Twenty Questions
While we’re on the theme of noticing: Jim Moore’s poem “Twenty Questions” is a wonderful reminder to pay attention to the ordinary, as in the ordinary we often behold the extraordinary. Or, to put more of a point on it, I sometimes suspect that if you can’t find the extraordinary in the ordinary, you probably won’t be able to find it at all.
We’re still a bit off from Christmas, but interestingly one of the great debates about the Incarnation – the claim that in Jesus God took on human flesh – was whether or not the finite had the capacity to bear the infinite. The Latin phrase for this confession – finitum capox infiniti – asserted that, indeed, the ordinary and finite flesh of the child born of Mary could bear the infinite and extraordinary presence and being of God. Sixteen hundred years later, Martin Luther used the same rationale to defend his belief that in holy communion there was a similar example of ordinary stuff – wine and bread – bearing the extraordinary presence of Christ’s body and blood. Indeed, Luther continued that anything – including the soup he loved to eat for supper – could bear God’s presence simply because it had been created by God and imbued with God’s very being.
Think of that for a moment – the willow tree, the white gravel road, the missed boat, everyday joys and sorrow – all of these and more have the capacity to confront us with the extraordinary beauty of the world that invites us to contemplate – and give thanks for – the possibility that there is more to this life than we may sometimes imagine.
Did I forget to look at the sky this morning
when I first woke up? Did I miss the willow tree?
The white gravel road that goes up from the cemetery,
but to where? And the abandoned house on the hill, did it get
even a moment? Did I notice the small clouds so slowly
moving away? And did I think of the right hand
of God? What if it is a slow cloud descending
on earth as rain? As snow? As shade? Don’t you think
I should move on to the mop? How it just sits there, too often
unused? And the stolen rose on its stem?
Why would I write a poem without one?
Wouldn’t it be wrong not to mention joy? Sadness,
its sleepy-eyed twin? If I’d caught the boat
to Mykonos that time when I was nineteen
would the moon have risen out of the sea
and shone on my life so clearly
I would have loved it
just as it was? Is the boat
still in the harbor, pointing
in the direction of the open sea? Am I
still nineteen? Going in or going out,
can I let the tide make of me
what it must? Did I already ask that?
Jim Moore, Twenty Questions
(Thanks to Shelby Andress for pointing me to Jim Moore and his poetry.)
Recent Comments