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I think words, either as visible collections of ink marks on a page or sounds in one's ear, suggest rather than define meaning. That they function, here's an analogy for you, as a shaky handrail at the edge of a vast, empty gorge. I've just spent some time at the Grand Canyon, and I'm thinking about big, open holes in the ground. Maybe more significantly than the emptiness of the words, no two of us read or hear the words or the spaces between them the same way.

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At its heart, that's why I can't tell someone, you or anybody else, what a poem means. The meaning of the work is in the mind of the reader, as that reader takes in the sounds and sights and constructs a reality. As a reader, even reading my own poems, I construct a reality from the words as they play out on the stage of my imagination. So in a way, the words become a form that shapes the emptiness that awaits my filling it with meaning.

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Welcome to our feature interview for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Seminary. I am William Greenway, editor of Insights and professor of philosophical theology. The author of our lead essay for the fall 2022 issue of Insights is the Reverend Dr. Paul Hooker.

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who recently retired as Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary's Associate Dean for Ministerial Formation and Advanced Studies. This issue of insights celebrates Dr. Hooker's work with us at Austin Seminary. Dr.

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Hooker is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, received his Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and a PhD in Old Testament studies from Emory University. He served as a pastor for 20 years in churches in Tennessee and Georgia before assuming duties as executive presbyter and stated clerk for the Presbyteria of St. Augustine in Florida.

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Do you say St. Augustine or St. Augustine there? We pronounce it like the grass, St.

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Augustine. St. Augustine, okay. So St.

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Augustine in Florida. For more than a decade, he served there as the executive presbyter. After which he assumed his duties as associate dean here at the seminary, where he again served for more than a decade. He is the author of numerous academic articles and books in biblical studies.

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but is no doubt best known in the PCUSA for his expertise in polity and service on the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission. And of late, he's probably best known for his poetry and hymns, several of which form the core of his contribution to this issue of insights. Let me note that an abbreviated written version of this discussion will appear in this issue of insights. The title of Dr.

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Hooker's essay, which we will discuss today, is Sightings of the Holy. Welcome, Dr. Hooker. We are looking forward to your insights.

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Thank you, Bill. Now, you begin with Peter Matheson. Is that how I say his name? Peter Matheson?

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No, I'm not really sure whether it's Matheson or Matheson, but the way is okay with me. Matheson. He's dead, so I don't think he can complain. So at any rate, we'll do it respectfully in either case.

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But you begin with his quest, kind of a famous quest actually, to see a snow leopard. And he never sees the snow leopard. So it was his quest of failure, And let me go ahead and go to my second question because it connects to this one so tightly.

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His scientific colleague who's with him on his trip, and you described this in the beginning of your essay, George Schaller, suggests it's better if there are some things we don't see. So in connection to that, what Schaller said in Matasin not seeing the snow leopard was his quest to see the snow leopard, since he didn't see it, a failure. I think the answer to that is yes and no. Yes, obviously, in the strict sense, he didn't see the snow leopard.

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Schaller, on the other hand, did see it later on after Matheson or Matheson, whichever way it's pronounced, had to leave and go back home to the United States. But no, I don't think it was a failure in the sense that over the course of Matheson's journey, He learned some things about the elusiveness of the holy and the indirectness with which the holy might be seen that I don't think he would have learned had he seen the leopard he sought to see. Schaller, on the other hand, makes something of the same point.

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Schaller makes the comment, you know, would it be better, maybe it's better if there are some things we don't see. I think what Schaller is really trying to suggest is that there are places and realities that lie beyond our right to know, and that the best we can do is to respect their sovereign freedom to remain unseen. Maybe he also meant that sometimes seeing what one seeks turns out to be a greater disappointment than not seeing it at all and allowing it to live only in one's imagination. So, I think the answer to your question is yes to no.

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Yeah. And what's ironic is it's Shaller who says it's better if there are some things we don't see. It's Madison who's looking for the snow leopard. It's Shaller who actually ends up seeing it.

