One of the great joys of teaching in a Catholic school is the access I have to the Blessed Sacrament. On some of my more difficult days, I’ve come to our school chapel, desperate for peace; my time before the tabernacle has been a place of healing and rest. It’s where I find myself most mornings, stopping for a minute to ask God to bless my plans and my students, my actions and their unseen consequences. During the day, I’ll sometimes even go there to grade.
But most importantly, in the chapel’s still silence, God awakens me to endless mystery and wonder. The light coming through the stained glass shimmers and is disorienting. The flickering candle, the reflections on the tabernacle; all of these images, refracting and distorting reality, call me on to contemplation. The greatest gift of praying before the Blessed Sacrament, exposed or in the tabernacle, has been the gift of prayerful meditation, which to me acts as a sort of invitation to poetry — a place where my heart is predisposed to seeing beyond the realm of sight into something that lies beyond.
The greatest gift of praying before the Blessed Sacrament, exposed or in the tabernacle, has been the gift of prayerful meditation, which to me acts as a sort of invitation to poetry.
Poetry, with its strangeness and “impenetrability” (according to one of my students), is an ideal language for trying to articulate the divine. “Who could speak / the largeness of the Lord?” I ask in a poem about my school’s chapel. God is so far beyond language and thought, beyond articulation, that his “I Am” leaves itself open to endless interpretations. What better mode of writing exists than poetry when it comes to endless interpretations? In each book of poetry I’ve written, I’ve included “You Are” poems — small meditations on the shadow-shapes God takes in our world. And I’ve prayed my way into countless poems, sitting before the tabernacle, opening my heart to God and his mysteries, uncertain of where he wants me to be but promising — usually without words — that I will try to follow him, even if I cannot see the path forward. And like reading or writing a poem, I usually end up somewhere entirely unexpected.
I’ve read W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” countless times (and I’m barely closer to understanding it than the first time I read it). I’m still moved by awe every time I read about the large desert beast (A sphynx? Who knows?): “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / […] moving its slow thighs.”
This is often what happens to my heart in prayer: God turns its stony hardness into a strange, slow movement toward Bethlehem, and I don’t need to understand the mechanics to know that something large is happening — is calling me toward change and growth and holiness.
One poem that came from this experience — the experience of quieting my brain and letting God move me through a line or image that I don’t quite understand — is called “Prayer for Humility.” After some good news or a successful day of teaching or writing, I would go to the chapel, giddy and lighthearted and full of thoughts of myself and my future. Each time, I’d hear the line, “Again there is that tiger’s tooth of pride.” This became a sort of ritual: coming into the chapel, falling on my knees, saying this line as the opening of my prayer and as a way of quieting my desires and leaving room for God to work. And with time, the line developed into a small poem:
Prayer for Humility
Again there is that tiger’s tooth of pride
against the throat. This is no jaw-yawning
pet, sleeping in its bed. This is the end
unless you play dead.
With only smallness left, pray
to be made small.
God has given me opportunities to practice this smallness whether I’ve embraced them or not. The very act of kneeling in prayer is a kind of littling, and often, with my eyes closed and my body hunched in prayer, I feel closer to the unseen and the unseeable: I’m reminded of the visible simplicity of the Eucharist, just bread, wafer-thin and bland, but containing in every particle the fullness of the eternal. And I’m reminded again that what I can see with my eyes and perceive with my senses is only part of the truth — that God remains larger than anything I can grasp.
I’d like to share another poem, also written before the Blessed Sacrament and about the largeness of God hidden in small things. I won’t say much about it except that I love the quiet prayer the speaker (unwittingly?) makes at the end.
The Rabbit by My Car Last Night Is Not Some Sign from God
When I denied Christ, it wasn’t by
a fire. It was silent, muffled like
a footstep in the snow. I left G.’s party,
sloughed off toward my car, slowing
in this secret, the heavy shame of losing
grip, letting lidded sentences
I do not say slip like fingers over
silk. Again, here was the old way.
I wanted so badly to see
the rabbit’s black and sudden eyes
as forgiveness. He sat there
staring even as I kept
my stride, was close enough to trip me.
He made one hesitant, soft move.
I froze. I was afraid
he’d run. I was afraid that if he left,
the night would tilt, would heavily
remind me that, out here, there is
only me.
My slow need reddened like
a coal. I wanted one thing then.
I almost say
out loud that I would give up anything
to have him stay.
The night is echoing the stars.
I would give him anything to stay.
It is in the chapel that God almost always finds a way of moving my heart toward him. He is asking me to stay there, and when I spend time in silence, trying to quiet my swirling thoughts, I realize I am really just asking for him to stay, too — to sit with me and fill me with this unspoken, unspeakable peace, and a longing for everything that exists just beyond my sight.