A word is dead, when it is said<\/p>\r\n
Some say\u2014<\/p>\r\n
I say it just begins to live<\/p>\r\n
That day.<\/p>\r\nSurely, Dickinson overstates her claim. Every spoken word does not \u201clive.\u201d Still, some words, once spoken, do not disappear. They may be harsh words, best forgotten, but once said they must be dealt with and reconciled, if possible, but even that does not make them go away.\r\n\r\nWords of love are surely meant to live, and marriage vows create a new reality, which must be dealt with \u2013 even if the vows prove impossible to keep. Perhaps Dickinson\u2019s poem best describes our hope that we can say something that will endure, and surely this is the hope and the task of the poet.\r\n\r\nDickinson\u2019s poem is more than a good idea. The directness of the poem disguises its craft \u2013 that is, the poet\u2019s ability to use language with power and precision. Here, Dickinson disguises a heroic couplet: two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter.\r\n
A word\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0is dead\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0when it\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0is said\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0some say.<\/p>\r\n
I say it\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 just\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0begins\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0to live\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0that day.<\/p>\r\nMany would say that the heroic couplet stands as the strongest two lines in the English language, and Dickinson uses it to give strength and fixity to her statement. To the heroic couplet, she adds the repetition of words and sounds to create internal rhyme and alliteration with \u201cd\u201d and \u201cs\u201d to the fore. The poem turns on the word \u201csay,\u201d which contrasts what is \u201cdead\u201d with what \u201cbegins to live.\u201d The craft of the well-said makes a difference, and a poet\u00a0knows the craft, knows how to put words together so that they have weight and density or lightness and transparency, as the need may be. Still, Dickinson brings more than craft.\r\n\r\nIn the search for truth, some take refuge in truism \u2013 those statements that undermine the truth with banality. Dickinson, however, captures a more complex reality. She does not say that the words necessarily will be true, but that they will live. In this, she has proposed her own metaphor: \u201cSpeaking is like giving birth,\u201d or \u201cA word is like a living person who has a life that changes and unfolds.\u201d Dickinson has captured a genuine similarity between a spoken word and a living person. She suggests unfolding possibilities rather than narrowing definitions, and it would be hard to explain its possibilities and, harder still, to define the many ways that people might relate to this poem.\r\n\r\nMonroe Beardsley called metaphor \u201ca poem in miniature,\u201d and some regard the poet\u2019s ability to discover metaphors to stand at the heart of the poetic vocation. Dickinson seems to say as much in her definition of a poet:\r\n
This was a Poet \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\r\n This was a Poet \u2014 It is That<\/p>\r\n Distills amazing sense<\/p>\r\n From ordinary Meanings \u2014<\/p>\r\n And Attar so immense<\/p>\r\n From the familiar species<\/p>\r\n That perished by the Door \u2014<\/p>\r\n We wonder it was not Ourselves<\/p>\r\n Arrested it \u2014 before<\/p>\r\n Of Pictures, the Discloser \u2014<\/p>\r\n The Poet \u2014 it is He<\/p>\r\n Entitles Us \u2014 by Contrast<\/p>\r\n To ceaseless Poverty \u2014<\/p>\r\n Of Portion \u2014 so unconscious<\/p>\r\n The Robbing \u2014 could not harm<\/p>\r\n Himself \u2014 to Him \u2014 a Fortune<\/p>\r\n Exterior \u2014 to Time \u2014<\/p>\r\nThe basic metaphor of the poem compares the poet to a perfume maker who distills a fragrant essential oil, i.e., an attar, from dead flowers, which is the normal way that perfume is made. However, Dickinson adds a twist. These dead flowers come from the familiar species that grew by the door, that we walked past, day in and out, that seemed to be noticeable only while alive and blooming and now useless being dead.\r\n\r\nDickinson is connecting several things: the poet to the perfume maker and the perfume to the ordinary flowers of daily life. Surely, there is every good reason to hope that a priest can be compared to such a poet, because life is mostly made of ordinary events that get lost unless they are connected and so magnified.\r\n\r\nAs Dickinson suggests, the connections are not abstruse or particularly inscrutable; rather the poet is able to see the obvious because:\r\n We wonder it was not Ourselves<\/p>\r\n Arrested it \u2014 before.