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So was that a, do you think that was actually a loss for Shaller? Or, you know, again, are you going to give me a both and, but this time on the side of actually having seen it? Yeah, well, To be honest with you, I don't know how Schaller felt about it.

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That's not the point of Matheson's book. And in fact, the reference to Schaller having seen the snow leopard is almost an aside at the very end of the book. But that Schaller is the one who sees the leopard and not Matheson suggests to me something about that sovereign freedom of the holy, that the holy chooses whether and when to reveal itself, and it does so quite apart from, and maybe independent of, our searching for it.

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unlike Matheson, Schaller is not looking for enlightenment. Schaller is not a Buddhist, as far as I know. He is literally counting sheep. That's what he was in the Himalayas to do, was to conduct a census of the Himalayan blue sheep, which were the primary prey of the snow leopard.

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So Schaller is deeply engaged in that work. And that's when the snow leopard makes its appearance. If one can draw conclusions from that, and that's a dangerous business, but hell, that's what poets do. Perhaps the holy appears most often to people who are not looking for the holy, but are simply hip deep in the quotidian tasks of living.

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Yeah, and that's where the story of these two really, in a way, sets up the rest of your your essay. Because you talk about how it's not when you were looking for the holy that you see it, but when you've been focused on something else, it turns out the holy has been manifest. That's kind of where you, when you're Matheson, you don't see it.

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When you're Shaller, focused on the sheep, suddenly it appears. There's something about that. So it was a fascinating kind of literary, I appreciated the foreshadowing once I figured it out. when I got to the end of your essay.

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And then this kind of leads me to my next question, where you cite Beldon Lane. And Lane says, and I'm quoting him, you're citing him now, the holy is seldom captured where we seek it most. And I guess that leads up to a practical question that comes from us, are we not supposed to be looking for the holy?

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Are we supposed to be abandoning that quest? Is that what that means? Or are we looking for it in the wrong places? And is the holy, I mean, that language of Lane, who, by the way, as you know, I have incredible respect for, and he might agree with this also, whether or not the holy is something to be captured anyway, whether that's the right sort of language.

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So how, so we want to be engaged with the holy, but then we're not supposed to look for it? I mean, what is the dynamic there? How...

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You know, again, we're talking about things that lie at the edges of our awareness and our competence largely. I suspect that seeking the holy is not only proper for us, it's probably something that's innate with us. We can't not do it. There's a phrase in an essay of Annie Dillard's where she asks, what is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?

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Are they not both saying, hello? You know, I think there's something about that. Maybe our deepest impulse is to move toward what we perceive as the holy. I think the problem lies when we expect that we can control the circumstances

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in which the holy will reveal itself. You know, if I attend worship expecting to have a revelation of the holy, I am almost always, I'd say nearly universally, disappointed. If, on the other hand, I simply engage myself in the business of living, you know, well, who knows what might jump out of the bushes? You say holiness runs in hides from frontal assault, like a trout darking for cover.

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So why do you think it runs in hides? Yeah. I think there must be something about the holy that resists manipulation and capture and never surrenders its sovereign freedom. I've been fishing for trout, standing in trout streams with a fly rod in my hand for something like 35 years.

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And if there's one thing that all that time has taught me, it is that as I approach the stream, it is a good thing for me to sit or stand at the edge of the stream for a little while, to settle my nerves, calm my expectations, allow the water I have stirred up by my wading to drift on downstream, allow myself in some way or another to become one with the stream. If I do those things, it will make it more likely that I will cast my fly well and I will present it more delicately to the trout. I can control that.

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But nothing, no amount of finely tuned fly casting, no length of time spent in patient waiting, is going to induce a trout to emerge from its hidey hole beneath a rock and strike the fly I have put in its direction. That remains solidly in the realm of the sovereign freedom of the trout. And there must be an analogy to the holy there.

