Through Cloud and Shade: Poetry as Theological Revelation

Preached during Evensong at Jesus College Chapel, Oxford on Sunday 23rd of January 2022

Through Cloud and Shade: Poetry as Theological Revelation

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer

What is a poem?

It’s a question that’s often asked, but never truly answered.

Poems are not defined by rhyme, because most poems don’t rhyme. Poems are not defined by strict meter, because many poems don’t contain that. Poems are not even defined by line breaks, because prose poems exist - and they are beautiful.

You cannot define poetry. You cannot capture it or pin it down - not entirely. It is somehow beyond us. It is ephemeral and difficult to explain. But you know it when you see it. You know it when you hear it. You know it when you feel it.

Defining a poem is made even more difficult by the existence of people like me - by poets - who ignore standard attempts at definition entirely.

As you can imagine, I get asked what defines a poem a lot. And, having gone to a university nobody has ever heard of, and failed miserably at the module on poetic techniques, I avoid any definition with a whiff of a trochaic iamb anywhere near it.

If you ask me, poetry is itself - pure and simple.

If you press me on it, perhaps I will elaborate. All of the elaborations follow a theme, however. And that theme is that poetry is not the words themselves, poetry is something else.

The words are just the vehicle for sharing that something else with us, in a way we can explain - however imperfect that explanation is.

A poem is not the words on the page - a poem is what you feel when you read it. When you hear it. Poetry exists in the space around the words. Both in the literal gaps on the page, and the pauses that linger when you hear it.

At its best, poetry is more than it has any right to be, because it is an attempt to capture something entirely indescribable.

In so many ways, poetry is revelation.

In so many ways - and I am walking a very difficult theological line here, so please don’t call some kind of Anglican inquisition - our experience of poetry, is like our experience of God.

We know who and what God is. We know. We experience it. But we cannot ever define it - because God is beyond.

God just… God is.

That is as close to the truth as we can ever come in words, I think. We can add stuff after that, God is loving. God is just. God is holy. But we bring human baggage with our human words - even the best ones.

But God… God is. God simply IS.

But we’re human, and so of course we attempt to pin things down, in our creeds and in our sermons.

And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of me, standing here, saying we cannot accurately speak of God - before continuing to speak of God. In the midst of a liturgy filled with words - all of them about… God.

But the thing about liturgy is that most of it is poetry.

The creeds, they’re poetry. The psalms - poetry. Huge chunks of the Old Testament - poetry.

We use poetry to speak of God, because what else can we do? How else can we try to contain something that is beyond anything we could express?

What can come closer to something that is indescribable, something beyond comprehension and expression - than a way of using words that is, in itself, indefinable? A way of using words that is, in itself, far more than the words that are used?

So of course we speak of God through poetry, and of course God speaks back.

The Psalms, for example, are human words - they are human cries to God - they are lament and anguish, joy and celebration - and yet we have recognised them as God speaking to us, just as much as they are humans speaking to God.

And that right there is another contradiction that somehow makes perfect sense - something that poetry and faith do very well.

God is in the Psalms - of course - even the ones that are angry at God. But how?

I propose that humans wrote the words, but God is in the poetry. Because poetry is not the words - remember? Poetry is not even the rhyme and rhythm that we lose in translation.

Humans write the text. Humans build the framework. Humans try to capture the utterly unknowable. And God brings the revelation - and so we understand.

God does that. To quote from tonight’s psalm -

Humans praise God with the lyre;

Humans make melody to God with the harp of ten strings.

Humans sing to God a new song;

Humans do all of that. And God is. And revelation happens.

So what is revelation?

Well, I’m not going to quote the Oxford English Dictionary at you - partly because it’s a terribly boring and cliché thing to do, partly because it’s a fairly useless thing to do, and partly because we’re in Oxford and that just feels weird to me.

So, instead of going to a proper authority, let’s speculate - poetically.

Obviously revelation is a form of revealing. It’s the unearthing of new knowledge in the heart of the familiar.

Revelation often happens in the midst of the everyday - and that’s what makes it so profound - This is so clear in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, which combined the mundanities of household life with the earth shattering truth of God’s boundless love.

Revelation is the marriage of the previously unknown with the intensely familiar, and through that marriage, something so profound that it cannot be articulated is shared with us.

And that’s the thing, it is a sharing. But not between people.

Revelation comes from God, not from prophets, or poets, or preachers. Revelation is one of the most profound and most mundane experiences we can have: the experience of God interceding in our every day. Because revelation is, in many ways, extremely intimate and personal.

Revelation is God slipping, for a moment, into our lives, and breaking apart the illusions that separate us from the divine.

And so though revelations are a form of sharing, you cannot share a revelation with someone. I cannot, you cannot. No priest or pastor has the power. Only God can reveal - though it is on us to create space for that to happen.

All we can do is share the knowledge gained from revelation, in the hopes that that is enough. That we, like Julian of Norwich, and all those before us, have set the ground well enough, turned the world round enough, opened a door wide enough, for a revelation to slip in. The revelation itself is separate from the earthly things that cause it.

Revelation only comes through revelation - and that is what makes it so profound. Revelation is almost unique in that it is both the result and the experience.

Julian of Norwich, for example, shares her revelations with us - but when we, upon reading them, experience revelation, those revelations are our own - our own gifts from God - built on our own lives and experiences - tied to our own mundanities - Julian opens the door, sets the ground, but the revelations themselves come from God.

