Forthcoming . . . .

For the last few weeks, I’ve been editing the page proofs for I pray in poems.  As I complete that task today, I offer this publicity snippet from the publisher’s website:

“I pray in poems is a journey, a spiritual walk from Advent 1 to Easter Week. Along the way, readers make twenty stops, exploring great works of art written by poets ranging from William Shakespeare, John Donne, and George Herbert to Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and Rumi. Waiting at these stops are also St. Paul, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, and the authors of the Gospels. As readers travel with the author through the gloomy twilight of Advent to the starburst of Epiphany, from the silent terror of a stone-cold tomb to the joyful cry of Easter, he also shares moments of personal struggle with anger, fear, and loss in the wake of a difficult diagnosis. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that Dave Worster “enlivens our lives as Christians by helping us see what we otherwise might miss . . . . By slowing us down, we can see through his expositions of these poems that God is in the details.” Ultimately, Worster’s meditations reveal how the words of the poets and the Word of God combine to transcend material suffering and offer hope for the life to come.”

And here’s a sneak preview of the poems in the book and how they are organized:

Introduction: “Sonnet 15” by William Shakespeare
Reading Poetry: “Advent” by Rae Armantrout
Advent 1: “The Collar” by George Herbert
Advent 2: “Sonnet 29” by William Shakespeare
The Rose Candle: “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims
Advent 4: “Making the House Ready for the Lord” by Mary Oliver
Christmas Eve: “The Oxen” by Thomas Hardy
Christmas: “Bezhetsk” by Anna Akhmatova
Epiphany 1: “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot
Epiphany 2: “Such Singing in the Wild Branches” by Mary Oliver
Ash Wednesday: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lent 1: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Lent 2: “Holy Sonnet 14” by John Donne
Lent 3: “A prayer that will be answered” by Anna Kamienska
Palm Sunday: “The Donkey” by G. K. Chesterton
Maundy Thursday: “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Good Friday: “The Scattered Congregation” by Tomas Transtromer
Easter: “Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond” by Mary Oliver
Easter Week: “These spiritual windowshoppers” by Rumi
and “I would love to kiss you” also by Rumi

Please feel free to share any of this information with your friends who love poetry, but also (maybe especially) with those who think they don’t!

Learning to pray your sorrow.

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:

With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

In my last post, Memento Mori, I wrote that “cancer, with its rounds of treatments and coldblooded survival statistics,” has shorn from me forever the sure and confident knowledge of my long and healthy life. I went on: “In the aftermath of this loss, anger and genuine grief are not at all unusual.  If we are lucky, we work our way through mourning to the place where my friend now finds himself. And where I find myself as well.”

When I wrote “we work our way through mourning,” I did not mean to suggest that this “working through” meant “leaving behind” my grief as if I could get to the other side and out of it. No. There is no far boundary to pain like this. By “working through” my rage and mourning, I meant to say that whatever destination I now hope to achieve I must achieve by means of sorrow, not in spite of it.  If the abyss cannot be denied, it must be embraced.

And redeemed.

George Herbert communicates this idea beautifully in the first verse of Easter Wings, above.  The “flight” described in line 10 is not an escape from the fall, from the sorrow, sickness, or shame Herbert writes of later in the poem; rather, we must understand that without the fall the flight could not exist. The fall furthers the flight, by which Herbert means that the flight is fully informed by, and indeed has no meaning without, that fall.

The shape of Easter Wings participates in its meaning. It takes little more than a tilt of one’s head (to the left) to see that the verse looks like a pair of wings. The first five lines describe the downward arc of humankind, the loss of the “wealth and store” given to us in creation until we have become “most poore” (at which point the verse is at the first of its two shortest lines).  At line 6 the verse begins to turn and expand: “With Thee,” Lord, we might rise and share in the victory of Easter morning.  But to achieve this triumphant flight we need both wings, both the redemption and the decay which precedes it.

Randall Jarrell writes at the end of his great poem 90 North: “I see at last that all the knowledge / I wrung from the darkness / . . . Is worthless as ignorance:  nothing comes from nothing, / The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom.  It is pain.”

Jarrell’s line “nothing comes from nothing” is surely a reference to Shakespeare’s King Lear. When the King asks his daughter Cordelia to perform her love before the royal court in order to win a larger share of land and wealth, she replies with “nothing.”  “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear angrily replies. “Speak again.” She refuses, and Lear banishes her.

Only after Lear loses everything (is reduced to nothing) does he grow to realize the true value of Cordelia’s silence—that she actually loves her father more than either of her two sisters, more than mere words could express.  From the darkness of his agony, Lear does not experience either wisdom or pain, he experiences both.  His suffering informs his epiphany, and we call it wisdom without denying that still it is pain. Lear is reconciled with Cordelia before the end of the play, but still he loses her.

A dear friend recently wrote: “in describing the art of living before we die and the art of losing, you paint a picture of life where illness, death, fear, and loss informs you but does not define you.  You are not “my friend with cancer, Dave” but rather “my friend, Dave . . . who is living with cancer.”  That’s it, exactly, which lies at the heart of faith. Creation from nothing. Redemption through the base wood of a cross. Joy by means of sorrow. Life with Cancer. Cancer with Life. I must somehow learn to embrace it all. To pray it all in hope that illness, fear, and loss will somehow further the flight in me.

“Even the darkness is not dark to you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to you” Psalm 139:12.