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But there's something, you know, I can make myself available. I can do all the things I know to do spiritually. But the fact remains, whether the holy makes its appearance is completely up to the holy. You made me think of something else, but I'm going to go to my next question and then see if the other formulates.

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What's the relationship between the holy, what you call the holy and God? Are we talking about the same thing here? That's a great question, and it gets to one of my prejudices. I resist the term God.

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Mostly, I resist it because I don't like the personalization of the term, as though God were some sort of personal being whom I could get to know and with whom I might have some sort of relationship, as though we went through the 6th grade together. I don't think that's at all possible. But I also have some squeamishness about the notion that the ultimate reality that underlies all other reality, what Meister Eckhardt once called the grunt, the ground, or what Jewish esoterica calls ein sof, the infinite, that reality might be limited in some way or maybe dichotomized into a God and a not-God. the mystical tradition, if you go back as far as Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, or come as far forward to Annie Dillard and Belden Lane, seems to think that the heart of all things is oneness, that all things are one, and that one is all.

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And I think of what we sometimes call God in that way, rather than in personal terms. And so I'm looking for language that's impersonal and elastic that helps me get at that expansive reality. And the holy is one of those terms for me. It's one I particularly like, given its history in the biblical narrative with which I have spent so much time in my life.

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So in a way, the reason the holy hides and resist capture is, and what comes to mind here is a couple of things simultaneously. One, a quote from Augustine that says, if you know God, You don't know God.

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know isn't God, because God is beyond your knowing. Or the distinction between the cataphatic and apophatic kind of traditions, or the via positiva and via negativa, where the one is about naming, but that immediately has to be undone, because once that naming is, that's then yours, that's controlled, so precisely what you've captured is not the holy. So what, you know, your reticence to say God is your reticence to capture.

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So it's an apophatic pose, apart from all images. And it seems to me like that's kind of what you're playing with here. So you reference to Pseudo-Dionysius, who, for those who don't know, is kind of known as one of the major figures in this apophatic tradition or via negativa. That's the move.

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Am I right to kind of see that, the move you're kind of making? And that's why you like poetry. over it against, which you're not, you're not against biblical studies and theology in the cataphatic sense, but there's something that can get lost there, a forgetfulness, a sense that you have it when actually now you haven't got it. And instead you're looking for this opening, and that's what poetry does.

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It moves obliquely. Is that, am I reading that correctly or making those connections correctly? No, I do not think I could have said that better. Yes, exactly.

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Okay, I don't know where to go. I mean, the bottom line is that... The bottom line is that I write poetry. I got started reading poetry because I was so deeply impatient with preaching, my own especially, but that of others as well, in which we seemed altogether too familiar and too certain about what this

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this reality we label God is. And we turned God into a personality we could, in some way or another, know and manipulate, and I think ultimately contain. When in fact, the mystical tradition, not just Pseudo-Dionysius, of course, but Eckhart and many, many others, leading all the way up to 20th and 21st century mystics like Dillard and Lane, repeatedly remind us that you cannot know this reality, that it resists all knowing, and that anything you think you know about it is in fact a falsehood, or at least a brokenness.

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You know, the psalmist speaks of God as the rock of my salvation. And that would suggest that in some way or another God is a rock, or there's something about God that is similar to rock. But in fact, the holy, the ultimate reality is also not rock, and that there are all sorts of ways in which rock is not a truth about ultimate reality. And so to make that statement, one must also, and at the same time, unmake that statement.

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One must say the no that goes along with the yes. And I'm fascinated by what that constant tension between the yes of cataphatic thinking and the no of apophatic thinking Pulls us toward, can we be more circumspect about the way we speak about things we do not understand? Yeah, OK, so, and yeah, and I'm that that's...

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That's a beautiful set of connections I really appreciate. And I resonate with it personally. What I tell students when I teach theology is we're teaching cataphatic theology, but the thing is to remember that cataphatic is grounded on the apophatic, or else it becomes idolatry. And then we connect that to having a graven image.

