by Robert McDowell, The Poetry Mentor,

author of Poetry as Spiritual Practice (July 2008)

www.robertmcdowell.net

Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry.” I think again of my friend who liked the way poetry made him feel physically, even though he did not know that it was poetry, the Prayer of Saint Francis, that he was feeling. You can feel that, too, as you discover the poetry in your spiritual practice and weave it into the fabric of your daily life.

An English woman I met recently managed to do just that.

Virginia’s mother, orphaned when she was six and raised by Catholic nuns, kept her daughter as far away from the Catholic church as she could. When Virginia was old enough to go to church, her mother took her to the neighborhood Lutherans. Always a reluctant churchgoer, Virginia was finally baptized there when she was thirteen. After that, she attended services irregularly, and when her mother died a week before her seventeenth birthday, she stopped going altogether.

Virginia was 26 and married by the time she suffered a miscarriage and was diagnosed with leukemia. The burden of irreparable loss and fatal illness lifted somewhat when she began to attend morning mass at the Catholic church across the street from her home.

“I got the irony,” she told me. “My mom was so spooked by anything Catholic, and there I was stumbling into mass every day! I don’t know what it was. Sitting in that almost-dark felt good. I liked looking up through the stained glass windows. I didn’t pay any attention to the figures on the windows. I just liked the light, the colors. I got into the sound of mass, too, all that chanting.”

The parish priest, Father Patrick, visited Virginia at home twice a week, and they discussed God, Heaven, and all of the spiritual questions Virginia could think of. Father Patrick suggested that Virginia try meditation as part of her practice. Virginia did but was frustrated, not sure that she was getting it or getting anything out of her attempts. When she told Fr. Patrick what she was going through, he introduced her to a friend of his, Ani Una, a nun (“Ani” means nun) who studied Buddhism and had been meditating for twenty years. Naturally, Virginia wanted to know how Una got meditation to work for her.

“Not easily,” the sister laughed, “not at first. I was frustrated, too, like you. Then I began to add poems to my recitations and something good started to happen. I included all kinds of poems—serious, sad, even light and funny. Those were especially good because they reminded me that my practice should be joyful, not drudgery. I wondered why the poems worked in me like they did. It was the words in their sequence, and the meaning of the words. Both took me deeper into whatever I was working on—letting go of things I was attached to, lapses of faith, unkind acts or words. Poetry doesn’t lie! Poems make me feel…like nature itself, like a blade of grass. They make me feel as if I could climb water!” Three months later, Virginia told Una that she was also including poems in her practice, and they were helping.

In her bestselling Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes a wonderful sentence about poetry as spiritual practice. It comes at the end of her book’s second section, which chronicles her four months in India. It’s the morning of her departure to Bali. She bows to a photograph of her guru, then slips a piece of paper under the carpet below his image. The paper contains the two poems she wrote in India. One had been written early in her stay, the other that very morning. “In the space between the two poems,” Gilbert writes, “I have found acres of grace.”

That’s my wish for everyone who experiences poetry in spiritual practice.