<\/p>\r\nOnce pointed out, the insight is clear. According to this poem, the poet\u2019s power lies not in some superhuman intuition, but in an aptitude for reality \u2013 for seeing the likeness between things in front of us. As Dickinson recognizes, we easily overlook the possible connections in front of us.\r\n\r\nThis kind of insight caused Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist, to argue that the function of all art is to \u201cdefamiliarize\u201d the ordinary. The artist takes what we know too well \u2013 what has become boring, trite and commonplace \u2013 and makes it strange so\u00a0that we must look at it in a new and arresting way. To accomplish this, the poet uses unfamiliar words, unexpected rhythms, unexpected twists to force the reader to struggle with the text and so to experience the commonplace as if for the first time. For both Dickinson and Shklovsky, the poet focuses on what lies in front of us, and this ability becomes the source of a wealth that cannot be robbed, because this seeing is constantly generating new fortune which, as Dickinson says, is \u201cexterior to time.\u201d\r\n\r\nA priest, too, must be able to forge the bonds of likeness not only between the things of this world, but also between this world and the larger reality of God. In this, Jesus shows us the way because much of his teaching is grounded in his ability to make metaphors: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed or like yeast that a woman took or like a man who built a house. This larger reality requires metaphors to describe it, and while those of Jesus remain canonical, the preacher must have some ability to see the metaphorical possibilities of this world to give the Kingdom new metaphors, new flesh in our own day.\r\n\r\nIf, as Dickinson suggests, a poet\u2019s power lies in the ability to discover the metaphorical links between unexpected realms, then the poet cannot be just a literalist interested only in the literal thing itself. Certainly, there is a place for concern with the literal. One must understand what a mustard seed literally is before it is possible to understand how the Kingdom of God could be like it.\u00a0Moreover, both law and science depend upon the limits of the literal meaning to name things with precision. So the botanist moves from the tree, to the deciduous, to the oak and then to the red or white or pin oak and more.\r\n\r\nThe connections here are literal and contiguous, and this type of relationship is found everywhere. Pen and ink and paper have a literal, physical connection and belong to the domain of writing. There is no metaphorical leap here, no juxtaposition from different domains with an assertion of likeness. Examples of this type of connection could be multiplied endlessly in a game of free association: window and wall, table and chair, cup and saucer.\r\n\r\nAs said above, metaphor requires a leap. Speaking a word is only somewhat like giving birth to a child; the endurance of a word spoken is only somewhat like the life of a person. Because the similarity is only partial and often cannot be precisely defined, some refuse to allow the truth of the metaphor. These literalists claim to be realists because they demand facticity, but really they are continually reducing reality only to physical, literal relationships.\r\n\r\nAs a result, these \u201crealists\u201d isolate and fragment the pieces of our world because they cannot recognize the likeness of different things. Their reality, bereft of metaphor, lacks imagination. With the exclusion of metaphor, science can lose sight of the wonder of\u00a0creation; the law court can forget the larger purpose of the law and make the laws an end unto themselves, and priesthood can cut itself off from mystery.\r\n\r\nA priest, like a poet, depends upon his ability to find the metaphorical link between things, especially between the words of the Scriptures and the life of the Church. The Scriptures do not\u00a0literally describe our experience today; they do not tell us exactly what we should do. Rather, the reader, in this case the preacher, must discover a relationship of likeness between the Book and ourselves. The literalist may insist upon a literal match between the text and today, but this leads to a violation of the text, which must be contorted and forced to make the text somehow fit literally even though there is no fit.