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And the fact is, the fact is that, I'm sorry, the fact that apophatic. The fact is that apophatic thinking cannot be expressed except in cataphatic language. Right. So the one cannot be pulled apart from the other.

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Yeah. And it's a qualification. And this then sets up, I wanted to say that set up the next question because it almost seems to me to tilt to the other extreme, right? So I kind of want to see your reaction to that because you talk about Mathis and he's traveling after he leaves the snow leopard.

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He's traveling to see a monk. He's trying to find a monk, a llama. Am I saying that correctly, actually? A llama.

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And he travels so far to see him and it turns out he misses him. He passes him on the road because to quote, he turns out to be an arthritic old monk dressed in rags and curing a goat skin beside the road. And that's the end of the quote.

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And in response to that, this is not who or what he expected to find. He cites the Heart Sutra, which says, form is emptiness and emptiness is form. So how is that meaningful? Yeah.

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Matheson is the one who brought that saying to my attention. It's A Buddhist saying from the Heart Sutra. And as is typical of Buddhist sayings, I suspect it's open to a great many readings. I read it, at least in the main, to suggest that at the heart of all reality, there is an emptiness that takes the form of whatever thing we are considering.

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we have a tendency, I think, to expect the packaging of reality to reflect its content, to be able, that old saying, you can't judge a book by its cover, but we in fact expect to be able to judge the book by its cover. But what if the content of reality is really not something we can discern, but rather an emptiness that remains unfilled until we come to it? What if the shape of each experience is unique to the one experiencing it?

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You know, I love the idea that at the core of things, there is an emptiness that invites our filling it with meaning. And I think quite largely, that's what I'm trying to do with poems. And I think that may be one of the lessons Matheson learned over the arc of his journey in the Himalayas. And this may make my next question redundant, but maybe also you can just build on what you just said, which is you speak of the empty forms of poems.

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Again, I'm quoting here. But your poems are carefully crafted, both linguistically and on the page spatially. So in what sense are your carefully crafted forms empty? Yeah.

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I get into fights with my poet friends about this all the time, especially the ones who are more imagistic and who write poems that make more use of empty space, white space on the page. They contend, and I suspect they may be right about this, that if a poem really is empty or open, then it ought somehow to suggest that emptiness or openness by the way it appears on a page. I think, however, that it may make less difference than they think, that regardless of how one arranges changes the words on a page, the words themselves both impose a structure and permit an openness.

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That there is an openness and an open-endedness about words that cannot be avoided by using them. You know our mutual friend and former colleague Louis Donaldson. Louis used to talk about the terror of the empty spaces between words and at the ends of a sentence. I think he's right.

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I think words, either as visible collections of ink marks on a page or sounds in one's ear, suggest rather than define meaning. That they function, here's an analogy for you, as a shaky handrail at the edge of a vast, empty gorge. I've just spent some time at the Grand Canyon, and I'm thinking about big, open holes in the ground.

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Maybe more significantly than the emptiness of the words, no two of us read or hear the words or the spaces between them the same way. At its heart, that's why I can't tell someone, you or anybody else, what a poem means. The meaning of the work is in the mind of the reader, as that reader takes in the sounds and sights and constructs a reality. As a reader, even reading my own poems, I construct a reality from the words as they play out on the stage of my imagination.

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So in a way, the words become a form that shapes the emptiness that awaits my filling it with meaning. In your first poem, so in the essay, there's several poems. The first one is Annunciation. And in Annunciation, I love the way you provoke us to think concretely and without romanticism about Mary and her plight as a pregnant, unwed teen in the 1st century.

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And you invite us to imagine that her Magnificat was not inspired by an angel, but was a poor girl's fantasy, I'm quoting now with that, with no better explanation to hand. and to suggest that since the fantasy is so profoundly meaningful for her and for us, that we go ahead and decide also to believe it with what you call her ferocious power, that we too affirm it and say, here I am. Is that a correct reading of what you're suggesting? in light of what I just said, there is no correct reading of this or any other poem.

