Spiritual Life: Poetry and prayer: Parallels of invocationMuch the way that, say, Lorenzo Thomas' work is, I must say Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery's Benediction was more poetry than Alexander delivered, proving in full that POETRY SPEAKS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE akin to prayer. The benediction, like authentic poetry, was an activity. It activated.
I am less concerned here, at the start, about what one prays -the creed of prayer-than that one begins an inner life of words, praying, or poetry, and that one finds a certain attitude of inner life. This can be found by at the very start of Lowery's work, of his saying focal words, using even secular prayers, including a poetics, even for those of us who have not found God, grace, a religion, or a church.
If his benediction was not petry, it is like poetry, like swimming--one has, sometime, to jump into the words or water and hope that something will be there. That something will hold one up. One has to learn the strokes, maybe, on dry land beforehand.
His prayer itself opened the dimension of the other, of the higher or the divine. Like an authentic poem, one prayer, is like one grain of sand on the beach-it starts the dialogue.
Alexander's poem, without its focus words, was poetry that cannot help a person in the direction that leads to prayer: that of wholeness, or healing, which is the secret realm of holiness.
Lowery's poem/prayer begins with the cultivation of an attitude, not just in stillness or some strange church, and this is where his poetry can help prayer: What is the magic word? You need not be a church person, an Muslim, a Jew, or a Christian to say this poem, or even a believer, but it can invoke the same attitude of reverence or relaxation response -that prayer awakes in a person.
Lowery evoked a poetry activating the memory, attitude, and perception, and it may be a good beginning or refresher for persons interested in eliciting the peace, power, and the active inner life of prayer. After all, prayer and poetry originally come from the same place, and much early poetry was sacred. Poetry, like prayer, accompanied ceremonies both at the temple and at the court. They were observances of the priest and king. They had the function of ritualizing, raising, and celebrating a sense of higher life. They were a training and discipline of inner attitude towards public and divine and even supernatural events. They were the developers of the culture.
Alexander failed to recapture some of these beginnings of us and the world through both poetry and prayer.
Poetry, from the Greek word poesis (to make), like prayer from the Sanskrit word pras or prcchati (for asking), often calls on unseen powers and addresses nature, the lover, time, or the West Wind as Thou. This is the mood of invocation. It is, philosophically and grammatically, the vocative relation: the poet calls out "0 Thou" to the universe. It is the grammatical case, the vocative, in inflected languages which calls out or invokes. This vocative relation-the grammar of calling out-is a personalizing, a connectedness with destiny, death, love and chance, shared by prayer and poetry alike. The vocative relation, or mood of invocation, is the calling out of the soul to life itself, be it the West Wind, Joy, the fountains and meadows, or love, or time, or even death.
Alexander's poem, though well-constructed, accomplished none of this.
Lowery, in his inner life, impersonated the world, and all poetry is a kind of prayer to the universe.
Lowery's prayer, can be memorized poems and repeated, revealing an inner landscape that can offset the evil, trouble, and turmoil of everyday life, the kind dished up for us by the past eight years of the previous failure of an administration.
Lowery's Benediction set the mood of invocation, waking up the inner dependence we have on beauty, truth, and goodness, and will go farther than Alexander's poem to help us actually create it. It put us between a prayer and a meditation. The attitude of the soul, the poem, enlivens the moment. This is the kind of waking up of the inner life that the vocative relation, whether addressed to God or no, can bring.
The Benediction more than the poem invoked meaning, which is indeed, the interface between prayer and meditation. In meaning we make an effort not just with the heart but also with the mind to awaken the sense of words so that as we repeat the formula or poem, we are discovering thought afresh.
Lowery's poem/prayer works, too, because he realizes the outward world changes. Days change. But the word Grace, constantly repeated, can measure all vicissitudes. It is the same with poems that we have internalized, making life ours in an inward song that no outer circumstances can change. This is that inward landscape of the relaxation response that can be such a great relief against stress, effecting even musculoskeletal, fight-or-flight, and psycho-immunological symptoms. Here Lowery addressed his love. The attitude of the poem is a prayer.
Alexander's poem failed to activate the inward life. It had no sense of what it means to build soul out of words, memory, repetition, and attitude. Absent was a kind of undertone, as if the mind were whispering to itself, to love, to destiny, to the universe. There was no inward speech, whether prayer or poem, between language and thought.
The Benediction poem was part prayer, part meditation. We can pray it, but we can also meditate it.
Right now, we need this kind of meditation to help us crawl our of our nightmare.
It is, on the whole, possible to meditate poetry and, as Re. Dr. Lowery did, to poeticize a meditation into a prayer.
Gerald Schwartz
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