\r\n\r\nAdmittedly, metaphor is no simple solution. It creates possibilities which, in turn, bring the problem of deciding which possibilities fit. For a priest, the possibilities are limited by the creed, the tradition as taught by the Magisterium. Still within that large context, possibilities abound, and possibility gives rise to possibility, to things unseen, unexpected. This makes some nervous; they want the world nailed down \u2013 clear and literal. This tendency toward a narrow literalism always exists, for it seems to offer the comfort of things known and sure, but this comfort requires a space small enough to be knowable. In such a small place, the ego becomes the measure of the world. When everything is measured against myself, that which is different and other becomes a threat and so must be defined as outside and false, and it must be kept outside.\r\n\r\nDickinson plays with this problem in a poem on preachers.\r\n He preached upon \u2018Breadth\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\r\n He preached upon \u201cBreadth\u201d till it argued him narrow\u2014<\/p>\r\n The Broad are too broad to define,<\/p>\r\n And of \u201cTruth\u201d until it proclaimed him a Liar\u2014<\/p>\r\n The Truth never flaunted a Sign\u2014<\/p>\r\n Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence<\/p>\r\n As Gold the Pyrites would shun.<\/p>\r\n What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus<\/p>\r\n To meet so enabled a Man!<\/p>\r\nFor Dickinson, the pride of this preacher \u2013 his narcissism and therefore his small-minded myopia \u2013 lies at the root of the problem. Instead of gold, we get fool\u2019s gold.\r\n\r\nIt is true that the preacher is faced with a difficult, if not impossible, dilemma. The preacher should preach and practice the same thing. In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales<\/em>, Chaucer concludes his description of the parson with just this ideal:\r\n But Cristes loore, and Hise apostles twelve<\/p>\r\n He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve<\/p>\r\n But Christ\u2019s own teaching and his apostles Twelve<\/p>\r\n he taught, but first he followed it himself.<\/p>\r\n Prologue, 527-528<\/p>\r\nSurely, this is the goal. However, if the preaching does not exceed what the preacher can practice, then the preacher is forced to remake God and the Gospel in his own image and likeness. Though Chaucer\u2019s ideal is much to be desired, it is more important that the preacher be faithful to the Gospel, and a good preacher really must preach a sermon that is a judgment on himself, first of all. The difficulty of doing this and sustaining it over a lifetime should not be underestimated. Sometimes the decision is conscious, but often it is unconscious. The preacher avoids this or that because it would be too difficult to face. In Dickinson\u2019s poem, the preacher\u2019s arrogance makes him unaware of his narrowness.\r\n\r\nAlthough the literalist may claim to be a realist, the opposite is true. The literalist is unable to see the possibility of the world, but as Dickinson argues, the poet is able to see the possibility of the dead flowers at the back door becoming an immense perfume.\r\n\r\nIn his Spoon River Anthology<\/em>, Edgar Lee Masters captures something of this metaphorical realism in his poem, \u201cFather Malloy.\u201d All of the poems in this book tell something of the people buried in the graveyard of an imaginary Midwestern town\u00a0named Spoon River. Though hailed as a great American poetic work when it appeared in 1915, its luster has faded in academic circles, though it robustly remains in print.\r\n\r\nAs the poem makes clear, the speakers describe the deceased Catholic priest from a non-Catholic point of view, from that of the people buried on the hill and not in the Catholic cemetery, where \u201cthe cross marks every grave.\u201d The poem lacks our typical theological concerns about priesthood. Still, or perhaps because of that, it describes in 23 lines, this parish priest as a real realist.\r\n Father Malloy<\/strong><\/p>\r\n You are over there, Father Malloy,<\/p>\r\n Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,<\/p>\r\n Not here with us on the hill \u2014<\/p>\r\n Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision<\/p>\r\n And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.<\/p>\r\n You were so human, Father Malloy,<\/p>\r\n Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,<\/p>\r\n Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River<\/p>\r\n From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.<\/p>\r\n You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand<\/p>\r\n From the wastes about the pyramids<\/p>\r\n And makes them real and Egypt real.<\/p>\r\n You were a part of and related to a great past,<\/p>\r\n And yet you were so close to many of us.<\/p>\r\n You believed in the joy of life.<\/p>\r\n You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.<\/p>\r\n You faced life as it is,<\/p>\r\n And as it changes.<\/p>\r\n Some of us almost came to you, Father Malloy,<\/p>\r\n Seeing how your Church had divined the heart,<\/p>\r\n And provided for it,<\/p>\r\n Through Peter the Flame,<\/p>\r\n Peter the Rock.