At once I am both a natural audience for Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church and not quite its ideal reader. As an Episcopal priest and poet, my day-to-day life is intertwined with poetry and church. In my current context (a parish in the wonderfully artsy and academic Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts), I regularly invite parishioners to enjoy the power of poetry alongside me. In particular, I’ve taken great joy in hosting poetry meditations on Zoom, where we reflect on the spiritual questions a poem might be evoking. My passions for both poetry and church mean I was immediately and enthusiastically on board with Van Engen’s project of ushering Christians into the experience of poetry. 

At the same time, Van Engen’s intended audience may be readers who are my opposite: those for whom poetry seems useless or feels unfamiliar. There is an underlying assumption that poetry might need justification in terms of its relevance, usefulness, and potential for pleasure. Meanwhile, the hypothetical reader’s thoughts on church seem to be relatively secure. Though clergy, I’ll admit I am someone for whom the reverse is sometimes true. Christianity often has more to prove to me than poetry does. I can get down and doubtful about church, especially the wider church and its role in history and contemporary life, with greater frequency than I do about the state of poetry. To justify why I continue to invest my life in Christianity feels much thornier than justifying investment in poetry. Acknowledging this gap helps me to understand that my own longings while reading do not necessarily reflect the book’s primary purpose.

While the energy of Van Engen’s target reader might primarily go towards agreeing, or disagreeing, with his premises about poetry’s value (including its theological value), I kept busy noting the tantalizing and possibly subversive implications of his insights. The book asserts that poetry provides opportunities for the church to continue participating in the role of naming first given by God to Adam, approach “truths too big, or too hard, to tell in any other way” (p. 201), and join others in rejoicing and mourning specific aspects of the human experience. These are worthy subjects, but I yearned for a more substantial vision of how any one of them might transform us. This, I felt, was delivered only in hints – ones I kept track of as I began to imagine a sign with quotes from the book hanging on the door of a church. So many sentences of this book provided relevant guidelines, prayers, and questions for someone entering a church: 

“Do not feel compelled to have deep thoughts or earth-shattering revelations.” (p. 42, about how to read poetry)

“Is God really guiding this?” (p. 141, a commentary on a poem by Anne Bradstreet)

“If we want the truth of it, all of it, we have to use our imagination.” (p. 179, commentary on Walt Whitman writing about grass)

“In winding about, we approach.” (p. 180, about both poetry and God)

“If God were an enemy instead of a friend, how could God do any worse than what he has done?” (p. 222, commentary on a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

“Becoming the body of Christ means dealing honestly, as Christians, with the difficulties that pieties do not resolve.”(p. 233)

Clearly Van Engen does acknowledge the connection between the insights of poetry and the call of the church, but I wanted more. When he uplifted poets whose work “[tries] to open…oddity to others” (p. 55), I wanted to know how seeing Scripture as odd or unfamiliar changes our interpretation of it and, subsequently, our theology. When he challenges a view of poetry that sees poems as primarily “proclaiming messages or puzzles of meaning” (p. 95), I wondered what would happen if we allowed ourselves to challenge similar perspectives on the Bible. What if we let Scripture, let church, let God teach us – like Van Engen says poetry does – “on the side” or “accidentally” (p. 91)? How might that change our faith? Van Engen writes too about how “attention produces discovery, and discoveries create anew” (p. 162) and repeatedly uplifts the power of imagination. One might wonder: What does an imaginative, discovering, attentive, creating-anew church look and act like? How does that kind of church interpret Scripture? What does that kind of church believe?