JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The lumber shed at the Abbey of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky. It’s late February. Each night at 8:00 Brother Paul Quenon walks to the shed, as he has every night for 20 years. He goes around back, where he finds his mattress. This is where he will sleep—outdoors, no matter the weather.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON (The Abbey of Gethsemani): I can’t be a full-time hermit, but I can be a night-time hermit, and there’s something about waking up in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody around. There’s a kind of an edge of solitude that you cannot experience in any other way.

VALENTE: Here, a monk seeks to live every moment in the presence of God, in unity with God. Brother Paul came to Gethsemani 52 years ago. He was 17, inspired by reading the autobiography of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who introduced many Americans to the contemplative life. Merton would eventually become his spiritual director and would encourage Brother Paul to write. Thomas Merton said monks and poets are people who live on the margins of society. Brother Paul decided to become both. He says monks and poets remind us to pay attention to the world around us, to focus on what’s essential.

BROTHER PAUL: Poetry is the language of the heart, and it’s the language of the imagination, and so the mind abides in silence. Contemplation is an abiding in silence, and what comes out of silence are words of the heart, words of love. When the heart is really full, the mouth goes silent.

VALENTE: Indeed, many contemplatives say the transcendent is beyond words. Brother Paul has published three books of his poetry and is working on a fourth.

BROTHER PAUL: “The Hood”: —a hiding place / for the head / a portable anonymity / a refuge from / artificial light / a cover to make / dimness dimmer / to make time slow down

VALENTE: Ideas for his poems usually come to him on long, solitary walks across the monastery’s vast stretches of woods and fields. During each walk he writes a haiku—a Japanese form of poetry usually three lines, seventeen syllables and set in nature.

BROTHER PAUL: The monastery is a poetic context to begin with, and we live in a beautiful environment, and nature is so present day in and day out. I discovered the haiku, and the haiku is such a short form I started combining it with my meditation practice:

“Above dim snow fields / lone light of Venus, lone wail of goose / pleading for spring”

You’re in God’s beauty, and it’s physical. It’s almost like a symphony flowing by me as I walk along, relaxed, and it’s a beautiful experience.

VALENTE: Occasionally over the years, he would climb to the top of this water tower until finally the abbot closed it off. Brother Paul quips, “This used to be a fun place.”

It was this little cottage, The Hermitage, where Thomas Merton spent years in isolation, praying and writing. Retreatants visit the abbey year round, seeking to slow down at a place where prayer is the main form of activity.

BROTHER PAUL: I think they come here seeking for quiet and, you know, an atmosphere of prayer, and maybe some seeds of wisdom, and just to see what it is to live this kind of life.

VALENTE: What purpose do you see in living the Trappist’s life in the modern world?

BROTHER PAUL: Well, I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are, so you need to shatter that. You know, somebody has to come along now and then just say listen, you know, that’s not it. That’s not what life is.

VALENTE: Forty-eight monks now live at the abbey. Once, there were more than 200. Brother Paul says many people are still attracted to the regular prayer and quiet rhythms of monastic life, but few are willing to stay.

BROTHER PAUL: I wish they would perceive the genuineness of the life. A man has to have, you know, a home and a career, and these are ways of achieving identity. Well, what we do is in a sense forsake our identity. We give up our identity to get a new identity, which really God formulates for us.

VALENTE: And yet Brother Paul says you don’t have to live in a monastery to seek what is important.

BROTHER PAUL: If you just sort of rest with what you have, be grateful for it, there again the chemistry of gratitude can transform what you have. Contemplation is simply maybe a big fat word for gratitude. To sense the presence of God in life and around me and in other people gives me a very deep gratitude.

VALENTE: Today the average age of the monks here is 70. Funerals are a regular part of life.

BROTHER PAUL: A monk lives in the presence of death, and you come here to die. You’re going to give up your whole life. If you decide to give up your whole life to Christ, well, it’s in Christ’s hand.

“Curved Walkway”: The burial ground fills with practical sounds from Tierce bell, drenching the dumb unheeding crosses. Alone I skirt around this rim of destiny, stirred by the bell… ‘til someday I’m left un-busied in this ground’s silent keep.

VALENTE: Brother Paul says that to be a monk is to live at the heart of a mystery, to live in a perpetual state of becoming. To him, that is both the power and poetry of monastic life.

BROTHER PAUL: We never get there. As Merton said, you know, if you think you have arrived you’re lost. People in the world come, you know, they come here on retreat. They ask me, “How long have you been here?” I answer as, what, another elsewhere, 52 years. But it is a fiction. How long have I been here? Excuse me, I haven’t gotten here yet.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

The Cowl

–solemn as chant,
one sweep of fabric
from head to foot.
Cowls hanging
on a row of pegs—
tall disembodied spirits
holding shadows
deep in the folds
waiting for light,
for light to shift
waiting for a bell
for the reach of my hand
to spread out the slow
wings, release the
shadows and envelope my
prayer-hungry body
with light.

My Novices: late 1950s

Young men came
looking for
–don’t know what–
Left the place
looking for
-don’t know what–
Of these I had no regrets.

Some came, seemed like
looking–
heard some talk about
-what-
stayed awhile
and left
talking like– Well,–
like somewhat.

Serious young men came looking.
took up talk about,
-don’t know what,
stayed long and left
talking
about everything what-not.

Some came completely
clear and sure about
what–
Those I sent away.

Silent young men, a few,
came looking for–
don’t know what-
stayed
and kept on looking
stayed and never got to
what–
wore out,
died,
had never stopped looking for
what–
For these I have no regrets.