<\/p>\r\nThe poem claims humanity for Fr. Malloy, who was not opposed to taking a friendly drink with whomever \u2013 not just with his parishioners, but also with those now buried over there on the hill, and this detail illustrates the priest\u2019s larger moral horizon and his pastoral relationship with the world beyond his parish. The poem connects the priest to both the past and the present as if he had been a sightseer in a strange mysterious land and so had the ability to make that world present and to bring it and himself \u201cso close to many of us.\u201d Though the priest belongs to these two worlds, he is able to move between them and to hold them together. The poem, then, makes this theme of incarnation explicit:\r\n You believed in the joy of life.<\/p>\r\n You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.<\/p>\r\nAn affirmation of the priest\u2019s realism follows:\r\n You faced life as it is,<\/p>\r\n And as it changes.<\/p>\r\nThis priest did not live in some spiritual world far away from this here and now. The poem ends with two metaphors for Peter, who stands both for the Church and for its priests:\r\n Peter is (like) a Flame.<\/p>\r\n Peter is (like) a Rock.<\/p>\r\nThe second, of course, is taken from the Gospels (Matt 16:18) and captures something of the Church\u2019s stability against the forces of chaos and evil. The flame, connected with the divining of the heart just above, suggests emotion, passion, zeal, mystery. The juxtaposition of the two \u2013 the Flame and the Rock \u2013 captures two essential pieces of the Church and of priesthood: the transcendent made incarnate, the divine made human.\r\n\r\nThose who would limit the Church just to the rock of stability deny the Church its vitality, its mystery. They deny the change that living must necessarily bring. Likewise, those who focus only on the spiritual miss the essential element of incarnation. For us human beings, incarnation includes the breakage that comes with sin. Fr. Malloy, the poem tells us, \u201cfaced life as is.\u201d He was a realist in touch with the human and the divine.\r\n\r\nEdgar Lee Masters\u2019 poem stands as a wonderful tribute to the many nameless priests who have, through the years, played such a role in the small towns and big cities of the Midwest and farther abroad. For their sake, the poem deserves to be known more widely.\r\n\r\nJust as the poet can see the metaphorical connections \u2013 the ways in which persons and things are alike, so, too, the priest must be able to discover the connections between the human and the divine and to hold them together. This charism is Christological, for Christ is himself \u201cthe image of the unseen God\u201d (Col 1:15), and in his very person he holds together divinity and humanity. This charism is given to us in baptism, and the priest has the special responsibility of making this reality present by means of word and sacrament in the name of and for the sake of the Church. In his poem \u201cGod\u2019s Grandeur,\u201d Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrates this sacramental manifestation in the opening metaphor:\r\n The world is charged with the grandeur of God.<\/p>\r\n It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.<\/p>\r\nHopkins not only grasps the likeness between God\u2019s grandeur and the light scattering from crumpled metal foil, he is also able to set it down in two lines of iambic pentameter. Very few of us priests have the skill of a wordsmith like Hopkins. Yet I have heard some preachers who caused the ground to move under my feet. All of us, as best we can, must hammer out or at least point out what the Kingdom of God is like so that its mystery may continue to unfold in our midst.\r\n This essay considers the metaphor: \u201cA priest is like a poet.\u201d\u00a0 As metaphors do, this statement suggests that we can understand\u00a0 a priest better by understanding his likeness to a poet. Generally, priests are not literally poets, and only three Catholic priests are commonly found in standard anthologies of English poetry: St. Robert Southwell, SJ (1561-1595), Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ (1844-1889).<\/p>\n Of the three, Hopkins is arguably the best poet, though the other two were more important during their lifetimes with Newman continuing to play an important role today. Clearly, a priest need not be a poet. Still, I would argue that a priest should be like a poet in some ways.<\/p>\n Just as there is a large discussion about priest and identity, so also one can find a parallel wonderment about poets and what they might or should contribute to the world. Lest either of these discussions bog us down, I leave them aside and propose that the basic similarity between priest and poet lies in their relationship to words.