The Parable of Perfect Silence by Christian Wiman - Poem for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A
The Englewood Review of Books curates a weekly series of classic and contemporary poems that resonate with the themes of the lectionary readings. Here is one of the poems for this coming Sunday (More poems for the Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year A can be found here)
This poem was selected to accompany one of the
lectionary readings for the coming week, 1 Peter 4:12-14;5:6-11
The Parable of Perfect Silence
Christian Wiman
SNIPPET:
…
When I began writing these lines
it was not, to be sure, inspiration but desperation,
to be alive, to believe again in the love of God.
The love of God is not a thing one comprehends
but that by which — and only by which — one is comprehended.
It is like the child’s time of pre-reflective being,
and like that time, we learn it by its lack.
Flashes and fragments, flashes and fragments,
these images are not facets of some unknowable whole
but entire existences in themselves, like worlds
>that under God’s gaze shear and shear and, impossibly, are:
untouching, entangled, sustained, free.
If all love demands imagination, all love demands withdrawal.
…
Christian Wiman (b. 1966) is an American poet and editor raised in the small west Texas town of Snyder. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. He was the editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, from 2003-2013. Wiman is now on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches courses on Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (via Wikipedia).