All of these I loved, but
seems the part I loved the best
was–
don’t know what–

Confessions of a Dead-Beat Monk

Of course, I’ve set the same bench
brushing off flies and thoughts,
how many years? What winters of
silence and summer variations,

what prodigious mockingbirds
I’ve heard! And that kitchen job!
Broccoli and spuds on Mondays,
rice twice a week, and Oh,

toasted cheese sandwiches,
Fridays! This diet of psalms,
fifty and hundred, runs ever
on from bitter to sweet,

returns like the sun to bow
and stand. And I tread the same
stairs and stare at walls, blank
or lit rose and gold. I rise

with whippoorwills singing
at 3, though night ever keeps
its secret from me, ‘till in
its treasure I’m locked.

Then I will be what always
has been, that enigma of
sameness between
now and the then.

My Last Poem

When I write my last poem
it will not say good-by
to poetry, but hello to itself,

will heave a glad sigh
it got into the world
before the door closed,

will look to its companion poems,
that it might have place
among these orphans,

that they might reach out hands
in company to go together
into oblivion or into memory,

or to some secret cove
where eternity sits,
from time to time, and reads.

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet and Anglican priest who died a little more than a decade ago, left a body of work that is slowly becoming recognized as among the best and most important religious poetry of the twentieth century.

Like the century itself, however, it is not easily orthodox or pretty. Its bleak moods and near despair reflect the pull of doubt that defined those decades for many, including believers. As such, it stands outside the mainstream of the dominant, God-affirming, sacramental poetry that looks back to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s affirmation that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

Yet Hopkins was also the poet of the “terrible sonnets”—bitter spiritual laments that Thomas described as “but a human repetition of the cry from the cross”: My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Thomas’s own prolific poetic outpouring explored this very question, and his work continues to resonate with compelling freshness and urgency as a new century of uncertainty unfolds.

His is, in many ways, an appropriate poetry for Good Friday, exemplified by his emblematic but enigmatic phrase, “The cross is always avant garde.” The line is from The Echoes Return Slow, a long autobiographical piece written in alternating pages of prose and poetry, and it suggests that for Thomas the cross always goes before us, and it presents a radical challenge to any easy resolution of the tough questions of faith.

A cluster of recurring images, symbols, and metaphors mark Thomas’s religious poems: silence, prayer, kneeling, waiting, watching, empty churches, a wound, the pierced side of Jesus-God-the natural world, a bare tree—and the cross, repeatedly described by Thomas as empty or “untenanted.”

Thomas is mostly interested in God’s silence or absence, the deus absconditus or hidden God, and what that means for forging an identity in the modern world. What language might be used to address such a God in a meaningful way? As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written, R.S. Thomas was—like one of the poet’s spiritual mentors, Soren Kierkegaard—a “great articulator of uneasy faith.”

An early poem, “In a Country Church,” from the 1955 book Song at the Year’s Turning, announces some of the themes that would dominate Thomas’s later poetry:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

The opening stanza is a powerful image of silence. The only sounds comes not from words but from the wind, not from the wings of angels but of bats. While there is no word from God, the poet gropes for a signal of grace and wrests from the silence a vision of a wintry image of love and crucifixion—perhaps a divine response.

“In Church,” a poem from Thomas’s 1966 book Pieta, returns to the theme:

Often I try
To analyze the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

This poem, with its hard-won final images, is far more powerful, complex, and successful than “In a Country Church.” It confronts the paradox of presence and absence, faith and doubt in a profound way. Philosopher of religion and critic D.Z. Phillips, in his book R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God, reads the last lines as a realization that the poet-priest “has to die to his old questions. It is only by dying to the old questions that wonder can come in at the right place.” Baylor University professor of English William V. Davis, in R.S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology, offers a more orthodox reading: “If…the cross is empty, untenanted, as it is in the Protestant tradition, this is not to deny the fact of the crucifixion but the truth of the resurrection.” Davis sees Thomas suggesting that “Jesus, as Christ, even in his absence—indeed, perhaps because of, and by, his absence—symbolizes and thus affirms his continuing presence.”

Crucifix by Eric Gill, circa 1913

It may seem a strange and contradictory stance for a poet who is also a priest, standing as it does in the face of so many people’s comfortable orthodoxy, but throughout his long career Thomas insisted he found no contradiction in his two vocations, even as he acknowledged he was not especially orthodox. “A lot of people seem to be worried about how I combine my work as a poet and my work as a priest,” he told the BBC in 1972. “This is something that never worried me at all.” He went on to insist, echoing Matthew Arnold, that “in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry” and “Christ was a poet, the New Testament is a metaphor, the resurrection is a metaphor”—explaining metaphor as “an attempt to convey an experience of a kind of new life, an eruption of the deity into ordinary life, a lifting up of ordinary life into a higher level.”

At other times Thomas acknowledged, “I’m obviously not orthodox, I don’t know how many real poets have been orthodox. …I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my Savior and that sort of thing.”

Yet throughout his long career, Thomas showed no desire to leave the priesthood and continued his priestly functions administering the sacraments, preaching the word, including, at one church, delivering a sermon in Welsh once a month. He served many rural parishes before he retired at Easter in 1978. He was also an outspoken Welsh nationalist, a pacifist involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a tireless critic of what he took to be the despoiling of the Welsh countryside by English developers.

Thomas’s poetry confronts not just the absence of God but what literary critic J. Hillis Miller has termed “the disappearance of God.” For Miller, the nineteenth century and its experience of the eclipse of God was a major turning point in the spiritual history of humanity. It is a perception described powerfully by Matthew Arnold in his essays and poetry, most famously in “Dover Beach,” where he portrays Victorian religious experience as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith.

