God as Poet

Years ago, a friend of mine who taught at the BYU law school told me of a non-member professor who had joined the church.  “I think I’m growing bored,” he said.  “The God I keep hearing about every Sunday school class is a kind of Organization Man [published in the 50s].  I was hoping for more of a poet—a Being in love with trees and clear, cool mountain  streams.”

Bruce assured him there were probably streams, probably full of rainbow trout, and that God loves William Butler Yeats and is moved by Bach’s Cantata 154 [“Sheep While Safely Grazing].  Yet a bright fellow like Malcolm Mugggeridge couldn’t imagine “God deriving any pleasure from a Mozart concerto.”

The Lord blessed me with the best job in the world.  At Thomas E. Ricks College [the proper  name] and BYU-I, I was paid an honorable wage for spending my time leading students through the land of poetry.  Here poetry includes philosophy and the history of ideas.

At the beginning, I would reach into my desk, pull out the scriptures and then hold up a stack of paperbacks.  “The scriptures are the roadmap; the “poetry” provides valuable supplementary readings and footnotes.”  I then drew a large, shaky, often oblong circle on the board.  “This circle is my 'world,' the space I live and worship in.  My goal is to make it ever larger each day of my life here, and in the Other World, and to invite you into at least one little corner.  Some of you find this frightening.  If so, you’ll want to sign your drop card and find a more comfortable pew.”

Yes, some always left.  A little co-ed from Spanish Fork said she “didn’t want a world that big.  Mine is small and safe,” she whispered.  A towering football player stepped to the desk and said, "You’re  good. Real good.  But I don’t want ya.  Circle or not.”

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start quoting long lines that rhyme, nor am I sure that all of you should watch the movie, Wit, starring Emma Thompson.  It’s a DVD about the most frightening word in our language other than “death.” “Cancer.” A professor of the poetry of John Donne, Emma  proves demanding; so rigorous in her treatment of the brilliant, paradoxical Donne, that even science students take her class as a kind of intellectual Fort Bragg in preparation for medical school.  They love her logic, her mercilessness, because they want to be objective and analytical with their patients.  Just what everybody wants in the people with the white coats and that thing around their necks.  Note: This is not my dear student, friend and doctor, Michael Packer.

Emma’s character contracts cancer and agrees to a “new and vigorous” approach a hot-shot oncologist is experimenting with--and secretly writing an article for a medical journal.  She becomes a commodity; an experiment.  How long can one take 3 times the usual amount of chemo? How many hours can she “hold on” until inevitable death?  [Again, I know of two exceptionally humane and deeply religious oncologists: Drs. Hancock and Dixon.]

So where does she go, sliced and diced, full of legalized poison?  She, an expert on the God-fearing poet of comfort and purpose, discovers she has no inner life; no inner space where peace and light rule and maybe a trout-filled brook quietly flows nearby.

In the end, therefore, she doesn’t want to read Donne.  That’s the paradox and the tragedy of the intellectual life without the Light of God.  The true life-meaning in Donne’s magnificent Divine Poems and his Holy Sonnets remained still-born, mere intellectual gymnastics.  She never got the point. 

Her mentor in Donne’s poetry in graduate school lies beside her, pulls out a copy of the Runaway Bunny, a book for her great grandson.  Poetry produces peace.  If Donne doesn’t work, try a bunny book, and crawl into a world where Divine Love and Compassion prevail.