<\/p>\n The poet is a wordsmith \u2013 someone who makes things out of words. A priest, among other things, is tied to the Word of God, not just as one who repeats it but also as one who gives it flesh again \u2013 in part by the living of it, in part by speaking this word anew. The priest, then, must be, to some degree, also a wordsmith.<\/p>\n Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), like Hopkins, died an unknown poet, but since her death she has taken a place in the front ranks of American poets. She has a small poem that sets out the task of words and, so, of poetry.<\/p>\n A word is dead, when it is said<\/p>\n Some say\u2014<\/p>\n I say it just begins to live<\/p>\n That day.<\/p>\n Surely, Dickinson overstates her claim. Every spoken word does not \u201clive.\u201d Still, some words, once spoken, do not disappear. They may be harsh words, best forgotten, but once said they must be dealt with and reconciled, if possible, but even that does not make them go away.<\/p>\n Words of love are surely meant to live, and marriage vows create a new reality, which must be dealt with \u2013 even if the vows prove impossible to keep. Perhaps Dickinson\u2019s poem best describes our hope that we can say something that will endure, and surely this is the hope and the task of the poet.<\/p>\n Dickinson\u2019s poem is more than a good idea. The directness of the poem disguises its craft \u2013 that is, the poet\u2019s ability to use language with power and precision. Here, Dickinson disguises a heroic couplet: two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter.<\/p>\n A word\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0is dead\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0when it\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0is said\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0some say.<\/p>\n I say it\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 just\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0begins\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0to live\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0that day.<\/p>\n Many would say that the heroic couplet stands as the strongest two lines in the English language, and Dickinson uses it to give strength and fixity to her statement. To the heroic couplet, she adds the repetition of words and sounds to create internal rhyme and alliteration with \u201cd\u201d and \u201cs\u201d to the fore. The poem turns on the word \u201csay,\u201d which contrasts what is \u201cdead\u201d with what \u201cbegins to live.\u201d The craft of the well-said makes a difference, and a poet\u00a0knows the craft, knows how to put words together so that they have weight and density or lightness and transparency, as the need may be. Still, Dickinson brings more than craft.<\/p>\n In the search for truth, some take refuge in truism \u2013 those statements that undermine the truth with banality. Dickinson, however, captures a more complex reality. She does not say that the words necessarily will be true, but that they will live. In this, she has proposed her own metaphor: \u201cSpeaking is like giving birth,\u201d or \u201cA word is like a living person who has a life that changes and unfolds.\u201d Dickinson has captured a genuine similarity between a spoken word and a living person. She suggests unfolding possibilities rather than narrowing definitions, and it would be hard to explain its possibilities and, harder still, to define the many ways that people might relate to this poem.<\/p>\n Monroe Beardsley called metaphor \u201ca poem in miniature,\u201d and some regard the poet\u2019s ability to discover metaphors to stand at the heart of the poetic vocation. Dickinson seems to say as much in her definition of a poet:<\/p>\n This was a Poet \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n This was a Poet \u2014 It is That<\/p>\n Distills amazing sense<\/p>\n From ordinary Meanings \u2014<\/p>\n And Attar so immense<\/p>\n From the familiar species<\/p>\n That perished by the Door \u2014<\/p>\n We wonder it was not Ourselves<\/p>\n Arrested it \u2014 before<\/p>\n Of Pictures, the Discloser \u2014<\/p>\n The Poet \u2014 it is He<\/p>\n Entitles Us \u2014 by Contrast<\/p>\n To ceaseless Poverty \u2014<\/p>\n Of Portion \u2014 so unconscious<\/p>\n The Robbing \u2014 could not harm<\/p>\n Himself \u2014 to Him \u2014 a Fortune<\/p>\n Exterior \u2014 to Time \u2014<\/p>\n The basic metaphor of the poem compares the poet to a perfume maker who distills a fragrant essential oil, i.e., an attar, from dead flowers, which is the normal way that perfume is made. However, Dickinson adds a twist. These dead flowers come from the familiar species that grew by the door, that we walked past, day in and out, that seemed to be noticeable only while alive and blooming and now useless being dead.