For Arnold and a poetic tradition that runs at least up through American poet Wallace Stevens, the temptation was to substitute poetry for religion. “More and more,” Arnold wrote in his famous essay on “The Study of Poetry,” “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”

Arnold’s experience was not the happy exuberance of a Nietzsche and his proclamation that God is dead. It was, rather, that God has withdrawn. “Our duty,”’ Miller says of Arnold’s view, “is to testify bravely to the existence of God in a time when our dwelling place is in the desert.”

This confrontation with the absence of God comes to the forefront of Thomas’s poetry in the 1970s. The first poem in his collection H’m begins: “God looked at space and I appeared / Rubbing my eyes at what I saw.” In “Petition,” the speaker, seeing the “rueful acts” of theft, murder, and rape committed by human beings, says, “I have said / New prayers, or said the old / In a new way / Seeking the poem / in the pain.” The poem concludes with a sense of disappointment: “One thing I have asked / Of the disposer of the issues of life: that truth should defer / To beauty. It was not granted.”

“The Coming” alludes in its own fashion to the Good Friday story:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

In the poem “Pieta” Thomas writes:

Always the same hills
Crown the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene
And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
of a maid’s arms.

In “The Combat,” Thomas invokes the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with God to comment on a major twentieth-century theme of the failure of language to adequately express religious insight or experience: “You have no name. / We have wrestled with you all Day, and now night approaches …. For the failure of language / there is no redress.”

Sometimes the failure belongs to God, as in Thomas’s poem “Nuclear”:

It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognize
as speech

John Powell Ward, one of Thomas’s most astute readers, has written that in the poetry “the biblical symbol that most gets rewritten is that of the wound in Christ’s side,” becoming “a new symbol of great significance.” But it is not just Jesus’ wound. In “Soliloquy,” God says “the sun was torn / from my side.” Powell also points to the poem “God’s Story,” where God “fingered the hole / in his side, where the green tree / came from.” According to Powell, “If the wound in the side can be so universalized, it becomes something of a rupture at the heart of existence itself, the very mark of identity.”

The absence of God also means Thomas at times rejects any easy sacramental sense of God’s presence in the natural world, as he writes in “Threshold”:

I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?

But the absence of God does not mean the nonexistence of God. Many of Thomas’s poems dwell on the immediacy of God’s absence, an absence in which God has just been missed, as in these lines from “Pilgrimage”: “Such a fast / God, always before us and / leaving as we arrive.” Or in the poem “Adjustments”: “We never catch / him at work, but can only say, / coming suddenly upon an amendment, / that here he had been.”

Thomas does not offer an easy resolution of the paradox of absence and presence, but in the long encounter he waged with doubt and silence—often on his knees, as many of the poems tell us—he seems to have won his way to a rugged kind of faith, an affirmation of love as the meaning of the cross, and a posture of patient waiting. On the theme of waiting William V. Davis finds some provocative connections between Thomas and his contemporary, theologian Paul Tillich. In The Echoes Return Slow, Thomas wrote of faith: “You have to imagine / a waiting that is not impatient / because it is timeless.” Davis sees this as the same sentiment Tillich expressed in a sermon on “Waiting” in his 1948 collection The Shaking of the Foundations: “He is God for us just in so far as we do not possess Him. … We have God through not having him.” Later Tillich adds, “Waiting is not despair. It is the acceptance of our not having, in the power of that which we already have.” For Thomas, the struggle was to learn just that: waiting is not despair.

Thomas was a poet who lived with questions, not answers, as described in the final lines of the poem “Pilgrimages”:

It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

Here the quest for God is also the pilgrimage into one’s self, and the lesson learned is that in embracing the mystery of God “out there” one begins to understand the mystery “in the finitude of the here and now.”

Rowan Williams, in his essay “R.S. Thomas and Kierkegaard” in the collection Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R.S. Thomas, argues that a kind of complex love begins to address, not resolve, this paradox. He cites a passage from The Echoes Return Slow:

But love answers it
in its turn: I am old now and have died
many times, but my rebirth is surer
than the truth embalming itself
in the second law of your Thermo-Dynamics.

The lines point a slow coming to a kind of faith, a faith in the poet’s own resurrection of some sort that he posits, at least momentarily, is as certain as the dead laws of science and technology. There is in the poem something of the dying to self in order to be born again. Williams concludes that “God, for Thomas, is both the frustration of every expectation and the only exit from despair. And that God is encountered only in the embrace of finitude.”

In a 1981 radio broadcast, Thomas said that in the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ God has given the answer to suffering. But the poet’s emphasis remained on the cross, trusted and finally understood, according to Tony Brown of the University of Wales, in his volume R.S. Thomas, as “the ultimate demonstration of love defeating time and mortality.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. In 2009, he wrote for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Easter and writer John Updike.

MARY KARR (speaking to students): Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Mary Karr talks about her love of poetry with students at a writers’ conference in Michigan.

KARR (speaking to student): Hello, honey-bun.

VALENTE: Karr was known mainly as a poet until her coming-of-age memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” became a bestseller in the 1990s. It was the vivid story of a sometimes hilarious but often brutal Texas childhood.

(speaking to Mary Karr): Here’s a snapshot of your past, the past that you write about: troubled family life, unstable childhood, alcoholism, divorce, depression, near suicide. Who is Mary Karr today?

KARR: Well, it’s really been uphill since all that.

VALENTE: Karr reveals the rest of her story in a new memoir, a story summed up in its title “Lit”—as in lit from within by the literature she grew up with, by alcohol and drugs, and finally lit by a faith she found unexpectedly in the Catholic Church.

KARR (speaking to writers’ conference): No one in the Catholic Church hired me as a spokesperson, nor would they. I’m sure I’m not the pope’s favorite Catholic, nor is he mine.

VALENTE: Karr grew up amid the hardscrabble oil fields of East Texas. Her father drank himself to death. Her mother was married seven times.

