“I don’t know exactly what prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.” Mary Oliver, The Summer Day.
Poetry is a way our clay proves its infusion with spirit. Any poet seeks to communicate some natural experience using words and images. The religious poet, in addition, seeks to communicate some experience of the supernatural.
Poets embrace all that is human with eyes open for the transcendent. What separates the religious humanist poet from secular humanist poets is the context of their meditations as they write. For the religious poet the atmosphere is prayer. The believing poet keeps as the end of his work a magnification of the divinity he or she sees reflected in the world. That is to say, the secular poet invites in the Muse the Christian poet invites in the Holy Spirit.
I don’t mean to set up a false dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit. There may be no difference in the intention; both may be inviting in truth of experience, clarity of perception and an artful way to express it. If this is done with love – that expansive gift of self – toward love – the benign self-giving energy that is at the core of creation, then it’s the same activity with a different vocabulary.
I pray as I write. I recognize that God is the source of all creativity; in the self-gift of God we are able to give of ourselves. The manifestation of this gift is the poem. For the iconographer it would be the icon, for the composer it would be the music. As God created as a gift of self, as an act of kenotic love so the artist gives of self to create his art. The image of Christ’s blood flowing from his side suggests itself as the act of the artist.