THE BIBLE AND A SECOND BOOK
There is one more pertinent thought I wanted to share from Rilke’s The Letters to a Young Poet.
Rilke shares with the young poet two indispensable books—of all books—that are always with him, wherever he goes: the Bible and a poetry book by a Danish poet. This immediately triggered a memory in me. Ralph Winter, a renowned missiologist and mentor whom I consider to have shaped me profoundly during my formative years, often spoke about having two books by his bedside: the Bible and Kenneth Scott Latourette’s A History of Christianity. During my 30s and 40s, I became an ardent student of history, believing that “insight is foresight based on hindsight.” For the first time in my adult education, I loved learning and dove deeply into history.
While the Bible has remained constant, my second preferred reading has shifted over the years from history to poetry and other contemplative writings. Both aim to convey the truth. Truths come to us in many shapes and sizes: experiences, facts, meanings, wisdom, and even feelings. When we say it is “true,” we mean it experientially, factually, and based on our understanding of meanings and feelings. At the risk of sounding simplistic, history presents interpretations based on facts (if there are such things as “objective” facts). As historians argue, which side of history is one telling or writing from? Even so, there is no doubt that the study of history aids overall human development and flourishing, but only under one condition: that we become aware of our own biases. Without this awareness, we can become destructive and manipulative. It is not whether one has biases or not that will cause harm, because we all have biases; it is a lack of awareness. There is a simple but universal lesson that what we focus on determines what we see and what we miss. It is this missing part, resulting from our biases, that can hinder our understanding. What we think we see would not be as productive and holistic. Ralph Winter taught me to first read the author’s biography to understand his or her background, i.e., biases, which has ingrained in me.
Poetry paints imagination based on intuition. I heard from an expert on T.S. Eliot that poetry is about wooing apprehension into comprehension. Poetry is about subjective seeing that is subtle and careful. No one interprets the same poem in the same way. Poetry beckons us to immerse our lives fully in honest interaction; otherwise, the poetry would not make any sense. Poetry is like a large mirror, granting generous latitude to explore our inner movements, while history is generally more restrictive and prescriptive, tending to remain in the intellectual realm. Poetry awakens our dormant intuitions into a living and breathing being, making it visceral and infinitely real. What is “real” initially becomes murky and confused, but over time, the real begins to emerge more confidently. My soul finally finds enough room and space to claim its brilliant existence.
Then there is the Bible. The Bible is a collection of multiple genres, from historical narratives to gospels and letters, or if you like, poetry. I would not say the Bible has history books; rather, the Bible features historical narratives. The narratives are to be read more as literary interpretations as opposed to literal ones. I love how the writers challenge and correct earlier narratives right in the Bible. The writers of the Bible were maturing in their consciousness of their real, subjective experiences of God, culminating with the narratives of Jesus. About a third of the Bible is written in poetry, which again is reflective of the culture and society at the time. The prophets of the Old Testament were considered to be poets. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great scholar of Jewish scriptures, said the following.
The prophet is a poet. His experience is one known to the poets. What the poets know as poetic inspiration, the prophets call divine revelation. . . . The inspiration of the artist is what is meant by “the hand of the Lord which rests upon the prophet.”
What makes the difference between the prophet and the ordinary person is the possession of a heightened and unified awareness of certain aspects of life. Like a poet, he is endowed with sensibility, enthusiasm, and tenderness, and above all, with a way of thinking imaginatively. Prophecy is the product of poetic imagination. Prophecy is poetry, and in poetry everything is possible, [such as] for the trees to celebrate a birthday, and for God to speak to [humans]. The statement “God’s word came to me” was employed by the prophet as a figure of speech, as a poetic image.
I believe that a “prophetic imagination” (to borrow from Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination) is desperately needed in today’s world. To conclude, allow me to repeat what Brueggemann said so eloquently.
Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger.
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and
perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.