KARR: I’m somebody who really does feel like I was snatched out of the fire and found something in myself that’s luminous and gives me ballast.

VALENTE: The road to faith was a long, hard climb for someone who once described herself as an “undiluted agnostic.” By her mid-thirties Karr’s life had begun to unravel. Her marriage was failing. She drank heavily, wrecked the family car, was hospitalized for an emotional breakdown. In desperation, she took a friend’s advice and reluctantly began to pray.

KARR: I would kind of bounce on my knees, and I would say, “Higher power, please keep me sober today”—whatever they told me to say—and then at night I would say, “Thank you for keeping me sober today,” and then I started to express myself, which was often, you know, with obscene gestures, double-barrel at the light fixtures.

KARR: Karr was newly separated and trying to stay sober when her five-year-old son asked her to take him to church.

KARR: And I said why, and he said the only sentence he could have said that would have gotten me to church. He said, “To see if God’s there,” and I thought, “Oh. Okay.”

VALENTE: Karr took her son to various churches, a process she dubbed the “God-o-rama.” She would sit with a paperback and a cup of coffee while he searched for God.

KARR: We got out, and we got in the car, and he’s buckling his seatbelt, and I said, “So was God there?” And he’s like, “Well, yeah,” like where were you? So that was when I decided that, for him, we would find a place of worship.

VALENTE: Karr says she still equated most organized religions with something people just did socially. Then one day she passed a Catholic church in Syracuse, New York, where she was teaching. She was struck by a banner out front. It said, “Sinners Welcome.”

KARR: I thought I had a better shot at becoming a pole dancer at 40, right, than of making it in the Catholic Church, and I think what struck me really wasn’t the grandeur of the Mass. It was the simple faith of the people. For me this whole journey was a journey into awe. I would just get these moments of quiet where there wasn’t anything. My head would just shut up, and I knew that was a good thing. And also the carnality of the church: there was a body on the cross.

VALENTE: Father. Bruno Shah, a Dominican friar, is a close friend who has written about Karr’s work.

FR. BRUNO SHAH: In the Catholic Church above the altar one sees the cross with the body on it. The body is there. The corpus of Christ is there bleeding, still in the midst of the world, and that’s I think really what got to her—her experience of being a sinner, her experience of being a sinner and recognizing that this does not distinguish her from anybody else in the world.

VALENTE: Many of her recent poems reimagine the life of Christ. She sees in poetry a form of prayer.

KARR: Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

VALENTE: Karr has been sober for twenty years, but she still prays to keep her demons at bay.

KARR: I don’t have very much virtue now. It’s really all of it is grace for me, all of it is given. I’m a very venal. I want to eat all of the chocolate and snort all of the cocaine and kiss all the boys.

FR. SHAH: The fact that this person would turn around so drastically is compelling. She sees all the alcoholics who don’t make it. She sees all the good chances that have been given to her for no good reason, and she asks in wondering thanksgiving to God, why me? And that’s a great testimony to her faith and to the authenticity of her conversion.

VALENTE: A conversion she says transformed every aspect of her life.

KARR (speaking to writers’ conference): My goal in writing about my faith wasn’t to proselytize, even though I did feel called in prayer to write about it, but to try to make a bridge between people who had been, like myself, completely unbaptized, completely without faith, a bridge between that and to bring them into the experience of faith.

VALENTE: Karr says she hopes her turbulent past provides more than just a good story but also sends out a message of hope to others. With her characteristic wry humor, she still refers to herself as a “black-belt sinner,” but a lucky one nonetheless.

KARR: I’ve never contended that I had a really horrible life. I feel like Jesus does like me better than he does all of you.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Sometimes for an autistic child like Elizabeth, cheered on here by her father—

RAY BREEN (to daughter on bicycle): Turn, turn, turn. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. Good, good.

FAW: Sometimes there are small victories—

RAY BREEN: Excellent, excellent.

FAW: —and the demons of autism loosen their grip. Too often, though, for Elizabeth there are other moments of seemingly impenetrable darkness and frustration. Unable to speak, Elizabeth communicates now by finding letters on a letterboard or typing into a keyboard. Even that, says her mother Ginnie, does not spare Elizabeth moments of agony.

GINNIE BREEN: I remember so distinctly one of the first things she typed out: A-G-O-N-Y, agony. This was a little six-year-old child, and she knew what agony was, and then she wrote, “I need to talk”—that that was her agony.

FAW: She wasn’t always like this. In her first 15 months, Elizabeth was healthy, active, alert, even verbal. Then she changed drastically.

GINNIE BREEN: Besides the complete loss of language within a week, she did start to have repetitive behavior and have frustrations and tantrums and really kind of left us.

FAW: Researchers suspect genetic and environmental factors cause autism. It is characterized by unconventional facial expressions, limited motor and social skills, and difficulty communicating—a life largely dependent. For Elizabeth’s parents that diagnosis was devastating enough, but they were also told there is no reliable treatment, no guaranteed cure, and ten years later not that much has changed, says Dr. Anthony Rostain, an expert on autism at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

DR. ANTHONY ROSTAIN (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia): It really affects almost every aspect of how the child thinks, acts, feels, and develops both cognitively and emotionally. So, as a result, it’s hard to come up with one-size-fits-all kind of treatment.

FAW: Elizabeth’s parents, Ginnie and Ray, both enjoyed lucrative Wall Street careers but gave them up to focus on their three children and the battle against autism. Early on, behavorial therapy exercises like this, they were told, might help Elizabeth to organize the chaos in her mind, help her to learn how to learn.

Teacher to Elizabeth: Show me jumping. Turn around. Good job. Can you show me sitting? Nice job.

