Last week I was blessed to hear my friend Jenney perform some of her poetry. Now I must admit that I’m not really a poetry guy. Poetry does not immediately speak to my heart or capture my imagination…but it might be because I haven’t been reading or listening to the right stuff! I’ve included one of Jenney’s poems below called “Motion”. When Jenney read this it caught me. It caught my imagination. The last two sentences continue to hold me firmly in their grasp. They say that “…we must not be ashamed of our aching need for contact for god is the absence of aloneness whatever the modern prophets say. And the need for love is not a cringing whisper of our indecent feebleness but a clamoring bell that shouts out our impossible greatness to the mad but listening world.” God is the absence of aloneness. How does that strike you? I find that phrase absolutely breathtaking–in a world where we’ve somehow mistakenly overvalued individuality, isolation, and self-sufficiency to be reminded that God is the absence of aloneness is an incredibly hopeful image. It is an incredibly poignant image to hold onto and I think it draws us back into an understanding of God that is both accurate to his identity and to our need for him. And our need for him, as the poem suggest (though using the term ‘love’), is not something to be ashamed of. Being in need of love, and embracing such a need, is never something to be ashamed of. It is who we are, it is what we are created for, it is built into our identity. We are lovers. We cannot get away from it…or, rather, when we get away from it we begin to disintegrate and lose who we are and what our humanity is all about. I am created to love and to be loved–and it is in this love that we come to understand our “impossible greatness”…or as the Christian narrative characterizes it…our identity as creatures who are indelibly fashioned in the image of God. We spend so much time moving, staying busy, filling our homes and cars with noise, making every attempt to keep our lives and minds so full that we’ve got no space to recognize our neediness impossible greatness. We “resist standing still” because if we stand still too long we might be reminded of our identity as lovers, and if we are reminded of our identity as lovers we might just begin to love, and if we begin to love we might become vulnerable, and if we become vulnerable we may just get hurt, and getting hurt…hurts.

Motion

Do you move through your life as I do? Hacking into each moment as if you are cutting a path Through a ricocheting field of insects? Do you resist standing still?
Fearful that the accumulation of seconds Will pin you to a tree branch And leave you as an offering to An already bloated predator? Are you breathless from your conviction That the years will pile around you as you stand still–Bury you under the frozen confetti of your regrets? Do you move not because you love motion But because you hate the microscopes That are trained above you as you try to commit To being a simple organism in a static microcosm? Are you like me? I who have tried to increase the speed Of my life without having first learned to release the weight of
My disappointed hopes. Have you in your fury sprinted into the distance Knowing there is only a wall to meet you? And have you in stubbornness, Your ignorant pride, tried to move that wall through the violence of your Personal outrage? If you have, then you are kin to me, we are brothers and Sisters in our confusion, and we cannot climb this wall alone, nor contend with The wilderness beyond it, through random motion and blind reaching in the dark.

No.

We must first become the offspring of the counterintuitive. We must gather our courage as casually as we gather shells from an unpolluted shore. We must coax our wounded peace out from its hiding place and rehabilitate its broken faith with our commitment. And we must not endorse regrets. We must not feed them even little bits of well intentioned love because this would not be a kindness but an invitation to a prolonging of our loss. Instead, we must learn to hurl superfluous desires back into the turbulent waters and be bold in the belief that the light does not arrive with the answers that we find but with the questions that we ask. And we must not be ashamed of our aching need for contact for god is the absence of aloneness whatever the modern prophets say. And the need for love is not a cringing whisper of our indecent feebleness but a clamoring bell that shouts out our impossible greatness to the mad but listening world.

I hope we find space in our life to risk getting hurt.

* I can’t claim that my perspective here in any way captures Jenney’s perspective…but I think that’s part of the beauty of poetry right? If you would like to purchase Jenney’s book of poems you can do so here. It’d be worth your while!