News
Poetry is the best theology
Michael Leach | Mar. 25, 2014 Soul Seeing
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When I was in the seminary, our English teacher, Fr. Ignatius Burrill, introduced us to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'll always remember these lines from "As Kingfishers Catch Fire":
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
When I was at home that summer, I glimpsed Christ on Clark Street. I was walking down the street toward our apartment near Wrigley Field and passed a down-and-out man leaning against a wall and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. I recalled my friend Larry McCauley telling me about a church nearby with a crucified Jesus etched in stone on the wall. A legend under the cross read, "Is it nothing to you who pass by?" I realized that the man on the street and the man on the cross were one.
I didn't know it then, but Burrill and McCauley had taught me that poetry is the best theology.
Poetry evokes what is good, beautiful and true. It imagines the unimaginable, describes the indefinable, and unveils what our senses cannot know or our intellect figure out. Poetry is theology leaping out of the file cabinet and into the heart. It is the Word or words that stir our souls. A poet is a seer who