The Best Poem Ever Written?
I work at a magazine, and in each issue we include a few poems mixed in with the articles and columns. These poems don’t have much to do with my job, so I rarely give them much time or thought.
But in our last issue, a poem wrecked me.
It simply took my breath away. I read it over and over, and each time I noticed something new in the short piece that seemed to speak for some part of my soul. I got the weird impression that the poem (or perhaps the poet) understood me better than I understand myself.
“Miracle story” by Bonnie Thurston
Ok, so I’m starting to learn some stuff about the magazine biz, but I’m in the dark about copyrights. So I don’t know if I can post the poem here. Never fear—it’s short, and you can read it here (on the Christian Century site).
Go ahead now. Take a minute to read it once or twice (or more times, if it hits you the way it did me).
Okay, now that you’re up to speed, HOW GOOD IS THIS POEM? Specifically, I think it says a lot about a view of Truth and Belief available to those on the journey of deconstruction and reconstruction. Let’s dive in.
First, Thurston introduces us to the fact that a saint in England centuries ago believed in a miraculous ever-blooming rose. Yeah cool, we modern people think, those medieval miracle stories check out. I wonder if the rose could cure cancer?
Then Thurston brings down the hammer:
So what if it isn’t true?
Everyone lives by a story.
So what if it isn’t true? What a question. It’s a question we couldn’t countenance in our days of evangelical faith, when Reason was on our side and a perfectly crafted argument could prove God’s existence or the historicity of the resurrection.
What is Thurston getting at? Well, everyone has to choose a story to live by. We are narrative beings. We create meaning and identity from stories. People’s stories—the ones used to organize a life and give purpose—are never empirically true. They are myth and morality and dream. “The important ones,” Thurston says in the next lines, “are, / at heart, dark, mysterious.”
What does this have to do with evolving faith? In the following stanza, which begins:
Why not one of a selfless
God who comes down to die…?
In other words, what a dark and mysterious and good story it is, a God of love and sacrifice. We can’t “know” if it’s true; we simply do not have the ability to investigate fully. These things happened, or didn’t, thousands of years ago. But we can live by this story, even without hard evidence. Even without certainty.
So what if it isn’t true?
The attar of roses
I had to look up the word “attar” the first time I read this poem. It means “a fragrant essential oil, typically made from rose petals.” I must admit, I’ve made fun of essential oils from time to time. Let’s set that aside so we can appreciate the beauty of this poem’s end.
Thurston says that every narrative—and, more than that, “the core of everything”—is filled with emptiness (“bigger than a tomb”), doubt, and incomprehensibility. Everywhere you look, every story you live, no matter how deep you dig, uncovers more mystery and unknown. Perhaps we’ve been trained to fear this lack of certainty, this lack of knowledge. But to Thurston, it is sweet. It is fragrant. It “eternally emits the attar of roses.”
(I googled the poet, Bonnie Thurston, only to discover that she lives in my hometown of Wheeling, WV! She often partners with the library there for public poetry events. This detail is just here for fun. I couldn’t find a way to reach out to Thurston—I think she’s off the grid when she’s not at the library—but I could perhaps cross her path someday. If I do, she will be warmly invited to Harbor!)
Whatever story you choose to live by, may it always emit the scent of the unknown, the sweet fragrance of mystery.
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