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There's only your reading or my reading or whoever's reading, and they stand on equal footing with one another. But I think the way you've read that is certainly consistent with what I see when I read the same poem. Okay. let me then use that to set up this next question.

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Okay. This is for Scott. You have a PhD in Bible. So in Bible biblical studies, the question between history and faith has raged for over a century.

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And classically, it's what's the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. But this reading of this poem would suggest that, you know, a question about the Mary of history. and the Mary of faith. So what do you think Mary understood about herself and Jesus?

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'Cause you suggest several things about that in the poem, and what is the relationship between that and the Mary of faith? If there is a difference, I mean, just play with that a bit if you want. Yeah, you know, I have absolutely no idea what the Mary of history, if in fact there was one, understood about herself or Jesus or anything else for that matter.

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It's the Mary of my imagination that fascinates me. I can imagine what that Mary understood, that she was carrying a child whose origins she did not understand and yet somehow trusted with, as you put it, a ferocious power. Those are your words.

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Yeah, I know. I don't want to steal you. Well, I got to say as you put it. Okay.

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Yeah, I mean, I think that's a lot like me. I have this education, but despite it, there is still a world in Scripture and in the life of faith I don't understand. And the province of that world just expands exponentially the longer I live with it and the older I get.

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I'm aware of how much I don't understand and how much what I thought I understood turns out not to be as trustworthy as I had believed. And yet somehow, I trust in that world ferociously, and I am inexorably drawn into it. In the end, I don't care much about the Mary of history as an object of study or research.

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I mean, her existence or non-existence, quite frankly, is just simply immaterial to me. I care a great deal, on the other hand, about the Mary of the faithful imagination. That Mary, I think, knows that something is afoot with this child in her womb, even if she has no idea what it is and can't articulate it if she did.

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That Mary exhibits A ferocious determination to birth this child and with him, whatever new reality is about to ensue, even if birthing that child will cost her everything she has and is. That Mary intrigues me and beckons me to follow her. And so there I am. And would you say the same thing about Jesus then?

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Yes. Okay, that's interesting. Let me ask, what would the... By the way, I'm not the only one who says that.

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I mean, that's basically Albert Schweitzer's final paragraph in the quest for the historical Jesus. Right. He comes to us as one unknown beside the lake and so forth. like it or not, and we've been now over 100 years since Schweitzer wrote those words, there have been plenty of arguments about it.

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What Schweitzer did was to suggest that in the end, trying to discern the, quote, historical Jesus is a failed task. You can't do it. And that the only Jesus available to us is finally the Jesus of faith. Or, as I would prefer to put it, the Jesus of the faithful imagination.

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That's the Jesus I'm following, not some historical construct that's the result of some decision about what Jesus actually said or didn't say. Which would take us right back into the cataphatic, right, as the ground of faith. instead of the apophatic. So the whole debate would be confused if someone were to think there's something at stake in it.

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Not that you're denying the existence of Jesus or Mary or such, but the idea that somehow a historical approach to establishing something about them is the root of faith, that's what gets you into the wrong place, the cataphatic place, and loses the apophatic, becomes a form of capture, which is precisely why, you know, people's response to this sort of thing And sometimes it comes from a lack of understanding, but at other times the response comes from, it is an idol that's being taken down. And so there's a ferocious response to it because it's something people have versus something that has them. And so it's always escaping.

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Would that be a way of reflecting what you're saying here? Yes, I think so. There was a thought that went flitting through my mind as you were talking, and I didn't hold onto it, so I've lost it. But I do think that

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I cannot follow a Jesus who becomes the object of historical analysis. If I convert Jesus into the object of research, I have ceased to follow and begun to analyze. But if, on the other hand, what I do is to listen to the narratives, as narratives, to see them as story, to use what Ricoeur once talked about as second naivete, not pretending that all the critical knowledge I have disappears, but getting beyond that critical knowledge to appreciate the story once again as a story.

