By Marianne Jones
Looking out my hotel window, I can see a few lights winking on Toronto Island, and a light dusting of snow. The water is slate-coloured, the sky silver grey.
From my vantage point I watch gulls sailing up to the penthouse floor of the high rise building directly across. Gulls don’t occupy high status in the bird kingdom. Yet a gull can snip the gravity threads with a breathless grace and float to places we cannot reach without an army of clumsy mechanical equipment.
Poetry gives us that same transporting freedom to soar above the gravity bonds of dailiness and disappointment. It pulls aside the curtain for a fleeting moment to show us the larger story behind our “real” stories. We feel stronger–energized–when we realize our days are recorded with close attention and deep interest by our Father. No part of them is dull or insignificant. It is our perspective that is dull and clouded, not our lives.
I suppose that’s the reason that I write: to bring some order, some beauty to the confused tangle of thoughts and feelings inside. To turn melancholy into something beautiful, like the sighing of a cello or the keening of a violin. When it works, suddenly pain has a beauty and significance. That’s why I find writing such a comfort. It externalizes sorrow, shrinks it and turns it into a semiprecious stone that I can hold in my hand and examine. Every event, from the most joyful to the saddest becomes another jewel strung on the necklace of my days.
Creating is God’s gift to us, God’s way of taking the wreckage and broken pieces in our lives, and recycling them into something more extraordinary than the original. It’s how the ugliness and despair of crucifixion became the hope and glory of Resurrection.
God does not deny the reality of suffering. He just doesn’t believe in giving it the last word.
Writing draws the poison from the Serpent’s bite. Creating is an act of defiance against the darkness. God never stops creating, never stops rebuilding. Nature never stops sending green shoots through the concrete. It cannot stop. It is full of God’s indestructible energy.
The poet is the prophet, the truth-teller in society. Sometimes I believe the artist is closest to the heart of God, the Creator and Poet. As with all prophets, her rewards will not likely be popularity and wealth, but the joy of creation, and proclaiming the message burning inside.
For the poet, the greatest moments of satisfaction are not those of seeing her words in print, or being paid for a manuscript. The best moments are when someone says, “I cried when I read your poem. I felt as if you were writing my story.” To reach out of our isolation and touch someone’s heart with our words, makes everything that went into the creating worthwhile.
One of Jesus’ many titles is “The Word.” What higher honour could God put on the poet’s craft than to refer to His own Son as Logos—the Word, the One Who communicated the true heart of God to the world?
Our ultimate goal as poets is not fame or publishing contracts, but to communicate God’s heart through our words. It is a calling that will require everything of us. God’s gifts are free, but not cheap or easy. But there will be those moments when we are not earthbound, when we soar and pull aside the clouds for an instant to show a peek at the dazzling light behind. That is the prophet’s reward.
Marianne Jones was named International Christian Poet Laureate by Utmost Christian Writers. She lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario with her husband Reg. She has written The Serenity Stone Murder, Great-Grandma’s Gifts, and The Girl who wouldn’t Die.
See also: Devote Yourself to God Through Poetry
Jake Doberenz is a writer, teacher, minister, and creative thinker from Oklahoma City, OK. He is the Founder and President of Theophany Media. Additionally, he ministers at the Mayfair Church of Christ and teaches middle school debate at The Academy of Classical Christian Studies in Oklahoma City. Jake is almost done with his Master of Theological Studies at Oklahoma Christian University, the same place he recieved an undergraduate degree in Biblical Studies with a minor in Communication Studies.