Corcoran Austbarr
September 25, 2024, the Mount hosted Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University, Abram Van Engen’s Ducharme “Word Made Flesh” lecture.
This year marks the second decade of the series. In his lecture, Engen discussed how “liturgy is a practice of poetry,” and dove into poetry’s importance in the church and the ways in which reading poetry can be a spiritual practice.
“Poetry is the art of encounter,” he says. “It is a word made flesh. It lives or dies in the experience it draws forth.” Toward the start of the lecture, Engen references a 1500-year long tradition of monks that spans across several Christian practices.
Many monks, according to Engen, read all 150 Psalms—sacred songs and poems compiled into a book of the Bible—each week. This practice is not done in order to understand them, but to experience them, precisely what he desires the faithful to do when approaching poetry. Engen encourages us to dwell on poetry, not dissect it, as “reading poetry is not the same as performing an autopsy.”
In poetry, readers meet the speaker in the stanzas (which means “room” in Italian) to encounter them. In American poet and educator Kay Ryan’s one stanza poem “Ideal Audience,” discussed at the lecture, Ryan makes it clear that she wishes to meet someone in her poetry; she desires that “only two ever found this room.”
To reference the Bible, Engen says poetry is like The Valley of Dry Bones, a vision that appears in the book of Ezekiel, until you breathe life into it, just as breath entered the bones. Such a comparison also serves as a reminder of how roughly one-third of the Old Testament itself is poetry.
If one has a poetic eye, they may even agree with Engen that Adam naming the creatures of the earth is the very first poetic act. Of course, Engen understands a significant number of people find themselves disliking much of the poetry they encounter, but to this he says, “what we look for in the world of poetry, is a friend.” Referencing C.S. Lewis, he reminds the audience that friendship, like poetry, often begins with, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one,” and asks us to continue to search for the poetry that is made for us.
Engen’s book Word Made Fresh dives deeply into the idea that over time our senses grow stale, but poetry makes them fresh. Poetry turns creation into “uncreation” so that when we return to the real world, everything seems new. Engen emphasizes that poetry such as this will inspire readers to see God and His creation in ways they did not previously consider.
What Engen ultimately believes to be the most valuable thing poetry can do for the church is to help Christians think differently about how we process scripture and understand our relationship with faith. Just as we must experience poetry more than understand it, we must start prioritizing experiencing God.
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