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If I listen to the Jesus in the stories, the Jesus who is born in my imagination is the one I'm willing to follow. Now, there are obviously some dangers and limitations on this. There have been plenty of people following Jesus as they imagined into catastrophes of 1 sort or another. I'm not eager to go there.

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But I'm also not eager to make Jesus into the object of some sort of laboratory process. And I guess the only phrase there that caught me a bit was born in your imagination. Yeah. I didn't think about that phrase when I said it, but I think I want to defend it.

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The Jesus who lives lives in my imagination, OK, but is born there. Born, lives, dies, rises. Okay, Let me keep moving forward. That would be an interesting...

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I mean, this is where... It would be an interesting... Yeah, it would be an interesting debate, but then I want to keep unpacking your thoughts. So that would be a great thing.

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Let me go back to the poem and ask, where did the inspiration for writing this poem come from? And are there ways in which in writing the poem, you have a sense that you glimpsed the holy out of the corner of your eye, as you like to say? I can't really remember how this poem got started other than I can recall sitting in the study that I'm in at the moment, which is the back of my house. It was a sunny afternoon and the sun that was shining in from the windows, the southern exposure windows here, shining through the blinds, creating a series of sort of lighted slats on the floor.

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And in those sunbeams, the air in the room, which typically is dusty because I don't dust the room enough, there were little dust motes floating in the air. Now, ever since I was a little child, that sight has fascinated me. And so I remember that I was just watching them float from light to dark to light to dark. And

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And I probably had been reading Reiner Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet of the first half of the 20th century, who was fascinated by angels. They appear all over Rilke's poetry. Maybe I had been thinking about the Magnificat. As I remember, this was in March, but who knows, it might have been in December.

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I don't remember. What I do remember is thinking that perhaps there might be a way to tell Mary's story. that doesn't make her into figments of our political agenda, whether she's the herald of some new eschatological world order or the willing slave of some divine determinism. Maybe there's another way of thinking about Mary.

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Perhaps she's just a girl, trying to understand how the holy had seized hold of her life and was taking her places she might otherwise have not chosen to go. I think that something like that must have been the beginning of this poem. And then you ask something about, what was the other question you asked, Bill? I'm sorry, there were two parts of that question, and I lost the other one.

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The thing probably was just about glimpsing the holy out of the corner of your eye, but I think you kind of addressed that with the dust mott, moats, or I don't know what to call those things. Oh, I know what it was. It was, is there a place where I glimpse the holy in this poem, something like that.

00:34:24.720 - 00:34:38.720

And yeah, I think so. And for me, it's in that last stanza. I mean, that's my spot in this poem. I'm following this bewildered and yet fierce young girl toward her destiny in Bethlehem.

00:34:39.280 - 00:34:53.280

I don't know what that means. I don't think she knows what that means. But there is something about the ferocity with which she follows that draws me like a moth to a flame. And I think that something may well be the holy.

00:34:56.320 - 00:35:20.320

You mentioned Rilke, and actually my next question is about you citing Rilke, where you say beauty is nothing other than the beginning of terror, which I'll lay my hands on the cards on the table, seems to be simply false. But he's a poet, he's overstating it. So as a philosopher, I'm like, I don't think it's nothing other than that. And you say beauty confronts us with finitude and mortality,

00:35:20.640 - 00:35:44.920

And also you say, these are all quotes, to see beauty is to see death, and also beauty and terror together comprise the holy. And these observations also surprise me. So what are you trying to say with these tight connections between beauty, terror, and death, and how do beauty and terror together comprise the holy? Yeah.

00:35:45.600 - 00:36:19.760

I think all of them, beauty, terror, death, are all liminal realities. When you stand before beauty or before terror or before death, you stand at the edges of your power, and you peer over the chasm into something that is beyond you. know, Rilke, and I'll admit, Rilke can be confusing and difficult, and he can be overly passionate and say things that he might later want it to retract. But because angels are such a powerful and frequently used symbol in his poetry, you can't ignore them.