FAW: Since she was three years old, her school district has paid a full-time professional aide to help Elizabeth academically.This is what a respected speech therapist believed might help loosen Elizabeth’s tongue. It turned out to be more fun than effective.There have also been years of special diets and vitamin supplements and homeopathic drops costing hundreds of dollars every month, a $20,000 hyperbaric chamber, which pumps extra oxygen into her brain for an hour every day, even unproven therapies like these prism lenses which distort Elizabeth’s vision in hopes of reordering the way her brain processes information.

FAW: Are you convinced that this has benefits?

GINNIE BREEN: I believe that this has helped other children.

FAW: And several times Elizabeth’s mother has taken her cross-country, seeking healing in prayer services.

GINNIE BREEN: We’ve used educational interventions, medical interventions. Why not spiritual interventions?

FAW: Parents of autistic children face a terrible dilemma. They are forced literally to experiment on their own children because the medical community has not tested and proven those treatments the way it has with treatments for physical conditions like heart disease or cancer.

DR. ROSTAIN: We are in very, very, very early stages of understanding how medications might improve functioning.

FAW: You don’t fault a parent for trying everything conceivable?

DR. ROSTAIN: I don’t, because if I had a child who wasn’t responding to treatments that were prescribed by the doctor, I might very well take that child to someone else and someone else and someone else.

FAW: What has happened to Elizabeth has happened with countless other autistic children—so many interventions with success only hit or miss. Ethicist Arthur Caplan:

PROFESSOR ARTHUR CAPLAN (Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania): I could take you online and find tons of quacks, rip-off artists, selling quote unquote “treatments” to parents of kids with autism. It is a huge problem.

FAW: It is also an ethical minefield: Does society have the responsibility and can it afford to help autistic children who lack the resources lavished on Elizabeth? If so, should that task fall, as it mostly now does, on local public schools?

PROFESSOR CAPLAN: You can’t do it that way. Obviously, different school districts have different amounts of money. We need a national policy to divvy up resources to autistic kids, not the school board budget. That makes no sense at all.

FAW: One intervention which has worked well for Elizabeth began five years ago in Austin, Texas with language therapist Soma Mukhopadhyay, who taught Elizabeth to use the letterboard. Then, a stunning turn in Elizabeth’s life: At the urging of her personal education aide, Terri Bird, Elizabeth began writing powerful, often deeply personal poetry, turning some of her frustration into inspiration, and for the first time, those around Elizabeth discovered her inner voice. For example: “…It’s not easy, you see, it’s very hard being me. / There is so much going on in my mind / All of the time.”

FAW (to Elizabeth): Why do you write poems?

Elizabeth types out the word F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S

FAW: Your feelings—that’s why you write poems. Elizabeth is, says her mother, “a very spiritual child,” and some of her poems are religious.

GINNIE BREEN (reads from poem “God Loves You”): It does not matter who you are / It does not matter if you stray far / God is always there for you…

FAW: Elizabeth has written 90 poems thus far. Many reveal her yearning to be heard.

GINNIE BREEN (reads from poem “Me”): If only they could walk in my shoes / They would share my news / I am in here / And trying to speak / Every day in some kind of way.

FAW: Sentiments echoed in this anthem written for children with autism.

Vocal music: “Oh, don’t you know I’m trying to find a way to show you who I am…”

FAW: Because she can communicate, Elizabeth, accompanied by Terri, also attends a mainstream public school where she excels especially in math.

TEACHER: Find the greatest common factor of 18 and 24?

Elizabeth types the number 6.

TEACHER: Good girl.

FAW: Her teachers marvel at her performance and persistence.

KERRI BENSON (Math Teacher): She’s taught me about patience, and I just, I can’t even begin to explain that I’ve probably learned more for her than anybody in life so far.

FAW: Elizabeth is warmly received by other students. Besides writing, Elizabeth can read with remarkable speed, and Terri tests her comprehension.

TERRI BIRD (Education Aide): Doing this job with Elizabeth is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.

FAW: Elizabeth’s success and her failures—this two-steps-forward, one step back—have been physically exhausting and emotionally draining for her and her family. It has also severely tested her mother’s faith.

GINNIE BREEN: It’s a natural thing to cry out where are you, God? I mean, I’m calling here in the darkness, and I can’t take too much more sometimes.

FAW: And though she on occasion has wavered, her beliefs have emerged stronger.

(to Ginnie Breen): Has it reinforced you faith?

GINNIE BREEN: Absolutely. There are times I know that we are being blessed on the right path here, and I’ll pray about it, and we’ll move forward.

FAW: Whether Elizabeth will eventually speak is, at best, a long shot. She may, her mother concedes, always need assistance, which is why in this household success is measured one day, one small victory, at a time.

GINNIE BREEN: I want to be able to say I have done everything to make my little girl talk. I mean, how can I hear her say, “I’m in agony because I can’t speak” and not try something? The data may say only one percent, but if that one percent is Elizabeth, that’s all I need, and she wants us to keep trying.

FAW: For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Northern New Jersey.

For many poets, believers and nonbelievers alike, it is possible to talk about the religious imagination they bring to apprehending reality and describing the world.

Theologically, Christianity provides a language—and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks—for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.

George Herbert

Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: “The dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation…and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination…emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God…the mystery of the incarnation.”

Both imaginations reach deep into the history of English poetry. One can feel and touch the sacramental in the metaphors of the great religious poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. It perhaps most fully flowered in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who characterized the incarnation in the lovely but surprising phrase “God’s infinity / Dwindled to infancy.” It is a poetry that closely observes and celebrates the material world as the arena or playground of the Lord.

Paul Mariani, a fine poet of this generation but perhaps better known for his biographies of Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and, most recently, Hopkins, offers a good working definition of the sacramental imagination as language that “pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.”

