Monday Meditation

When I was ordained to pastoral ministry 36 years ago, a friend gave me a gift book for the occasion: The Contemplative Pastor by Eugene Peterson. That book was supremely helpful to me as a young pastor beginning to navigate my way in ministry. I had the opportunity to meet him when he was a guest preacher in our Kentucky congregation. We had coffee and conversation, what stayed with me to this day was his concluding: “ read the poets.” I’ve never forgotten that advice. He didn’t say which poets to read, though I recall a few he mentioned. 

Soon after I discovered the poet Jane Kenyon and learned she was the granddaughter of a Methodist preacher, whose severity frightened her as a child, eventually leading her to turn away from religion. But as an adult, she rediscovered Christianity. When asked in an interview, how her faith shaped her writing, she said, “My spiritual life is so much a part of my intellectual life and my feeling life that it’s really become impossible for me to keep it out of my work.” This idea of faith as part of both “intellectual life” and “feeling life” is worth contemplating. Kenyon was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died at age 47 on April 22, 1995, from leukemia. 

Here is a poem is Kenyon wrote about the way of the Holy Spirit.  

BRIEFLY IT ENTERS, BRIEF IT SPEAKS

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred
years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the
keeper….
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy
summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

+ Jane Kenyon
Collected Poems (2005)