Poem/Poet/Poetry

“Our experience of God from the beginning is that God is creative. Many scholars think Genesis 1 is meant to be a poem, and the Greek word for ‘made’ is related to our word for ‘poem’, making God the first poet and first to speak lyrically. God speaks poetically as He creates. The creation of the visible universe also suggests to us that God is an artist…creation is an ongoing process which God continues to guide and is not just something that happened once billions of years ago.” (St. Methodius, Fr. Ted Bobosh)

“God continues to create and has created us to co-create and pro-create. We are created to work with God’s creativity to be life-giving beings. Each day that we live, we experience God as creator for God continues to actively bring life into existence. God is poet, artist, creator. We are made in God’s image and share in these life-giving gifts and processes… Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet.” (Fr. Ted Bobosh, St. Pophyrios of Kavsokalyvia)

“We live in an either/or mentality and suffer from an ingrained dualism. We are missing out on the poetic depth of our nature. Traditional Christianity teaches that the whole world is a sacrament….Without the Eternal Poet’s presence, art is transcendent only to the point of overcoming the mundane; it cannot impart the transfiguration of the Divine. It is possible for art to possess a false light, in which its beauty lures one beyond himself toward an idol. When art itself is worshipped, instead of valued as a sacramental gift whereby man can glorify God, it becomes a mirage.” (Jonathan Jackson)

“Scientific knowledge” describes knowledge that is “outside” of us: such as objective, verifiable, experimental results. “Poetic knowledge” (by far the harder to describe) refers to the knowledge we have from the “inside.” It is what we know because it is us, or because we have a participation in its life. Scientific knowledge gives us an ability to master and control the world around us. It also gives us a knowledge that is “alien” to us….poetic knowledge is acquired by union with and attachment to the object; scientific knowledge is acquired by distance and detachment from the object…Living in a world of machines can be wonderfully abundant but lonely and isolating. Even when we study other humans, with scientific knowledge we place them in a category that we loathe: that of objects. Poetic knowledge is a reality seeking for a name. Its difficulty in finding an apropos name is itself indicative of its very nature. We all have it, we cannot live without it, and we have a hard time describing it or defending the conclusions that it presses on our reality.” (Karl Stern, Father Stephen Freeman)

“Anger, fear, joy, confusion, delight, wonder, frustration, a hunger for meaning, a thirst for revenge - all these emotions, and more, are observable in the Book of Psalms. The psalm writers did not choke down these very real emotions or pretend they did not exist. Rather, they acknowledged their experiences, but, importantly, they acknowledged their experiences within the context of laying it out before God. Because the psalms are inspired poetry, they unlock a door within us usually sealed off to texts of strict logic. They are songs from the heart for the heart, and did not merely float down from the sky to maneuver the pen of a disinterested author. The Psalms flow from life experience, and they flow in one direction - toward God, and not away from Him. This is important, for it indicates that the emotions that sometimes drive us away from God - anger, for example, or desire - do not have to. The full depth and breadth of the human experience is pliable in the hands of God.” (Fr. John Oliver)

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