Poetry Sunday Sermon: Reversals - February 23, 2025
[LINDSAY] Last February, Keith and I held the Worship Enrichment Committee’s first Poetry Sunday. As it was Lent 1, we selected poems that thematically resonated with Lent, exploring the restlessness within us that asks something deeper of our lives. One of the poems we discussed was Jane Kenyon’s Walking the Dog at Sunrise, which includes the line “Searching for God is the first thing and the last, but in between such trouble and such pain.” In that poem the speaker is wondering what words of comfort she can offer a friend who has suddenly, tragically become a young widow.
My husband Tim was sitting just over there in our regular pew that day. We had no idea then that he was sick, no idea he would die of a terrifyingly rapid cancer in the first hours of that Easter morning. Lent 1 to Easter. Those 40 days of Lent turned out to be the last 40 days of his life. And the sudden widow looking for comfort was me. Searching for God is the first thing and the last but in between such trouble and such pain.
I mention this because it’s the personal backdrop to the theme Keith and I chose for this year’s Poetry Sunday. Our theme is Reversals. The unexpected gains in loss, the ways that God meets us at the bottom, the paradox of how our life can be added to when it’s pared away. This is not learning we seek . . . but it’s learning life doles out. We see intimations of Reversals, going down to go up, in our readings today: Joseph who was sold into the death of slavery by his own brothers finds that God used that suffering to preserve the life of many, including those who betrayed him. And in the Psalm: the lowly shall possess the land. And in the Epistle: what is sown in weakness is raised in power, what is sown perishable, is raised imperishable, and in the Gospel: do good, expecting no return and your reward will be that you are children of God. And though we didn’t read these today, we’re all familiar with Jesus’s use of the spiritual principle of the reversal: the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, the broken hearted shall see God.
Today’s poems all have elements of Reversal. Some gently: The Frost and Schwartz poems both explore the down-up found in the everyday. And some hard-won: the Eliot and Kenyon poems both explore the reversal born out of loss or the soul’s dark night. All point us to deeper experience of how we might encounter our rawest most challenging moments with faith that our story is still being written.
[PJ PROJECTS POEM I]
[KEITH] from BIRCHES
by Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
[LINDSAY] In Robert Frost’s poem, the speaker is remembering being a boy, engaging in a quaint entertainment that must have been rather common for a rural New Hampshire kid of the late 1800s. He’s remembering climbing birch saplings, swinging out, riding them down to the ground, seeing them spring back up again - they don’t stay bent as when an ice-storm buckles them.
What’s notable here is that the speaker is careful to recognize that the moments of climbing – “I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, /And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven,” – is answered by the down. “Till the tree could bear no more, but dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back.” The climb, the movement toward heaven is countered by our inability to stay there.
“Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Here’s the nugget of the reversal, a gentle everyday sort of reversal: This domain, here, with our cares and considerations and even these moments when our face is lashed from the twig from the seemingly pathless woods: THIS is the right place for us, this is where love is, not the up toward heaven, but the down toward earth is what we are built for.
[PJ PROJECTS POEM II]
[LINDSAY] from EAST COKER
by T.S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
. . . In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
[KEITH] Eliot uses reversal to instruct not how we come to understand faith or knowing the divine, but rather the need for a radically different approach to God.
His language involves us in the mystery of God. Notice how he grabs us by repeatedly using the pronoun “you”, as well as his use of dramatic reversals, His meaning may be difficult to understand at first, but his words and ideas are difficult to ignore. In the first of two fragments from East Coker, Eliot argues against a human, earthbound definitions of hope, faith, and love, urging patience, and a suspension of any zeal to know, to acquire faith or understand the divine.
In the second fragment, Eliot insists that approaching God requires us to hold the contradictions of being human humbly and without judgement and without any attempt to reconcile. Moments of ecstasy, moments when we feel a nearness of God, coexist with periods of spiritual dryness. Similarly joy and grief, knowing and unknowing, self-will and willed selflessness. Each challenge and clarify the other. And so, in the poet’s language
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
[PJ PROJECTS POEM III]
[KEITH] CAMPERS LEAVING: SUMMER 1981
By Jane Kenyon
Just now two chartered buses from Boston
pulled majestically onto Route 4. Dust
settled along the back road . . . the dog
stopped barking, turned three circles,
and lay back down.
Faces in every tinted window
turned back for one last look
at Ragged Mountain.
The sun had cleared the peak . . .
it was so bright they had to turn away. Soon
the noisy reconstruction of every family . . .
