The truth is there wouldn’t be much poetry without my faith. It all began when I was living in Beacon in a proto novitiate for young Marianists back in 1956-7. There was a poetry contest given by an order of nuns, with first prize being ten dollars. No one knew much about poetry, so I took out a book which explained scansion and wrote a sonnet focused on Good Friday. Then, at Manhattan College, poems about John the Baptist.
That’s what I asked myself when I first glimpsed the Latin title of Pope Leo’s recent Encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. The meaning of those words seemed to me clear, at least in English: “Magnificent Humanity.” But then immediately I was puzzled. What “Humanity”? We cruel, self-destructive creatures? And “magnificent”? What is the Pope talking about? Do the Pope and I live on the same planet? With our persecutions of each other, our greed, our racism, our wars, our trashing of our environment—“magnificent”?
The binding of my 1988 paperback edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Collected Poems is drying out, so that some sections of pages are coming apart. But what haven’t dried out are my many yellow post-its throughout the book—notes on various poems that especially spoke to me two or three decades ago. Many of these poems address in some way Milosz’s relation to God—which is what interests me for this post.
I’d been thinking for a while about the time and place of where I grew up—in rural Minnesota in the 1980s, in the middle of what came to be called the farm crisis. For my MFA program, I had written an essay exploring one or two aspects of the experience. Then right at the end of my program, my father had this huge meltdown, his whole nervous system was just shutting down.
Fr. Murray Bodo is now in his eighties, but in this new collection his creative mind is as rich and fertile as ever—as it ranges over such subjects as favorite museums; Easter, Christmas, and other seasons; his New Mexico childhood, his travels, his aging.
The poetry of Texas writer Vassar Miller (1924-1998) isn’t as well-known as it should be—because, critics suggest, she was writing religious verse in a decidedly secular age. But I’ve long treasured my copy of her collected poems, If I Had Wheels or Love (1991). Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her disability naturally finds its way into some of her poems—but many more are grounded in her Christian faith. It’s these that I want to look at in this post.
“The stations of the cross” is a Roman Catholic devotion in which fourteen scenes depicting Christ on his way to crucifixion are recalled and pondered: his scourging, for instance, or his encounter with Pilate. Morrissey’s poem is titled Stations of the Cross (no “the”), suggesting parallel sites where “the cross” may be found. In addition to the immediate reference to Jesus’ historical suffering one may also read an implied immediate environment of school violence and beyond that innumerable instances of scapegoats and victimization in the wider world.
The New Testament is essential reading for me. But sometimes I wonder what it is I’m reading, and that’s because I don’t know Greek. I should have made the effort to learn this language long ago. Now I’m old, and it feels too late. I re-read, study, and think about the New Testament from afar, in multiple English-language versions. Here’s a passage from David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament (2017; 2nd ed., 2023), Luke 5: 1-11, where Jesus speaks to a crowd and then to the fishermen who will become his disciples.
There’s a moment in the piece titled “Security” when a number of cultures and religions—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab-American, straight-up American, Muslim, Jewish, Arab Christian and American Christian (!)—are all gathered around an impending meal, and there’s a moment of shared holiness despite the locale and the means by which we arrived at this venue.
Some readers have asked: who is the you? I hope it’s not greedy to have “you” mean multiple things! First it speaks to the reader, the “you” who’s invited into the book. In some of the poems “You” addresses the Divine. And in other poems the “you” is addressed to the friend, a character in the book. Finally, “Matters for you Alone”: not only meant for a single person, but also for someone literally by himself: a solitary reader.
Fr. Giussani does what great thinkers do: he gets to first principles. It strikes me that what has been forgotten about liturgical renewal is that it was intended to help us live worshipful lives in the world. That’s what he invites us to throughout: it’s not about liturgical reform first but a liturgical way of living.
Enter Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, which explores the Christian gospel through the lenses of three literary genres: tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. In essence, Buechner suggests that serious matters of the gospel are first matters of a human life well lived before they are a logical problem to be solved and systematized.
Jon Fosse’s novel Septology (published in Norwegian in 2019) is a monologue beginning and ending in the mind of Asle, an elderly widowed Norwegian painter living in the countryside on the proceeds from the sale of his paintings. He communes throughout the next 667 pages with a self who becomes both him and not him.
I miss the very close community that I believe we all felt when my family and other families in our conservative Baptist church saw one another as special and bonded. We counted on one another. Whenever the pastor turned the lights on, we were there: Sunday School, church, prayer meeting, young peoples’ meetings, vacation Bible school, mother-daughter banquets, midnight watches, potlucks, revivals, and car washes on Sunday afternoons.
I’m going to have to bow out for a little while. In the middle of life’s way I have suddenly returned to school to study environmental science and law. Whether this is wandering in a dark woods—and if it is, whether I will emerge on the right side of the woods—time will tell. I don’t think of this wandering as a complete career shift, as I still have literary work to publish.
I am always troubled by two things which are really one thing. One thing, or one part of this big thing, is religion: Why does it seem so broken now, so impossible? And the other part is the ecological crisis: How can my work as a writer, teacher, or father answer to these uncanny times?
Carolyn Forché is now a celebrated American poet. But she was far from that on the day in the late 1970s when a car pulled up outside the remote California beach house that she was renting. The driver idled the engine, then finally turned it off. At that, Forché, alone in the house and busily typing, noticed the sudden silence and became apprehensive. In her gripping memoir What You Have Heard is True, she narrates what happened next.
In her new books The Scandal of Holiness and Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson writes as a lifelong Christian to other Christians. She would like more people who profess the faith to immerse themselves in reading works of imaginative literature. This duology is part of new widespread interest in Great Books curricula.
Piccinini was an Italian surgeon at Sant’Orsola hospital in Bologna, a husband, a father of four, and a passionate leader and friend of thousands of high school and university students in Italy between the 1970s and the end of the twentieth century. He died at the age of 48 in 1999 in a car accident on the highway between Milan and Bologna. At his funeral in Bologna, celebrated in the basilica of San Petronio by the then archbishop Giacomo Biffi, there were seven thousand people.
If, as is the case, the word “anthology” derives from a combination of Greek words meaning, “gathering of flowers,” then most poetry anthologies might best be described as mixed bouquets. Readers search them for a few spectacular roses and lilies amid the humbler baby’s breath and fern fronds that fill out the collection. Yet I suspect its far easier for twenty people to agree on the beauty of a particular flower than the merits of a recently written poem.