<\/p>\n Dickinson is connecting several things: the poet to the perfume maker and the perfume to the ordinary flowers of daily life. Surely, there is every good reason to hope that a priest can be compared to such a poet, because life is mostly made of ordinary events that get lost unless they are connected and so magnified.<\/p>\n As Dickinson suggests, the connections are not abstruse or particularly inscrutable; rather the poet is able to see the obvious because:<\/p>\n We wonder it was not Ourselves<\/p>\n Arrested it \u2014 before.<\/p>\n Once pointed out, the insight is clear. According to this poem, the poet\u2019s power lies not in some superhuman intuition, but in an aptitude for reality \u2013 for seeing the likeness between things in front of us. As Dickinson recognizes, we easily overlook the possible connections in front of us.<\/p>\n This kind of insight caused Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist, to argue that the function of all art is to \u201cdefamiliarize\u201d the ordinary. The artist takes what we know too well \u2013 what has become boring, trite and commonplace \u2013 and makes it strange so\u00a0that we must look at it in a new and arresting way. To accomplish this, the poet uses unfamiliar words, unexpected rhythms, unexpected twists to force the reader to struggle with the text and so to experience the commonplace as if for the first time. For both Dickinson and Shklovsky, the poet focuses on what lies in front of us, and this ability becomes the source of a wealth that cannot be robbed, because this seeing is constantly generating new fortune which, as Dickinson says, is \u201cexterior to time.\u201d<\/p>\n A priest, too, must be able to forge the bonds of likeness not only between the things of this world, but also between this world and the larger reality of God. In this, Jesus shows us the way because much of his teaching is grounded in his ability to make metaphors: The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed or like yeast that a woman took or like a man who built a house. This larger reality requires metaphors to describe it, and while those of Jesus remain canonical, the preacher must have some ability to see the metaphorical possibilities of this world to give the Kingdom new metaphors, new flesh in our own day.<\/p>\n If, as Dickinson suggests, a poet\u2019s power lies in the ability to discover the metaphorical links between unexpected realms, then the poet cannot be just a literalist interested only in the literal thing itself. Certainly, there is a place for concern with the literal. One must understand what a mustard seed literally is before it is possible to understand how the Kingdom of God could be like it.\u00a0Moreover, both law and science depend upon the limits of the literal meaning to name things with precision. So the botanist moves from the tree, to the deciduous, to the oak and then to the red or white or pin oak and more.<\/p>\n The connections here are literal and contiguous, and this type of relationship is found everywhere. Pen and ink and paper have a literal, physical connection and belong to the domain of writing. There is no metaphorical leap here, no juxtaposition from different domains with an assertion of likeness. Examples of this type of connection could be multiplied endlessly in a game of free association: window and wall, table and chair, cup and saucer.<\/p>\n As said above, metaphor requires a leap. Speaking a word is only somewhat like giving birth to a child; the endurance of a word spoken is only somewhat like the life of a person. Because the similarity is only partial and often cannot be precisely defined, some refuse to allow the truth of the metaphor. These literalists claim to be realists because they demand facticity, but really they are continually reducing reality only to physical, literal relationships.<\/p>\n As a result, these \u201crealists\u201d isolate and fragment the pieces of our world because they cannot recognize the likeness of different things. Their reality, bereft of metaphor, lacks imagination. With the exclusion of metaphor, science can lose sight of the wonder of\u00a0creation; the law court can forget the larger purpose of the law and make the laws an end unto themselves, and priesthood can cut itself off from mystery.<\/p>\n A priest, like a poet, depends upon his ability to find the metaphorical link between things, especially between the words of the Scriptures and the life of the Church. The Scriptures do not\u00a0literally describe our experience today; they do not tell us exactly what we should do. Rather, the reader, in this case the preacher, must discover a relationship of likeness between the Book and ourselves. The literalist may insist upon a literal match between the text and today, but this leads to a violation of the text, which must be contorted and forced to make the text somehow fit literally even though there is no fit.