Lately I’ve been learning about live-streaming. If you’ve watched the National Cathedral’s Sunday morning services, you’re familiar with the concept. A worship service -- or a concert, lecture, or really any event -- appears on the internet while it’s happening in real time. I’m learning about live-streaming because St. James the Less will start live-streaming our services later this summer, so parishioners uncomfortable with attending in-person gatherings can still “attend” from their homes. So far the learning process has been great fun, and there’s a teenager in my house to whom I can direct any questions.
One lesson I’ve learned is that this apparently simple process -- recording a service with a camera and uploading it to the web -- contains mind-boggling complexities. There’s an array of technological options to consider, tutorial videos to watch, manuals to read, and software to tinker with. My mind is full of data, pros and cons, causes and effects. It’s all very rational; and, in linguistic terms, it’s a whole lot of prose.
In situations like these, I often find some lines from John Ashbery’s poem “Grand Galop” rattling around in my head:
The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.
I’ve always found those lines both funny and comforting. I’d much rather fret over a straightforward cooking project than come face to face with my own haplessness in the face of “large unfinished concepts.” That’s one thing poetry does so well. Using devices like rhythm, rhyme, and consonance (Ashbery’s “forced to fret over insufficient,” closely followed by “Unfinished”), poems are memorable invitations to look at our lives in a larger context. That they stick in our heads isn’t accidental. Like hymns, poems work as mnemonic devices. Poems invite us to consider ourselves and our world, and hymns invite us to consider God, even after worship has ended.
Of course, there’s also a long tradition of devotional poetry that considers God. In some ways, poems are better suited for that purpose than prose. Their use of metaphor and carefully weighed language remind us that underneath rational, prosaic descriptions lurk incomprehensible realities. Take the subject of prayer, for instance. It’s one thing to explain prayer in the helpful prose of, say, the Catholic Catechism: “Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ.” But it’s wholly another to explain prayer with poetry, as George Herbert does in this long list of metaphors:
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Herbert describes prayer in ways that resonate with us -- I especially love “the Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth” -- even as he demonstrates that prayer is a mystical reality, beyond our ability to comprehend and language’s ability to fully express.
This weekend, our worship and my Hymns of Healing video will feature hymns written by poets. All hymnwriters are poets in some sense, but just as The Hymnal 1982 features music by established composers like Handel and Vaughan Williams, it also features texts written by the likes of St. Francis and William Cowper, better known for their poetry than their hymns. They invite us to worship and consider our faith in texts of transcendent beauty.
Speaking of transcendent beauty, I’m also excited to share with you over the next few weeks three videos from an excellent singer, former St. James music director Anastasia Balmer. Ana graciously helped me out by singing three poem-hymns: a setting of Emily Dickinson’s “Will there really be a morning?”, and two of the Five Mystical Songs, Vaughan Williams’s settings of Herbert’s poems. Like the more prosaic technology of live-streaming, these poems are mediums -- insufficient but necessary -- for coming face to face with a God who transcends our ability to comprehend.
Josh Langhoff
