we teeter on the edges of dark

I returned to work from holidays today to find two artifacts in my church mailbox: pair of socks and a book. Church mailboxes can yield the strangest discoveries. I was perplexed by the socks (my kids probably left them somewhere?) and delighted by the book. It was a book of poetry and woodcut prints entitled “Prophet, Priest, and King” and collaboratively produced by Chris Stoffel Overvoorde, an American artist, and Martin Oordt, a poet who taught for years at our local university before passing away in 2011. The book is a series of visual and poetic explorations and snapshots of Old Testament characters who anticipated, imperfectly, haltingly, partially, the final prophet, priest and king, Jesus Christ.

As I was paging through this marvelous little book this morning, my thoughts drifted back and forth between the book itself and the news of the day. Like nearly everyone, I have found it difficult to avoid thinking about last week’s events in Charlottesville. More specifically, I have found it difficult to think and respond well to last week’s events in Charlottesville. How to make sense of the demonic evil of white supremacy? How to process the reappearance of appalling slogans and violent actions and dehumanizing attitudes that we naively thought were safely tucked away in history books? How to respond well in the maelstrom of online outrage that we seem to demand of one another, when we are all carefully policing our neighbour’s responses, whether our words and tweets and status updates name things accurately enough, whether they are delivered forcefully enough or quickly enough or angrily enough? How do we respond with wisdom and fidelity to Christ and his kingdom, to Jesus and his way, when our modes of discourse seem to squeeze everything through the narrow gate of doing our good deeds to be seen by others, when we always seem to be either trying to convince ourselves of our congratulate ourselves for our moral probity?

I was thinking on these things as I turned the page in my new book to the entry on King Solomon. The passage the image (above) and poem was based on was 1 Kings 3 where God visits the king in a dream. “What should I give you?” God asks. Solomon famously responds, “Give your servant an understanding mind, able to discern between good and evil.” A good response, that one. An understanding and discerning mind is a desperately necessary thing. Maybe the most necessary thing. The world was and is a messy and violent place. Human beings are conflicted and incorrigibly selfish creatures. Evil masquerades as good. Good ends resorts to evil means. The right responses lead to unanticipated outcomes. Silence isn’t always golden. Understanding and discerning are thorny tasks. It has ever been thus.

As I was pondering Charlottesville and Solomon’s dream and this screwed up world in which we’re trying to understand and make our way, I was struck by a stanza in Martin Oordt’s poem opposite the image of Solomon:

Balance walks in God’s natural house,

but we teeter on the edges of dark

afraid of tripping onto four legs

and need to call for help to rise.

It’s a risky thing for non-poets like me to attempt an interpretation of poetry. But Oordt’s words seemed to me to express deep and important truths. And they speak to the events that we have seen over the past week which are, of course, nothing more or less than an expression of the deep darkness that resides within the human heart (not just the hearts of our enemies). A few lines, then, that are guiding me as I reflect upon how to live, think, and speak well in these troubled times.

but we teeter on the edges of dark… We lust for power, we crave violence, we cling to privilege and seek always to extend it. We don’t learn from the past. We recycle the sins of history. We are afraid of what we can’t (or won’t) understand and we rage against what we perceive as a threat.

afraid of tripping onto four legs… We flatter ourselves to imagine that we are enlightened creatures of reason and compassion. We are instinctual, reactive animals. This is how we often behave, at any rate. We are always tripping onto our four legs.

and need to call for help to rise… We need God. We can’t do what needs doing on our own. We need to be called to higher and better and truer things. We are incapable of rising—truly rising, rather than just recycling hatred, ignorance, and vengeance and dressing it up as virtue—on our own. We need the Crucified One to judge and heal us, lead and deliver us, teach and forgive us. We need the Shepherd King to turn us from our madness and to save us.

——

Here is the full poem by Martin Oordt.  It’s entitled “Solomon’s Search”:

All hours of sun are counted as light

in the turning of each flower;

the moon reflects its light in the dark

as slow motions of flowers seek rest.

 

Sea waves lift and slide

touch persuasion of moons;

planets move in silent tunes

as stars shine in full harmony.

 

Balance walks in God’s natural house,

but we teeter on the edges of dark

afraid of tripping onto four legs

and need to call for help to rise.

 

It takes pure white found in lilies

mixed with red of innocent children

shot through with green and gold

to learn how to stand in our night.

 

My gold chains cannot prevent lions

or our anger from splitting beams;

we must listen to songs heard only in dew

to break our chains one sun morning.