A Prayer, A Poem

What is prayer? That's about as bad as asking 'what is poetry?'. Both are so deeply ancient and inherent to our kind that it escapes our modern tendency to create a science out of it. While poetry comes from an ancient Greek word meaning "to make, do, create" (so specific, eh?), the English word for prayer comes from the Latin word precarius, which means 'to obtain by entreaty' (New American Oxford Dictionary). Deep down, humankind has always known that we are not self-sufficient as a race. If we were, then why this long history of asking? And what are we asking for? We ask for things we think we are lacking--we know that we lack. We are asking for Biblical shalom--Hebrew for the state of utter completeness, the state of perfect rest and peace. We are a restless race--always have been. We respond in many types of prayer.

But really, what is it that we're asking (and asking and asking) for? We often ask for momentary things, and even when we ask and desire the good things, we still don't take it far enough into the eternal communion with God that is the root of all truly fulfilling desires. Lucky for us, Jesus--God--lived as a man for a whole 33 years down here. While He maintained rest with His Father, He wrestled for it in constant prayer. The fact that Jesus has to pray to stay close to His Father God is the deepest proof of His full humanity--He, just like us and the ancients, needed to ask in order to keep His shalom, His peace.

Because of Jesus the man who is God, we can find a way to be human that does not leave us chasing, knife in hand, the enemy running around in our own souls and bodies. The knife becomes useful only for harvesting vegetables and chiseling poems in the tree bark.

So where does the random poetry reference fit into this? Writing poetry--among all other expressions of human creativity--has to do with our need to complete things; or perhaps it often has more to do with our need to give breath to our discontentment with the incomplete things we see. In fact, if a poem seems 'too' complete with nothing but bubble gum pastures and cotton-candy clouds plotlessly wrapped with a bow, it runs rough on our ears because we know that life is not this way--not the life in which a Savior-God hangs naked on a cross and dies before He can restore the dignity of every man and woman by rising from the grave. If there was a bubble-gum route to shalom, He probably would have preferred that one. We, Christian or not, know that our world is deeply incomplete as of now, so when we find something small that is complete--or as close as we can find--we call it 'beauty' and must capture it in writing or paint or deliberate body movements of some sort. And it is the naked dying Savior that makes the third day that much more beautiful.

Both the need to ask and to create show that we, from ancient times, need to be overt. We need to express, share, communicate and be known in community. We are not self-sufficient, separate beings--and we are not self-sufficient from God. So we ask, we create. We ask in the form of our creativity; we create from the desires behind our asking.

As of late, I've been overwhelmed by the natural entwining between poetry and prayer. It seems that I can't do one without the other. Without prayer, my life is empty of God and I am dry for things to write. Without poetry--imagery, metaphor, plot line--I am unable to express my prayer. I understand God and prayer through the story and scene that He's given me through Scripture and Sacrament. When I'm writing, I'm using diction and linguistic features along with my silly metaphors that inevitably spill over to my asking for shalom--for myself or for someone else. Or perhaps I write about some place where I found a smidgen of it, or a moment in the day when I could visualize it, taste and savor it.

It seems that the two will never be separate for me. If you are looking for a poem without Christ, you won't find it here. If you are looking for Christ without a poem, you won't find that either. Come Holy Spirit; teach me to find places of shalom, and let me use my words to spread the wealth.