"No Simple Language"

I stumbled across an old favorite album as I made my way home on Saturday after a week at church camp. I probably haven't listened to the first Jars of Clay effort in its entirety in about 10 years, but I think it still holds its age about as well as any Christian album I've ever heard (with only "Jesus Freak" by dc Talk as a peer). The eclectic instrumentation, piercing poetry for the lyrics, and sheer joy that shines through it differentiated it from both the mainstream alternative of the '90s and from its contemporaries in the Christian Music camp.

"Flood" may have been the most popular song on the album, with its heavy alternative feel--and it's probably one of the biggest reasons for Jars' crossover appeal--but the one that remains my favorite is "Love Song for a Savior." Towards the beginning of the song, it tells us that "she loves the daisies and the roses/no simple language/someday she'll understand/the meaning of it all..."

I don't just love this song because of my history with it in the formative years of my faith, nor for the fact that I can see my two-year-old daughter with this kind of delight and potential and hope. I also love it for the sheer poetry that opens up the whole of my interior world for reflection.

Doesn't good poetry do that for us? Far from the simplistic rhymed couplets which most amateur poets inflict upon us, a good Shakespearean sonnet (or his blank verse, for that matter) or the horribly-absent-all-punctuation e e cummings delight and dumbfound us. Rabindranath Tagore, Constanstine Cavafy, Rilke, R S Thomas, T S Eliot, Emily Dickenson, Keats, Lewis Carroll, and many more have been my guides through life since I was read to as a little child.

There are poets, too, whose songs are matched with music...as Augustine says, "The one who sings prays twice." Amongst these are James Taylor, U2, Jim Croce, Simon & Garfunkel, Sting, the Beatles, Stephen Foster, our aforementioned friends Jars of Clay...well, add your own to the list.

The Bible gives us a great deal of poetry, even in its prose. And I've discovered that poetry makes the quest for understanding slippery and difficult, for every meaning has its mirror and shadow. A poetic faith as related in the Revelation to John means something entirely more difficult, more beautiful, more timely than a prosaic reading of it would lead you to believe. An attempt to flatten the raw beauty and sexual power of the Song of Songs into only an allegorical or literal reading constrains the text and Spirit in a way that the lovers in the verse refuse to allow. And when Jesus speaks poetically of the need to be born "from above," the flat and simple faith of Nicodemus begins to take on a texture and richness both true and terrifying.

As I spent time at camp this week, we thought together with teenagers and grown-ups about being connected in faith to God and each other, and many of us reflected on how that informs our interpreting the Bible. Are we reading it just for the head-knowledge of concrete doctrine...or do we allow it to grab hold of us and plunge us into a new world where we become "lost in wonder, love, and praise" ?

Another one of my favorites, Welsh priest & poet R S Thomas commented, “Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart.” May the poetry of life and faith so shape the thoughts of our hearts into no simple language!