<\/p>\n Admittedly, metaphor is no simple solution. It creates possibilities which, in turn, bring the problem of deciding which possibilities fit. For a priest, the possibilities are limited by the creed, the tradition as taught by the Magisterium. Still within that large context, possibilities abound, and possibility gives rise to possibility, to things unseen, unexpected. This makes some nervous; they want the world nailed down \u2013 clear and literal. This tendency toward a narrow literalism always exists, for it seems to offer the comfort of things known and sure, but this comfort requires a space small enough to be knowable. In such a small place, the ego becomes the measure of the world. When everything is measured against myself, that which is different and other becomes a threat and so must be defined as outside and false, and it must be kept outside.<\/p>\n Dickinson plays with this problem in a poem on preachers.<\/p>\n He preached upon \u2018Breadth\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n He preached upon \u201cBreadth\u201d till it argued him narrow\u2014<\/p>\n The Broad are too broad to define,<\/p>\n And of \u201cTruth\u201d until it proclaimed him a Liar\u2014<\/p>\n The Truth never flaunted a Sign\u2014<\/p>\n Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence<\/p>\n As Gold the Pyrites would shun.<\/p>\n What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus<\/p>\n To meet so enabled a Man!<\/p>\n For Dickinson, the pride of this preacher \u2013 his narcissism and therefore his small-minded myopia \u2013 lies at the root of the problem. Instead of gold, we get fool\u2019s gold.<\/p>\n It is true that the preacher is faced with a difficult, if not impossible, dilemma. The preacher should preach and practice the same thing. In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales<\/em>, Chaucer concludes his description of the parson with just this ideal:<\/p>\n But Cristes loore, and Hise apostles twelve<\/p>\n He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve<\/p>\n But Christ\u2019s own teaching and his apostles Twelve<\/p>\n he taught, but first he followed it himself.<\/p>\n Prologue, 527-528<\/p>\n Surely, this is the goal. However, if the preaching does not exceed what the preacher can practice, then the preacher is forced to remake God and the Gospel in his own image and likeness. Though Chaucer\u2019s ideal is much to be desired, it is more important that the preacher be faithful to the Gospel, and a good preacher really must preach a sermon that is a judgment on himself, first of all. The difficulty of doing this and sustaining it over a lifetime should not be underestimated. Sometimes the decision is conscious, but often it is unconscious. The preacher avoids this or that because it would be too difficult to face. In Dickinson\u2019s poem, the preacher\u2019s arrogance makes him unaware of his narrowness.<\/p>\n Although the literalist may claim to be a realist, the opposite is true. The literalist is unable to see the possibility of the world, but as Dickinson argues, the poet is able to see the possibility of the dead flowers at the back door becoming an immense perfume.<\/p>\n In his Spoon River Anthology<\/em>, Edgar Lee Masters captures something of this metaphorical realism in his poem, \u201cFather Malloy.\u201d All of the poems in this book tell something of the people buried in the graveyard of an imaginary Midwestern town\u00a0named Spoon River. Though hailed as a great American poetic work when it appeared in 1915, its luster has faded in academic circles, though it robustly remains in print.<\/p>\n As the poem makes clear, the speakers describe the deceased Catholic priest from a non-Catholic point of view, from that of the people buried on the hill and not in the Catholic cemetery, where \u201cthe cross marks every grave.\u201d The poem lacks our typical theological concerns about priesthood. Still, or perhaps because of that, it describes in 23 lines, this parish priest as a real realist.<\/p>\n Father Malloy<\/strong><\/p>\n You are over there, Father Malloy,<\/p>\n Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,<\/p>\n Not here with us on the hill \u2014<\/p>\n Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision<\/p>\n And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.<\/p>\n You were so human, Father Malloy,<\/p>\n Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,<\/p>\n Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River<\/p>\n From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.