The Poetry of Lent

By Duo Dickinson, Trinity on the Green (New Haven)

For me, Lent has become about poetry.

Lent is a conundrum for the few of us who think about it. After the Council of Nicaea 1,700 years ago, it was said by some of the newly connected church leaders that six weeks of fasting, prayer, and contemplation were a necessary way to focus our lives on the salvation of the world by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As with many deeply devoted rituals, humans evolve them. Easter is now part of every CVS pharmacy’s shelf space commitment after Christmas – usually involving chocolate bunnies. Lent, in turn, has evolved away from fasting, prayer, and contemplation, to the denial of eating said chocolate before Easter, to, now a vague pretext for Mardi Gras.

But Lent, to me, is more about Good Friday than Easter. Good Friday is a day of hideously human action. Humans, us, murdered the savior that the Council of Nicaea worked so hard to define. In our pathetic inadequacy to understand the sacrifice of God on earth, we do the best we can with rituals, aesthetics, and fact-finding in all the ways we can to try to control what we really, really cannot control.

There is no more human act than poetry. It is completely unnecessary in life, yet essential to the poet. It is communication, but not the desperate fact-checking we impose of the inscrutable. Poetry communicates us to ourselves through the poet. It reveals no information, composes no dogma, nor does it suspend the drudge and fear of now. Poetry is the mirror beyond the words it uses.

So in the confrontation of Good Friday in Lent, that which was once called “contemplation” poetry is inevitable. At least for me.

A Bishop and I talk.

Not often, but enough. We inevitably deal with our inadequacies as humans in a world where our limits are excruciatingly clear. I began to write every morning in Lent, really to myself – but shared. She reads what I write in Lent. Five years ago, it became about poetry, specifically the words of Emily Dickinson. https://savedbydesign.wordpress.com/category/a-year-in-lent/

After that first year, the Bishop asked “Are you doing Emily again?” and I realized that God was with me, with Emily, and with the Bishop. Why?

Emily Dickinson lived a perfectly reasonable number of years in the middle of the 19th century – 55. She saw her beloved cousin die when she was 13 as her mind was forming. Thirty years later, she could not bear to attend her father’s funeral .

Somewhere in between, Emily started to write to herself, too. And poetry became a daily act of living. For no one but herself, and scarcely shared. The words she spent her days creating were kept in her room – at her death, ten poems were publicly published and a couple of hundred more were shared with intimates of the 1,799 she wrote. She wanted all of her writing to simply vanish at her death. But a sister, then others, saw the resurrection of her beauty was simply necessary.

Including me.

I have written about 200 essays each day of Lent these five years that were triggered by the words of a mystery, over 100 years dead. She is simply with me in the early morning in silence, on my exercise bike. An hour a day, often with brutal typo’s, but instantly published – now read perhaps 15,000 times – puny in the internet maelstrom. Each morning I have either followed a collection’s curation, or searched her work, or simply see the moment and try to find its resonance in Emily Dickinson’s isolated explorations of heart and mind.

Unlike scholars, I only know more than the poetry itself by the incidents that were part of its generation. The thousands of factoids compiled by hundreds of Emily scholars are but a tiny echo of the Council of Nicaea’s efforts to determine realities out of human enigma. We want to control only because the power of our ignorance is so daunting. There is never enough faith to understand what we cannot know.

It is enough for me to know that the gut-punching impact of Emily’s words as coming from God – given to me through the reality of Jesus.

So I deeply love the poems of Emily Dickinson, without knowing anything. Like I know God. The reality of incoherent love cannot be dismissed, no matter how inconvenient. Our rituals can come up from who we are, rather than be a measure of how we should live. Emily opted out of most 19th-century rituals – no marriage, children – not even a public presence. I am thinking she would be called “odd” by a world fully circumscribed by traditions and social standards.

As we veer into the realities of approaching Good Friday, the human judgments of “odd” or orthodox become louder in our minds in Lent. But beauty is the Easter of our humanity.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236)

By Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236)

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