In a similar vein, literary critic and Gettysburg College English professor Peter Stitt, in his book THE WORLD’S HIEROGLYPHIC BEAUTY, a study of five mid-twentieth century American poets (Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and Robert Penn Warren), writes that all of them “love the physical world to such a degree that they sense within it some transcendent meaning, some hovering aura of belief.” Stitt notes that because Wilbur and Warren, for example, believe “that something sacred is to be found within reality, they do not feel required to abandon the physical in order to find the spiritual.” The sacramental imagination can, indeed, be summed up in the title of Wilbur’s great poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.”

The sacramental imagination has always been strong, but it seems particularly ascendant in contemporary poetry and criticism. Perhaps it is because there is something of a religious revival going on among intellectuals and artists not unlike that of a half-century ago; certainly there seems to be an abundance of religious themes in current film, fiction and music.

William Cowper

Unfortunately, however, that dominance makes it more difficult to hear and understand—or grant religious legitimacy to—the dialectical imagination. But poetry where the dialectical imagination is dominant, stressing the distance between God and the human and experiencing the world as a place where God is silent or absent, also has a long and distinguished pedigree in English poetry and hymnody.

Donald Davie suggests as much in his discussion of poet and hymnist William Cowper (1731-1800) in his introduction to THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF CHRISTIAN VERSE. Davie notes of the first line—“Sometimes a light surprises”—of Cowper’s poem/hymn “Joy and Peace is Believing”: “One may have read this poem, or more probably sung it, many and many a time before realizing that the crucial word in it is the first: ‘Sometimes’—only sometimes, not always, not even very often!” The usual relationship between God and believer in Cowper’s imagination is distance rather than presence.

Similarly, in what is perhaps Cowper’s most famous poem, the first line (“Oh, for a closer walk with God”) stresses absence, an absence the second stanza only underscores: “Where is the blessedness I knew / When first I saw the Lord? / Where is the soul-refreshing view / Of Jesus and his word?”

In the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of the dialectical imagination was the Welsh Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called him “as influential as T.S. Eliot in religious circles,” and one critic designated Thomas “a poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.” His powerful poem “The Porch” needs little explication:

      Do you want to know his name?
      It is forgotten. Would you learn
      what he was like? He was like
      anyone else, a man with ears
      and eyes. Be it sufficient
      that in a church porch on an evening
      in winter, the moon rising, the frost
      sharp, he was driven to his knees and for no reason
      he knew. The cold came at him;
      his breath was carved angularly
      as the tombstones; an owl screamed.

      He had no power to pray.
      His back turned on the interior
      he looked out on a universe
      that was without knowledge
      of him and kept his place
      there for an hour on that lean
      threshold, neither outside nor in.

R.S. Thomas

God’s absence, wrote Thomas, was for him like a presence “that compels me to address it without hope of a reply.”

One of the most difficult cases to critically deal with in trying to use religious categories is the poet who is an avowed nonbeliever but whose poetry is rich with religious resonances, themes, and iconography. Such a poet was Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who was not a practicing Christian herself and was sometimes scathing in her dismissal of Christians as dogmatic and judgmental. But as Scripps College modern languages professor Cheryl Walker suggests in her fine and challenging, though sometimes uneven, study GOD AND ELIZABETH BISHOP, “She lived poetically, and in a sense religiously.”

Without using the language of the sacramental and dialectical, Walker’s study suggests that Bishop was a first-rate poet of the dialectical imagination who longed to perceive the world in sacramental terms, but was generally unable to. God’s presence was just not there. Like sacramental poets, such as her rough contemporary Richard Wilbur, Bishop was a close and careful observer of the material world, the local and the ordinary. Her observations revealed the absence of transcendence rather than the presence of God, but the poetry was no less religious for that perception.

Walker divides her study of Bishop into chapters exploring different Christian concepts and theological themes—time and eternity, the fall, love and longing, justice and charity, suffering, and “assent.” She draws out of Bishop’s poetry and prose the religious possibilities that are either on or just below the surface.

Walker is especially concerned to look at Bishop in light of the poet’s reading of Catholic mystics, especially St. John of the Cross. She is careful not to overwhelm the poems with interpretation or create for them a theological Procrustean bed, but she also candidly admits the poet’s dialectical imagination. In the poem “Squatter’s Children,” for example, about the lives of poor Brazilian people on the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro, Walker sees that “we are once again confronted by the deus absconditus, the absent God who looks down on the children of the poor seemingly without much interest.” She identifies one of Bishop’s most moving poems, “One Art,” as “a religious poem without a God to offer grace.”

Elizabeth Bishop

Even when one quibbles with some of the fine points of Walker’s reading, it is a rewarding and—for those who equate the dialectical imagination with a secular antagonism to things religious—surprising tour through the work of one of the premier poets of the middle of the last century. Bishop loved old hymns and the poetry of George Herbert, knew the Bible well, and read theology all her life. Still, the spiritual did not present itself to her “as a tenable substance,” observes Walker, quoting the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “but, rather, through its absence.”

“To be of two minds was characteristic of Elizabeth Bishop,” Walker writes. “She could never quite relinquish the desire to believe, though a settled faith eluded her.” Precisely.  And therein lies the tension between the sacramental imagination of presence and the dialectical imagination of absence. Both offer rich possibilities for a poetry that speaks powerfully of and to the modern world.

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Charles Taylor’s A SECULAR AGE.

In A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote about the dim possibility of adequate commemoration for those lost in the slaughter of World War I:

“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

When Hemingway wrote, war poetry was still poised between the old and durable need to honor the dead and acknowledge with both regret and proper gratitude the dire nature of their civic contribution, and the second and more unsettling need to voice the sometimes dishonored and dishonoring terms of that sacrifice — the anguished appearance of war guilt for crimes perpetrated during the course of war by some of these sacrificial victims, the soldiers.

