The celebrated American poet Christian Wiman recently published a collection of poetry, memoir, and literary criticism entitled Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. I started reading it on New Year’s Day this year, hoping against hope that something in there would keep the despair at bay, at least for a little while. On page sixteen, my eyes were suddenly transfixed by these few lines from his poem “Witness”:
“…I said I will not bow down again
to the numinous ruins.
I said I will not violate my silence with prayer.
I said Lord, Lord
In the speechless way of things
that bear years, and hard weather, and witness.”
The tension Wiman creates between wanting to remain in the safety of silence and his inability to stop speaking ultimately gives way to the discovery that right at the edge of both speech and silence, there is the One that bears years, and hard weather, and witness. I think our Church finds itself in a moment of exactly this kind of tension. We’re genuinely unsure whether to speak or remain silent, but our hearts are crying out, Lord, Lord, in that speechless way of things.
The gift of poetry is that it opens up space precisely where silence and speech collide. Poetry is not like ordinary language. Poetry struggles with the slipping and sliding of words until, through an act of profound making – what the Greeks called poesis – our attentions are focused and meaning is found, or perhaps just gestured toward, and we find some consolation for this journey that is life. The Anglican faith has a rich tradition of poetry — from the Psalms to the Prayer Book, from Herbert to Rossetti to Eliot, those who follow God in the way we are on have often found it necessary to resort to poetry over prose to even begin to find an adequate way of proceeding.
In 2025, the Diocese of Rupert’s Land is excited to share that it has been the recipient of a Calvin Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant. This Lilly-funded grant program provides funds to church groups to engage in year-long initiatives to inspire vitality in our worshipping life together. Our team’s proposal to explore the poetic sensibility of Anglicanism has been funded for this year, and we are excited to share a bit about the events coming to Rupert’s Land this year.
The goal of this grant is to reinvigorate the worshipping life of our diocese by resourcing parishes and leaders both academically and experientially with the best of the imaginative and poetic aspects of Anglicanism. In many of our parishes, worship is approached with care and creativity, and there is a real hunger to be constantly learning and improving as worship leaders invite people into the beauty of holiness. This grant will help introduce more people to the poetic sensibility of Anglicanism, both in our liturgical life and in our theological tradition, offering an invocation for people’s imaginations to be inspired in ancient and new ways.
Poetry, as an exercise in expansive meaning discovery, creates for itself a lot of space for encounters with others. Local artist and St. Margaret’s parishioner Seika Dyck has graciously created a striking visual motif for our project featuring the ark-like shape of a church’s nave, evocative of the way the Church offers a place to be securely held. This nave ceiling extends down with lines of invitation into a sea of blank space, suggestive of the possibilities for invention, discovery, and unbounded encounter with others. All of this is anchored by a Canterbury cross, reminding us that it is Jesus that is at the centre of all our exploring, that we come to this project from a distinctively Anglican tradition, but that this tradition always sits somewhere between the received infrastructure of the past and the open possibility of the future.
So far, we have enjoyed an inter-religious poetry exchange at St John’s College featuring food, poetry, and rituals from the Anglican and Sufi Muslim traditions. Local poet and saint benedict’s table parishioner Angeline Schellenberg has guided us through two remarkable workshops on Lament during Lent. Moving into the spring, Beth Downey Sawatzky (another saint benedict’s table parishioner) and I will be offering some workshops for lay-readers and lectors at St. Bart’s (April 12th) and Christ Church, Selkirk (April 26th). In June, Kirsten Pinto-Gfroerer, Val Neufeld, and Melody Driedger will be hosting a poetic/contemplative retreat entitled A Day of Recollection. This fall, for the more academically inclined, you can look forward to a public lecture series featuring local academics who specialize in various figures in the Anglican poetic tradition. We’ll also be offering a class through St John’s College on John Donne and his use of Scripture. For the poets, you can look forward to some more workshops on poetry writing, a possible poetry slam, and, most exciting of all, an all-day conference on November 1st with Steve Bell and Malcolm Guite.
To follow along on this journey through Anglican Poetics this year, be sure to keep an eye on the Diocesan events page. You can also follow us on Facebook or Instagram or join our mailing list here. All events associated with the Anglican Poetics Project will be marked with Seika’s beautiful logo to help them stand out from our regular Diocesan programming.
We hear so often voices of doom from leaders, academics, statisticians and worriers that our Church is dying. But I think the poets offer us more vision. I leave you with these words from Rainer Maria Rilke:1
You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.
- Barrows, Anita. Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Translated by Joana Macy. Riverhead Books, NY, 2005, pp. 71.
