses were not for dramatic effect but because she would get choked up by the writing. One of my seminary professors would do the same as he moved from a discussion about Greek verbs to a reflection on the grandeur of God’s grace. My pastor in Gloucester, Massachusetts would regularly need to stop mid-sentence during his sermon to collect himself as he fought back tears. I loved this characteristic in all of them, partly because I too know what it is like to be overwhelmed with emotion in the midst of preaching. But, also because I know their tears came from a well of gratitude. And genuine gratitude comes only when you understand the details of life as a gift, as grace.
Like Hopkins, Brian Doyle was a poet who savored language. He wrote essays and novels, but even in his prose he couldn’t avoid being a poet. I read his first novel, Mink River, this winter. The novel is intended to show the confluence of lives and events in the characters of a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest. It is not a novel you read for the storyline. My sister-in-law told me she tried to listen to it as an audiobook on a road trip and quickly gave up. Like Hopkins’ poetry, Doyle’s prose invites itself to be read out loud but not as a page-turner. You want to savor each description, pause, and read them again.
Doyle introduces Mink River by claiming there is nothing exceptional about the town. It is “not an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise. . . but there are some odd sweet corners here.” He then introduces those odd sweet corners through the eyes of a soaring eagle:
And down the street goes the eagle, heading west, his capacious shadow sliding like a blanket over the elementary school, where a slim older woman with brown and silver hair and brown and green eyes is holding court over the unruly sixth grade, her eyes flashing;...
and over a lithe woman called No Horses in her studio crammed with carving tools as she is staring thoughtfully at a slab of oak twice as big as she is which isn’t very big at all; and over a man named Owen Cooney who is humming in his shop crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera as his pet crow sits quietly on an old Oregon State University football helmet watching;...
and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another…
What unfolds throughout the rest of the novel is Doyle’s attempt to capture a few of the stories, “braided and woven and interstitched,” of the people and creatures of Mink River, Oregon.
As you can tell in the passage above Doyle is not concerned with adhering to grammatical norms. Call me old fashioned but I like quotation marks and a sentence break every once in a while. Still, his frantic unraveling sentence structure offers us a way to see the world, the stories of the membership of Mink River all flowing into and out of one another.
Doyle’s story is filled with nouns. Entire paragraphs are sometimes just lists of things—“their gear and tackle and trim.” The novel is a literary junk store of people, places, and things. Who doesn’t love a book with a hand drawn map in the opening pages like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? The nouns are concrete and particular. It is not just a crow on a football helmet in Owen Cooney’ shop, it is a crow on “an old Oregon State football helmet.”
I am currently sitting in a Smoky Row coffee shop in the suburbs of Des Moines. On the table in front of me is my drip coffee in a for-here mug with a splash of 2% milk. My keys and phone and the camo-duct-tape billfold my kids made for me (fashionably decorated with yellow Minion stickers from Despicable Me) are resting next to my black Moleskine notebook because I don’t like sitting with stuff in my pockets. Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings lies on top of the notebook. To the right of the laptop is my backpack, red and worn, chosen because it has a built-in rain-cover for when I lived in Aberdeen, WA, where it rains 300 days of the year. The gray buckle on the sternum strap is missing a prong and so it no longer secures across my chest. My gray and black stocking hat sits slanted on the pack. We live in a tactile world and this is the gear and tackle of my trade.
One of Mink River’s members is a dying man. He is never named. Doyle first introduces us to him “as the man who has twelve days to live.” He resides in hospice care in the guest-room of the doctor’s home. With only six days to live, he has a conversation with Danny, a boy injured in a bike accident, who is recovering at the doctor’s house. He gives Danny a list of the objects he will miss as his life comes to an end. He says:
These are the things that matter to me. The way hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snow berries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife’s voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Rubber bands. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children’s hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart…
The list continues for an entire written page. It wanders from “the postman’s grin” to “raccoons” to “cigar-scissors.” The list concludes with “My wife’s eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.”
The list works. I have found myself picking up the book and re-reading this list all week. But it is not because I share the dying man’s affinity for furnaces or raccoons—no offense to either. It works because this is the stuff that makes up a life. You get the sense that this unnamed man with only six days to live has lived all of his previous days with wide open eyes and a wide open heart. Doyle’s list invites me to pay attention to the things that matter to me. What would I include in a similar list?
These are the things that matter to me. The cold quiet mornings at Apgar campground. The taste of a hotdog cooked over a campfire. Letting my mind wander on a walk in the woods. The smile on Jackson’s face when he hits a double. Mornings when Katie hits the snooze button on her phone and rolls over to rest her head on my shoulder; why do those 9 minutes go by faster than any other? Reading out loud to my kids. Chopping garlic and onions. The beginning of a season, the beginning of a new book, the beginning of a semester. Syllabi. Wrigley Field. Addie’s feet thundering on the hardwood in the kitchen when she first wakes up. Sunday mornings in the sanctuary before anyone else arrives. End-of-the-year book lists. The way the garden looks after weeding. Eating all the raspberries on the walk from the backyard before I get them into the house to rinse. Grandma Caswell’s tomatoes. Sweet corn. Tomato pollen, the smell it leaves on my hands, my fingerprints yellowed after harvesting. Watching Isaac sneak a half dozen cherry tomatoes into his mouth when we send him out to pick our dinner salad. Pat Hughes calling Cubs games on the radio.
