Prophetic Imagination

And the poets down here don't write nothin' at all;

They just stand back and let it all be.

(Bruce Springsteen, "Jungleland.")

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Remember to "sing to the Lord a new song." Literally and figuratively speaking. Our lives can be songs, songs of praise to the God who created us. (Brother Mark Brown, SSJE)  

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I have been doing a lot of blogging this past week or so. I write in order to figure out what I think and I've been trying to make sense of things in a world that does not make a lot of sense to me right now. 

One of the nice things about blogging - in some ways more than preaching, which is also another way I think - is that you get more feedback and comments as a blogger, especially on Facebook. One wise colleague commented on my post about The Loss of Empathy that the Whos in Whoville got together and sang. The very next day, the word from the Cowley Fathers (shown above) was "Sing." I paid attention to this and remembered some things...

Walter Brueggemann has been a prolific writer and thinker who has much to say about Old Testament Theology and the Church's Vocation in a post-Christendom context. I was fortunate to call him my teacher when I did my doctoral studies at Columbia Theological Seminary where I took courses with him on Jeremiah and the Psalms. 

But like many of us, I think even Walter has one or two really clear thoughts and the rest grows out of that. I can't say I've read everything he's read because, quite frankly, I can't read as fast as he writes. But I've read a lot of his work. And for my money, a good chunk of what he has to say can be found in Finally Comes the Poet, which was published nearly thirty years ago. The rest, I think, is clarifying what he said there and if you don't know Brueggemann very well, I think it's still the place to start. 

Poems are songs. The psalms are poems that can be sung as prayers but Brueggemann's point is that the prophets are also poets; that they are more than social critics. They are people who can imagine the world as "otherwise." It is poetic imagination that allows them to see when things have gone off-track because they can imagine what might yet be. It is poetic imagination that allows them to hope, and to sing of an alternative reality. This poetic imagination is not unlike that of those who marched for Civil Rights, singing "We Shall Overcome."

So, just one quote from that amazing book that I think points to a way forward from the posts I've been writing of late on Religion and Politics and the need to cultivate empathy. Left alone those may feel overwhelming. But I think they are more like the tilling of the soil, to help identify the work that the Church is called to - which is ultimately about finding our voices and learning to sing a new song (again.) So, here it is - almost an answer to Springsteen's plea in "Jungleland" about the silent poets:

There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. they will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, "finally comes the poet." Finally.