By the second half of the last century, war poetry came to embody an antiwar ideology. Judgments about politics and history have thoroughly rearranged the conventions of the war poem and have changed the way we look at courage and honor, as well as sacrifice. Part of what has happened is also an awareness of the bastardizing of public language, although I shrink from any judgment that things are any worse now for words than they ever were. It has never been easy to speak well about the moving target of difficult issues like war. There are certainly always new problems and new situations, as we think about justifying war and are faced with the horrifying results…Any war, no matter how victoriously prosecuted, is of course always a defeat for the civilized impulse, for the need to come up with other than violent resolution of conflict. And then there is the deadening of language that happens with the incessant barrage of public communication — “compassion fatigue,” in journalism professor Susan Moeller’s phrase.

But here I like to think of Maya Lin’s serene and wise description of how language is subverted, and memory served, by her brilliant memorial for the American dead of Vietnam:

"I always saw the wall as pure surface, an interface between light and dark, where I cut the earth and polished its open edge. The wall dematerializes as a form and allows the names to become the object, a pure and reflective surface that would allow visitors the chance to see themselves with the names. I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirror image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead."

Here is "Facing It," Yusef Komunyakaa's poem about encountering the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
I turn that way — I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Even the title gives us some clue about the difficult act that the poem covers. Facing “it” is hard: first, the swelling tears have to be acknowledged, the hard swarm of the memories, and the realization that the black, glassy, and highly reflective surface of the memorial itself forces a look inside oneself, as well as a look outward, back to a specific name, to someone who went up in a white, booby-trapped flash. The memorial also insists that inside and outside the self are hard to separate, and that the separation of past and present is equally difficult, as we inevitably carry the past within our present. Among the other fusions that a visit to the memorial affirms, we are made to see that we are always at one with the living and the dead, and that as a nation, black and white, we face similar grief and loss. “I’m a window,” says the poem’s speaker; through me, other people’s losses come to the surface. At the memorial we meet as a community, however disparate.

And then, simply but powerfully, the poem moves to a self-correction. At first, a woman’s gesture reflected in the stone seems a hostile one of erasure. The woman is attempting to scrub away at the names. Then it becomes clear to the speaker, and to us, that the gesture is homely, loving, and domestic: a mother, presumably a surviving relative of one of the names, bends to comb a boy’s hair, to make him more presentable to the dead. It is an homage she is paying, and it is that unadorned homage and that respect with which the poet chooses to end.

Lorrie Goldensohn is the editor of AMERICAN WAR POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY
(Columbia University Press) and the author of DISMANTLING GLORY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOLDIER POETRY (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Easter is not easy for most poets and writers, the difficult mystery of resurrection being more intractable than incarnation.

One of the best examples of the problem is perhaps the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century, John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”  Updike identifies the difficulty in the opening line:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

The crucial word in the center of the first line—if—starkly states what might be called “the Easter problem” and Updike’s insistence on the orthodox doctrine of the physical, bodily reality of the resurrection, even when hedged with the doubting if, provides a succinct but apt statement of one of the key themes of his work—the terror of death and the search for some sense, some promise, of overcoming, and he will not brook any evasions:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The tension between belief and doubt in the face of death, between faith and its opposite—certainty, and the need for resurrection run through all of Updike’s vast body of writing, from his early novels, stories, and poetry (“Seven Stanzas at Easter” was written in 1960, just a year after his first novel was published, and the poem was the winning entry in a religious arts festival sponsored by a Lutheran church on Boston’s North Shore) to his later work, including Due Considerations, his final collection of essays and criticism, and Endpoint, a posthumous book of poems published this month.

“Endpoint” does not directly address Easter, but its many meditations on Updike’s impending death—he died January 27 at the age of 76 and was battling cancer as he wrote many of the poems, specifically addressing his illness in a number of them—underscore the tension he wrestled with throughout his career between the fear of death and the hope for some kind of afterlife. In a poem entitled “Death of a Computer,” he writes of an old computer’s final crash and the “hopeful garble” on the monitor’s screen: “I in a spurt of mercy shut it down. / May I, too, have a stern and kindly hand / bestow upon my failing circuits peace.” In “Fine Point 12/22/08,” the last of the seventeen poems in the title sequence, he asks, “Why go to Sunday school, though surlily, / and not believe a bit of what was taught?” He praises Jews who “kept faith / and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites / from table to table as Christians mocked”:

We mocked but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

Updike wrote in an early autobiographical essay, “The Dogwood Tree,” of his fascination with what he called “the three great secret things”—art, sex, and religion and how they combined and interacted in his artistic mission to “transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps, and anonymities, in its fullness of satisfaction and mystery.” While the appreciations and obituaries that poured forth at his death duly noted how art, and especially sex, wove themselves into his work, few noted what British novelist Ian McEwan called Updike’s “religious seriousness,” his being “constitutionally unable to ‘make the leap of unfaith.’”

The final piece in “Due Considerations” is a contribution to National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series. Written at the age of 73, Updike acknowledged, “Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds.” While affirming the power of science to explain much of the universe, he also noted that “subjective sensations, desires, and, may we even say, illusions compose the substance of our daily existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address and placate these. We are part of nature,” he continued, “and natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity.”