Your list would no doubt be different from mine. Try it. But, even though your list is different from the dying man’s list in Mink River or my list above, I would guess some of the items were likely, laughably, familiar. The specific details of anyone’s life often have a universal appeal. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty” is, in one sense, simply a list of things that are spotted. Doyle’s Mink River is a series of lists of objects and people and their happenings in a fictional town on the coast of Oregon over a period of a few months. Each, however, is brimming with life.
I started writing this essay several weeks before Easter but as I was reading John’s account of the resurrection this week in preparation for my Easter sermon, I was struck again by the specificity of the details John chose to include.
After Mary Magdalene finds the stone moved from the entrance to the tomb, John goes out of his way to mention three times that he beat Peter to the tomb as if it was some kind of foot race (John 20:4, 6, 8). He notes how the linen cloths used to wrap Jesus’ body were on the ground in the tomb in three consecutive verses and how his head covering was neatly folded and placed by itself in the corner of the cave (20:5-7). It dawned on me that perhaps the first thing the risen Lord did after he defeated death, as his heart once again began to beat, was to fold his grave clothes. This seemed to me to be good news for laundry doers everywhere—and especially to moms who probably still carry out the bulk of this mundane chore. The risen Christ folded his laundry. I suppose the angels could have done it but angels probably don’t have much experience with laundry.
John goes on to relate the moving encounter between Jesus and Mary in the garden after he and Peter leave. Mary is weeping. Weeping because she is grieving Jesus’ death. Weeping because the Jesus movement that she had become a part of looked like it had come to a violent and sudden end on a Roman Cross. Weeping because she could not even find Jesus’ body. The angels in the tomb ask her about her tears. And then a man she mistakes as the groundskeeper, the gardener, asks her the same question. “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” (John 20:15). Mary begins to leave in despair until she hears the man call her by name and she recognizes his voice. She turns and looks and sees Jesus, alive and well. She runs and embraces him. Her tears turn to joy.
Death had been defeated. The life and teaching and miracles and promises and atonement of Jesus had been fulfilled. Sin was judged and its power overthrown. New creation had begun. The final enemy had been conquered. But instead of dwelling on the cosmic realities of the resurrection, John tells the story of Easter by mentioning a foot race, folded grave clothes, and Mary’s wet tears. The close of the gospel of John is just as ordinary. Jesus hosts lunch with his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
If Jesus really was alive that first Easter morning, and I believe he was, then all the stuff of life matters. The resurrection is God’s “yes and amen” to life—not to some disembodied spiritual world of clouds and harps and angels in white but life on earth. Life we experience with our senses—taste and touch and smell and sight. Life with laundry that needs to be folded and fish-fries with friends.
Easter Mondays are hard. As a pastor I am worthless on Mondays in general but on Easter Mondays I feel most acutely the incongruity of what was declared the day before and the realities of everyday experience. The victorious declaration, “Christ is Risen!” and then the response, “He is Risen indeed!” starts our service. We sing resurrection songs and celebrate the promise of new creation. We hear about an empty tomb and Thomas touching the risen Lord’s hand and side. We feast. And then Monday morning I have to drag the kids out of bed for school and pack yet another peanut-butter and Nutella sandwich. The lawn needs to be cut and the edging done. And the unwashed Easter meal dishes sit on the counter taunting me. Christ is Risen! Fold the laundry.
Reading Mink River and Doyle’s lists of the objects and happenings of everyday life was a refreshing reminder of the real world Jesus came to rescue. It is the stuff of life that makes it life. Reminding the congregation of this is part of my job as a pastor. We were made physical beings and our great hope in Christ is that even after death we will one day, once again, have physical bodies and live in a physical place.
For many years, whenever I would read “Pied Beauty” my first thoughts would turn to my English professor’s tears. Actually, for a while, my first thoughts were of spotted Yellowstone cutthroat trout, then to my English professors’ tears. Then I had a freckled son of my own. Jackson is a wonder—compassionate and focused with a predisposition for justice. His thick, blonde hair comes from Katie’s dad and his subtle smile from her but he lives for sports as much as I did at his age. He reads great books and laughs with me at The Princess Bride. The world, and its stuff, is all before him.
May God grant me a heart soft enough to always be a preacher who is moved to tears when I think of the gift that is captured in something as simple and perfect as the freckles on my son’s face. Glory be to God for dappled things indeed.
Doug Basler
Pastor & Writer
Doug has been published in Christianity Today, The Presbyterian Outlook, Story Warren and The Rabbit Room. He is currently a D.Min student in the Sacred Art of Writing program at The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Seminary.
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New Releases: Things we’re excited about at Ekstasis
The Breath and the Clay creative gathering in North Carolina. March 22-24. “What do we make of the world we have been given? Echoing the words first spoken by the Great Artist in the Genesis narrative, we, too, have been invited to bring forth, to give birth, to call life into being.”
New Finds: Treasures from the ether
Maison Assouline. From the founders: “We created this company to be the first luxury brand on culture. We wanted to supply everything for a contemporary library; we started working with top perfumers for scented candles, with Goyard for a book trunk, with Chanel on a quilted leather slipcase, and so on.”
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"It dawned on me that perhaps the first thing the risen Lord did after he defeated death, as his heart once again began to beat, was to fold his grave clothes. This seemed to me to be good news for laundry doers everywhere—and especially to moms who probably still carry out the bulk of this mundane chore. The risen Christ folded his laundry." Worth posting in the laundry room! Love this.
What a gorgeous essay.