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The Spirit Searcheth All Things
"For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God."
1 Corinthians 2:10, KJV
In 1630, a man of many gifts with a bright future at court donned the cloth and disappeared into the English landscape. He lived quietly as a country parson with a call to write poetry. Three centuries later, another gifted man, recently ordained, walked into the wilds of north Wales to serve as a priest in the barren terrain and to a hostile population. While there, he wrote out his great argument with the deus absconditus, the absent god. The first was George Herbert; the second, R.S. Thomas.
Herbert was the great poet of the affirmation of God; Thomas, the great poet of negation. Yet both, like so many before and after them, felt the Spirit's dual call to the word: in priesthood as in poetry.
I believe poetry and fiction are ways the Spirit searches all things, on earth and in heaven, whether the author is aware of the Spirit or not. The interplay between religion and literature has given us much of what we consider the best and most moving poetry and fiction: “The Divine Comedy,” “Paradise Lost," “The Brothers Karamazov,” the poems of Donne and Eliot and the stories of Flannery O’Connor.
In the Daily Words to come, I want to explore this great dance between the Spirit and the creative life. Consider the Latin roots of companion: com, with, and panis, bread. A companion is a bread-fellow: as I eat, I share my bread. In our communion, the bread, the body of Christ, is the central act of our devotion. It is the place where the eternal, the divine, becomes real in the flesh of this world. But perhaps messmate is an even better translation, for there is much that is messy in the pursuit of the Spiritual life. Think of what follows as a grab-bag of pointers I have found through my own reading and writing.
You need not be a poet to hear this call. Every time we name something truly, a grief, a joy, a moment of grace at the kitchen table, we take part in the Spirit’s searching. The fact that there are books written at all, good and bad, true and untrue, is itself a miracle of the human capacity to heed the Spirit’s call.
I cannot offer a way to summon the Spirit; the Spirit comes at its own bidding. What I can offer is what I have learned about the discipline of waiting for it. I write these reflections as I write my poems: trusting the Spirit, my ear, and the power of association.
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