“Due Considerations” also includes Updike’s 1999 essay for The New Yorker, “The Future of Faith,” a combination of personal and journalistic observations that seems a prescient anticipation of the recently released American Religious Identification Survey’s finding that the percentage of Americans who claim to be Christian is declining, especially among mainline Protestants. “As the year 2000 draws to a close, faith in America hangs on,” he wrote, describing the state of belief in signature Updike style that is instantly recognizable: “A Protestant Christian on the eve of the third millennium must struggle with the sensation that his sect is, like the universe itself in the latest cosmological news, winding down, growing thinner and thinner as entropy works an inevitable dimming upon the outspreading stars.”

Updike wrote that The New Yorker assignment was given to him because he was the magazine’s “token Christian,” and he undertook it only reluctantly: “The attempt felt dangerous; I feared it might empty out of me the last drops of what feeble faith had got me thus far.” Finding himself fearful and sleepless in a hotel room in Florence, Italy overlooking the city’s stolid Santa Maria del Fiore, the fourth-largest church in Christendom, Updike reports an epiphany in the midst of a thunderstorm: “Lightning. Hectic gusts. The rain was furious. I was not alone in the universe. … I was filled with a glad sense of exterior activity. My burden of being was being shared. God was at work—at ease, even, in this nocturnal Florentine commotion, this heavenly wrath and architectural defiance, this Jacobean wrestle…. All this felt like a transaction, a rescue, an answered prayer.” It is, in a sense, the mature, aging Updike’s personal encounter with one aspect of the Easter problem—abandonment, the solitariness of being alone in the universe, and the need for transcendence.

The passage echoes the famous closing of his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” written almost 40 years earlier, in which a young boy is plagued by doubt, the fear of death, and questions about the afterlife. The fourteen-year-old protagonist, David Kern, has a series of unsatisfying encounters with adults, including the Reverend Dobson, a Lutheran pastor who tells him the afterlife is like Lincoln’s goodness living on after him. Despite the minister’s vacuous answer, Updike wrote of David: “The sight of clergymen cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at some time, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot, submit to death.”

As David goes about the farm-boy business of burying six pigeons he has killed as pests, he loses himself in studying the intricate designs on the birds’ feathers: “As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

In some senses, including what he called his “fragile” faith, Updike was the emblematic mainline Protestant. He was raised a Lutheran but, like many other Americans, held his denominational affiliation somewhat loosely. After marrying his first wife, a Unitarian, the couple attended a Congregational church as a sort of mixed-marriage compromise, and in the mid-1980s, after divorce and remarriage, Updike identified himself as “a card carrying Episcopalian.” He could even, as he said in a brief note he wrote about his 1988 novel S., the third book in his trilogy based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, write of becoming “an increasingly enthusiastic disciple of Indian religions.” That appears to have been more a literary and linguistic enthusiasm than a discipleship, yet his poem “Religious Consolation” seems to acknowledge a need for the varieties of religious experience:

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
Those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
Whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
Those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

Unlike most of his characters and many Americans, Updike was theologically sophisticated. He cut his teeth on Danish Lutheran theologian Soren Kierkegaard, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, and, to a lesser extent, existentialist German philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. All three continued to engage him, and in “Midpoint,” a long autobiographical poem published in 1969, he paid tribute to Kierkegaard and Barth:

An easy Humanism plagues the land;
I choose to take an otherworldly stand.
—
Praise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel’s creed
Upon the rock of Existential need;
Praise Barth, who told how saving Faith can flow
From Terror’s oscillating Yes and No;

In his conclusion to a 1976 review of biographies of Barth and Tillich, Updike wrote that both men “confronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them—Barth by claiming He was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that He was present, weakly, in everything. Theology buttresses the faith that would hold off mortal fear, and these two theologians, a decade after the decade of their deaths, present a merged afterimage, positive and negative slants on the problem of Angst. What lingers of Barth, still ringing in the air of churches and seminaries, was his tone of fearlessness, his bold, encyclopedic, and hearty exposition of the word of God as over against the word of Man; whereas Tillich, unable to exclude anxiety and doubt, brought them into the sanctum, and called them holy emotions.”

More than any other contemporary novelist Updike also made clergy significant, even central characters in his work. It is hard to imagine another writer who has created such a range of clerics, from the dueling figures of orthodox Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach and liberal Episcopalian priest Jack Eccles in Rabbit, Run to the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, Updike’s version of Hawthorne’s Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, in A Month of Sundays, to his epic yet intimate In the Beauty of the Lilies, in which he richly described the loss of faith of Presbyterian clergyman Clarence Arthur Wilmot, to his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, and its depiction of the Reverend Deborah Larcom, a Unitarian clergywoman. When she preached, one of the other characters observes, “it was with utter naturalness and clarity, taking Jesus and Buddha as equivalent embodiments of goodness, citing Doctor Schweitzer and Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King as manifestations of the divine in human form.” Drawn from across a range of denominations and theological perspectives, Updike’s clergy are never cardboard or stick figures, but fully realized and embodied characters. As he said in a 1978 interview, “The practicing minister is in a terribly difficult position in our pretty well de-Christianized, inconsolable age. But they keep going, don’t they … and I admire them.”

Still, it must be noted that despite Updike’s insistence that if Jesus rose it was a bodily rather than metaphorical resurrection, Jesus himself and the events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection are largely absent from his poetry and fiction. His hope, the unstated Easter hope for eternal life that runs through his work, is dependent on what he called in one story “supernatural mail” with its “decisive but illegible” signatures, those very immanent things and events that contain within them the promise of more. In “Pigeon Feathers” he provided a telling example: “The sermon topics posted outside churches, the flip, hurried pieties of disc jockeys, the cartoons in magazines showing angels or devils—on such scraps he kept alive the possibility of hope.”

Or as Updike affirmed in the last line of the first poem in his final book: “Birthday, death day—what day is not both?”

–David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on novelists Marilynne Robinson and Alice McDermott.