<\/p>\n You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand<\/p>\n From the wastes about the pyramids<\/p>\n And makes them real and Egypt real.<\/p>\n You were a part of and related to a great past,<\/p>\n And yet you were so close to many of us.<\/p>\n You believed in the joy of life.<\/p>\n You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.<\/p>\n You faced life as it is,<\/p>\n And as it changes.<\/p>\n Some of us almost came to you, Father Malloy,<\/p>\n Seeing how your Church had divined the heart,<\/p>\n And provided for it,<\/p>\n Through Peter the Flame,<\/p>\n Peter the Rock.<\/p>\n The poem claims humanity for Fr. Malloy, who was not opposed to taking a friendly drink with whomever \u2013 not just with his parishioners, but also with those now buried over there on the hill, and this detail illustrates the priest\u2019s larger moral horizon and his pastoral relationship with the world beyond his parish. The poem connects the priest to both the past and the present as if he had been a sightseer in a strange mysterious land and so had the ability to make that world present and to bring it and himself \u201cso close to many of us.\u201d Though the priest belongs to these two worlds, he is able to move between them and to hold them together. The poem, then, makes this theme of incarnation explicit:<\/p>\n You believed in the joy of life.<\/p>\n You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.<\/p>\n An affirmation of the priest\u2019s realism follows:<\/p>\n You faced life as it is,<\/p>\n And as it changes.<\/p>\n This priest did not live in some spiritual world far away from this here and now. The poem ends with two metaphors for Peter, who stands both for the Church and for its priests:<\/p>\n Peter is (like) a Flame.<\/p>\n Peter is (like) a Rock.<\/p>\n The second, of course, is taken from the Gospels (Matt 16:18) and captures something of the Church\u2019s stability against the forces of chaos and evil. The flame, connected with the divining of the heart just above, suggests emotion, passion, zeal, mystery. The juxtaposition of the two \u2013 the Flame and the Rock \u2013 captures two essential pieces of the Church and of priesthood: the transcendent made incarnate, the divine made human.<\/p>\n Those who would limit the Church just to the rock of stability deny the Church its vitality, its mystery. They deny the change that living must necessarily bring. Likewise, those who focus only on the spiritual miss the essential element of incarnation. For us human beings, incarnation includes the breakage that comes with sin. Fr. Malloy, the poem tells us, \u201cfaced life as is.\u201d He was a realist in touch with the human and the divine.<\/p>\n Edgar Lee Masters\u2019 poem stands as a wonderful tribute to the many nameless priests who have, through the years, played such a role in the small towns and big cities of the Midwest and farther abroad. For their sake, the poem deserves to be known more widely.<\/p>\n Just as the poet can see the metaphorical connections \u2013 the ways in which persons and things are alike, so, too, the priest must be able to discover the connections between the human and the divine and to hold them together. This charism is Christological, for Christ is himself \u201cthe image of the unseen God\u201d (Col 1:15), and in his very person he holds together divinity and humanity. This charism is given to us in baptism, and the priest has the special responsibility of making this reality present by means of word and sacrament in the name of and for the sake of the Church. In his poem \u201cGod\u2019s Grandeur,\u201d Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrates this sacramental manifestation in the opening metaphor:<\/p>\n The world is charged with the grandeur of God.<\/p>\n It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.<\/p>\n Hopkins not only grasps the likeness between God\u2019s grandeur and the light scattering from crumpled metal foil, he is also able to set it down in two lines of iambic pentameter. Very few of us priests have the skill of a wordsmith like Hopkins. Yet I have heard some preachers who caused the ground to move under my feet. All of us, as best we can, must hammer out or at least point out what the Kingdom of God is like so that its mystery may continue to unfold in our midst.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"menu_order":4,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":["fr-harry-hagan-osb"],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[67],"license":[],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/36\/revisions\/59"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/36\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/catholicimagination\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}