This, too, is true of poetry. Poets open the door to understanding; we set the stage, we try to use what is all around us, the common and every day, the familiar and well known, to share the truth of that which cannot be fully known. To share what cannot be fully shared, and God does the rest. God creates the revelation.

Poets cannot know, for certain, what you will read in our work - we cannot know, for certain, that what we try to share will be what IS shared. But we do our best - and, perhaps, just perhaps, revelation happens.

But back to the readings - in Numbers, the pillar of cloud and flame may act as a revelation to those who experience it, but it’s not a revealing - right?

It’s a pillar of cloud and flame - or perhaps two pillars - one of cloud, and one of flame - theologians far more competent than me have been arguing about it for longer than any of us have been alive. But either way - when most of us think of clouds, we think of how clouds conceal.

That tends to be their metaphorical purpose, right? Or they reflect a negative prospect. But in this reading, in this wilderness, they reveal and reflect the commands of God. The cloud lifts when it is time to travel, and settles when it is time to stay put.

The fire, so often connected with destruction, provides light, and evidence of the presence of God, even, and especially, in the covering darkness.

God takes the perceptions we have, and turns them. In the presence of God our expectations shift, our understanding shifts, and revelation happens. The every day becomes holy, and, for the Israelites, following that pillar in the wilderness, the holy becomes every day - but not in any way less wondrous because of that.

And, truly, what could be more every day - more mundane - to the Israelites, than cloud and fire?

And yet, the combination of these mundane things with the presence of God creates something so wondrous that, thousands of years later, I am here, stood in a Chapel on a rainy island on the other side of the world, speaking to all of you about those incredible events in a far away desert most of us will never see.

In cloud and fire, as in bread and wine, and in so many other things, God takes the ordinary stuff of life, and makes it extraordinary.

It is this - the combination of the mundane and the holy - that creates revelation.

I remember, upon reading this passage for the first time, being struck by the way clouds revealed truth, instead of hiding them. And of God’s presence in the clouds.

My conversion to Christianity was both predictable and dramatic. All of my friends saw it coming for years, but I, in denial, and deeply stubborn, needed a moment of dramatic revelation to see the truth of God’s existence myself.

So one night I sat in a cathedral and told God to “do a thing”.

Later that night, a miracle happened. There was a moment of utter impossibility - and I knew nothing would ever be the same.

The thing is, just before it happened, I was trying to take photos of the sky. It was a cold clear night, and the stars were spread out above me, and so I set up a small tripod, to take photos of the sky - Setting a long enough exposure that it would capture all the stars.

Twice, about a minute into the photographic exposure, a wall of cloud rolled overhead, covering the stars, and ruining my photo.

I decided to try a third time.

But do you know what? It turns out that God’s got a thing about trinities.

And so there I was, with a sky full of cloud, and a miracle.

Now, if I open up my photos, I can pinpoint the moment I realised God exists, because of the photo I was taking at the time it all happened. The four and a half minute exposure, ticking away as I experienced a moment of earth shattering revelation.

A photo of a sky, filled with stars, and there, streaking across the bottom half of the photo, an impenetrable veil of cloud.

God, rolling into my life, changing everything in an instant - coming in the form of the most ordinary of things. A wall of cloud on a cold November night in the North East of England.

And so what is my point?

I’ve stood here and I’ve talked about poetry, and God, and revelation, and clouds, and basically all I’ve said is that we can’t accurately define poetry, or revelation, or God (though we can accurately define clouds), and, despite talking for all that time, I’ve also said that we can’t accurately talk about any of those things either.

But we have to try - right?

Because we’re human. And we were given the gift of words, and the gift of faith, and the gift of knowing, and sharing and seeing, and being.

And, I think, poetry is a huge part of that gift - a gift from God.

My best friend Kym, (a poet, of course), often says that a good poem is like a spiral staircase; you examine the point from a load of different angles; you go on a journey; you keep walking, and keep walking; and when it is finished you find yourself somewhere that is, fundamentally, the same place - but also entirely different.

To put it in more scientific terms - a spiral staircase, seen in 2d space, takes you nowhere at all - it is only when you add the vertical plane, only when you see the whole picture, that you realise how far you’ve come, and how much you’ve seen on the way.

Revelation, too, is like a spiral staircase. We live in that 2d world, circling the endless miraculous work of God without seeing it for what it is, or fully understanding what it is that we are doing.

We think we are moving in place, when really we are moving onwards - inching our way towards God.

We journey through our lives every moment of every day, without ever seeing how far we have come, or the fullness of what is happening. We know that something is happening, of course, but without revelation we fail to see what it is.

God is in everything, and is ever present, and it is in revelation that we glimpse that truth for a moment, that we see the full picture, the vertical plane.

Revelation does not change the world, not really, it simply changes how we see the world. It breaks open God’s words and God’s actions - if only we are open to seeing it.

And so, with the spiral staircase in mind, let me attempt to end this sermon somewhere close to where we began it, but also somewhere entirely other.

Poetry is the oldest form of literature on earth. It predates the written word. It has been found in every culture, in every part of the world, being invented thousands of times, with each time separate from the other. Poetry has followed humanity forever. It has been used to share our loves, record our histories, and reflect our fears.

I think poetry follows us because it serves a purpose, because it speaks to us like nothing else can, and that it is often a tool for revelation, and certainly a gift from God.

To go further - I think that when we die, and are gathered up to God, who loves each and every one of us beyond comprehension, that God will joyfully welcome us home - and that perhaps that welcome will come in the form of the most beautiful poem any of us will ever know.

AMEN