Poetry, Prayer, and Learning to Pay Attention

This post is written by Lanie Walkup. Lanie is a New Testament PhD student at Baylor, focusing on families, narrative, and the gospels. She’s also the wife of Logan, my former seminary classmate, and my very good friend. After seeing her love for poetry up close, I’m delighted to share this piece she’s written.

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I have a big window in the front of my apartment, and because I live in a garden unit, my couch is situated just right, so that my eyes are at ground level. As I drink my coffee there each morning, I see a man who lets his dog sniff a little bit too long in my front yard, provoking my dog to suspicion. Sometimes a bird will run into the window, or a bunny might stop by to visit and peer in before darting away at the slightest disruption. Perhaps it will linger, hopping from dandelion to dandelion picking up each stalk and chewing it from its base until it reaches the white cotton that finally dissipates into the air. Sometimes I will sit in my small, city “backyard” next to my small, city “garden” and see squirrels picking off my cucumbers as if I had planted them just for their enjoyment. I might observe the various birds that came to the garden or the bees that would jump from plant to plant without discrimination. I began to take more notice of these seemingly meaningless and fleeting moments, and I have come to find that they have profoundly shaped me. I’ve lived here nearly 5 years. I’ve seen these occurrences almost daily, but only in the last several months have I begun to pay attention to them and to find a strange delight in them.

Our lives are made up of minutes and hours and days, usually filled with small and insignificant activities. But by observing the workings of nature and taking notice of the present, or being attentive to our breath and our bodies, these things have the potential to open us to a life that is shaped by paying attention and a life that is marked with deeper joy.

Paying attention does not come easy. And when I’m not in nature, like during the long Chicago winters, it becomes a more difficult practice. But poetry has become one of those places and practices that has helped shape my attention. And it has proven a lifeline in a time when I experienced intense anxiety. Learning to pay attention has been both a gift and a discipline.

How Poetry Formed Me

It wasn’t that I felt distant from God during my anxiety attacks. It was more like an intense overwhelm where imagining accomplishing certain tasks was too much. Everything required just a tinge more effort than I was able to give. Prayer, itself, seemed to require too much of me. But as I read various poems over and over again, I found that poetry began to form me in unexpected ways. Sometimes I found solace and other times a pathway to stillness, sorrow, and lament. What I did not anticipate was that while still experiencing my anxiety and burdens, the practice of paying attention could still give way to a life of hope, joy, and delight.

The poem “Praying” by Mary Oliver describes prayer as a sort of yielding.

She writes,

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Dwelling with poetry became my act of prayer. Poetry gave me the language and words of hope and joy when I couldn’t find them and words of despair and sorrow when I needed them. They were my meager offering I had to give to God. Marina Tsvetaeva writes, “What can we say about God? nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays… it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to—there is something and there is someone—but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.”

Poetry has a unique role for prayer. It has the strange ability to hold tension—trust and doubt, presence and absence, despair and hope—and to express these things in ways often beyond our understanding. Poetry is not meant to be ironed out, laid upon a table for the scalpel to sort it out into neat lines and ideas. A poem can show us a full picture of life lived in the tension of God’s world and the brokenness of humanity, a life before God and a life at the mercy of our vulnerabilities. True faith, true hope, true prayer is not simply praising or praying to God despite all your emotions, but it is speaking to him with the fullness of who you are while waiting in the silence for his reply. It is not a contest but the doorway.

Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath 1994, VI” poem describes a man in despair as he is falling asleep, he writes

…

He is a man breathing the fear

Of hopeless prayer, prayed

In hope. He breathes the prayer

Of his fear that gives a light

By which he sees only himself lying

In the dark, a low mound asking

Almost nothing at all

And then, long yet before dawn,

Comes what he had not thought:

Love that causes him to stir

Like the dead in the grave, being

Remembered­—his own love or

Heaven’s, he does not know.

…

Hopeless prayer, prayed in hope. Prayer itself is an act of hope. This is the tension of lament—desperation expressed toward the only One who has the power to act. Yet the poem also holds in it the strange paradox of the man utterly alone but surrounded by love. It holds both comfort and doubt, both sorrow and the joy of being known.

The Mundane Infused with Glory

As poetry can be a way to educate us in prayer, it helped to shape in me the space to pay attention to moments where I might be able to see God’s work in the world and feel his presence. Poetry helped deepen my ability to see and experience life around me as utterly enchanting. For this reason, I am often drawn to the poems of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver. Their poems often describe an image or a mundane task as if it were infused with glory.

Consider Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath 1991,V”

            The seed is in the ground.

            Now we may rest in hope

            While darkness does its work.

or Mary Oliver’s “Passing the Unworked Field”

            Queen Anne’s lace

                  is hardly

                          prized but

            all the same it isn’t

                          idle look

                                          how it

                          stands straight on its

            thin stems how it

                          scrubs its white faces

                                    with the

            rags of the sun how it

                                    makes all the

                                          loveliness

                                                it can.

These simple or unglamorous moments are captured in time and yet presented like eternity invading time. Berry’s poem is short but powerful, and in these three brief lines he opens to us the themes of patience, darkness and light, and death and life. Oliver draws us into the banal yet majestic world of a weed-like flower, reshaping our perspective on nature, purpose, and beauty. 

Poetry gave me new ways of seeing myself, the world, and God’s interaction in the world. And thus it gave me a new way of being in the world. Every facet of earth became charged with little “tastes of the transcendent” as one of my friends puts it. And these foretastes of the divine are the places where joy and beauty might be found.

With endless streams of media, news, and the never-ending knowledge of every tragedy or crime that has taken place that day, I am convinced that one of the more challenging tasks in our day and age is finding and choosing joy. “We must risk delight,” as the poet Jack Gilbert declares in “A Brief for the Defense.”

            …

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

            …

What is the measure of your attention? After disappointment and doubt, sickness, pain, or brokenness, is there still room for delight? Poetry teaches us to pay attention. Pay attention to your life, to the world filled with so much hurt, but also to immeasurable beauty. Can we train our eyes to see it, to experience it, to savor it? Turn to your morning cup of coffee and drink it slowly. Find it in your favorite fictional character or in that lyric that stops you in your tracks. There is certainly enough sorrow to fill our days, and poetry rightly helps us express the fullness of those emotions. But like a poem, life holds both sorrow and joy. Will we turn to pay attention to the world, to nature, to places where we might finally “…enter the dialogue / of our lives that is beyond all under- / standing or conclusion. It is mystery. / It is love of God. It is obedience” (Mary Oliver, “Six Recognitions of the Lord”).

May learning to pay attention be your prayer to God and the place you find utter delight in him.