Yesterday the phone rang at noon.
Father, calling from the hospital, had
something on his irradiated mind – just what,
he couldn’t say, not that he didn’t try.
He wept, and gave the phone to Mother
to say good-bye.
All summer I watched the campers from the far
shore. They learned to swim and sail,
and how to cling to a tipped canoe. Some
struggled the entire time but failed.
On the last day I heard a voice
say simply, I need the pole.
Sometimes when the wind is right it seems
that every word has been spoken to me.
[LINDSAY] Another New Hampshire poet, Jane Kenyon, pairs two distinct things in this poem: children leaving summer camp and a phone call between the speaker and her hospitalized father undergoing radiation. She pairs them without comment, allowing their resonances to speak for themselves. The effect imbues the poem with melancholy.
First there are the children on chartered buses, turning back for one last look at Ragged Peak. But the brightness of the sun clearing the mountain makes them turn away. How artfully Kenyon suggests their return to the hubbub of normal life: “soon the noisy reconstruction of every family…”
Then there’s the phone call: illness and radiation diminishing her father, his inability to speak clearly. There’s the pain of what, afterall cannot be spoken, and then he weeps, gives the phone over to his wife to say goodbye.
All summer the poem’s speaker heard the campers across the lake at their waterfront activities, swimming, sailing, learning to cling to a tipped canoe. Some struggled the whole time but failed. She tells us “on the last day I heard a voice say simply, I need the pole.” There’s such understated sadness in this, the finality of, even on camp’s last day, still requiring the pole to keep from sinking. The beauty of Kenyon’s writing here is that it’s a voice that comes across the water, lifting it out of the particularity of a camper struggling to swim and becoming any of us at a moment in life needing the pole.
The reversal comes in the poem’s final two lines: Sometimes when the wind is right it seems/ that every word has been spoken to me.
Though this poem’s melancholy, contending with loss and failure, is palpable, it ends with the surprise sense of being met even in this mood, even in the midst of these sorts of existential pains. In our tradition, we might use the word Spirit to talk about this presence, this sense of being spoken to and comforted. The incredible assurance of this poem is that sometimes, maybe most particularly at our hardest moments, we find the wind is right, and that every word has been spoken to us.
[PJ PROJECTS POEM IV]
[LINDSAY] WINTER SOLSTICE
by Ruth L. Schwartz
The clouds mound over the far-off hill:
faithful pioneers, stilled caravan.
Above them, moody wisps backlit
by the kind of wild gold
we know can’t last –
pink bright as a peach made in heaven,
yellow shining like God’s final say.
And now a black plane rising up,
small and brave enough
to stop my heart.
Lost already behind the hill, the sun
might be grieving for us, or itself.
Or might be glad to call it quits,
to sleep so long, this longest night –
before, by morning, beginning to spin,
slowly but fervently
in the other direction.
What we don’t know will have to love us
into being, I can see that now,
and what we need to know
will be withheld from us
and laid on top of us, in tenderness and loss,
the way night nightly lays its long
and lovely body down on top of everything –
and all the light we’ve made lies down
under that dark.
[KEITH] Ruth Schwartz’s poem opens with an invitation to see ourselves as “faithful pioneers”, that is people of faith journeying in a place we have never been. We are “still” before a glorious sunset that like all sunsets we know must fade. Schwartz uses reversal, light against dark, a colorful sunset against the bleakness of winter solstice’s longest night, a world still, yet spinning in the other direction to describe what separates us from understanding God.
And then at the heart of the poem, the poet is direct, her language unvarnished.
What we don’t know will have to love us
into being, I can see that now,
and what we need to know
will be withheld from us
But consider the final stanza. Here we are invited, without knowledge or understanding, to live under the reality of a divine, intimate blanket made up of unreconciled reversal – tenderness and loss, light and dark, covering the nightly darkness in each of our pilgrimages with the light, the love, that we’ve made of our lives.
[KEITH] As humans we bring an innate drive to understand, quantify, reconcile, order, possess every aspect of our lives. We are relentless and urgent about it. We bring that same insistence to our faith lives, wanting an orderly understanding of God. But our lives are filled with reversals, moments when God’s love is felt, others when there is silence, that cannot be explained or understood by any theology or science or dogma. We are left to continue to live in love, making ourselves open and vulnerable. We walk with courage, step by step in the face of the pathless wood. We learn to suspend the need to know or reconcile the joy and despair in our approach to God. We come to trust that “what we don’t know will have to love us into being”. AMEN.