00:36:20.440 - 00:36:40.240

And so you have to start asking, what did he mean by angels? And the more I read it, the more I think that what he understood about an angel was a transcendent and perhaps even ultimate beauty. I almost want to render the term beauty with a capital B as though it takes on some kind of supernal reality. Maybe it is the holy.

00:36:40.720 - 00:37:19.760

or it is a way of speaking about the holy. Certainly it lies beyond the ability of human beings to comprehend, let alone to process. So when Rilke talks about the beauty that is at the beginning of terror, what he's saying is that to see the beauty of the angel is to be caught up in something that is utterly self-transcendent, but it is also, and I think simultaneously, to experience the reality of our own limitation, our mortality, our finitude, precisely because such beauty stands as a constant reminder of what we cannot be and cannot achieve.

00:37:20.480 - 00:37:54.560

Beauty is, in this sort of terse, poetic construction of Rilke's, the beginning of terror because it's the occasion in which we confront our finitude, our mortality, our death. If you follow that line of thinking, you come to this nexus of beauty and terror and death, a sort of realm of mystery beyond our power to understand or explain. It's a darkness at the edge of the light of awareness and knowing. And for me, at least, that mystery is a way of speaking about the holy.

00:37:56.080 - 00:38:18.000

So it reminds me, but it's different language, which is, I think, where I'm hesitant with this tight connection of terror and death. It reminds me of the biblical phrase, fear of the Lord. That sort of fear is the beginning of wisdom. But is that along the same lines?

00:38:18.560 - 00:38:32.240

Is that something different? And Rilke, of course, is not a Christian or a theist. I mean, he has angels, but he's using them metaphorically. So he might be avoiding that language deliberately, but maybe it's up to the same thing.

00:38:33.360 - 00:38:41.080

I don't know, just let me open that up. You're the Hebrew Bible scholar. That's pretty much a Hebrew Bible thing. So let me ask you to draw those connections and distinctions.

00:38:41.840 - 00:38:57.600

Well, yes, I think it is something of the same thing. You know, I used to hear from Sunday school along, fear of the Lord means worship and respect of the Lord. Well, no, it doesn't. Yerech Yahweh means to be afraid of God, to be afraid of the Lord.

00:38:59.360 - 00:39:25.040

or it means the fear of the Lord. And it quite literally means fear. It's rooted in the notion that being in the presence of God is life-threatening for human beings. To be in the presence of the holy is to be in the presence of that which obliterates anything it might wish to obliterate, regardless of whether or not you wish to be obliterated.

00:39:26.800 - 00:40:02.560

And to have that sense, to know one's limitations over against the holy, seems to me, in fact, to be the beginning of wisdom. And I think that something like that phrase is what I'm after in this notion that beauty and terror, in some way or another, comprise the holy. You wonder shortly after that if desperation, I'm quoting again, desperation is the first step on the path to the holy. What makes you think that this may be so?

00:40:04.560 - 00:40:33.680

You know, sometimes a line will come to me in a dream or in the middle of the night and I'll wake up and have to write it down. And I think this is one of those lines. I think it's true, but I also think there's something experimental about it. It reminds me of the cloud of unknowing, that 13th century or 14th century, I think, English spiritual method written anonymously, probably by a Cartusian monk somewhere on the east coast of England.

00:40:34.760 - 00:40:52.640

which insists that the only way you can approach the holy is to abandon everything you know or think or feel about the holy. And it goes back to what you were saying from a while ago from Augustine. If you think you know God, the God you think you know is not God. One has to enter a radical...

00:40:52.880 - 00:41:04.320

Just for anyone who doesn't know, this is a classic articulation of the via negativa or the apophatic way. So yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. One enters this radical apophatic state of emptiness.

00:41:05.200 - 00:41:39.600

And I wonder if the process of stripping away one's knowing induces a sense of rootlessness, ungroundedness, a self-emptying that might be akin to desperation. I also wonder if reaching the ends of one's knowing and feeling and ability to make sense of the world one lives in is a necessary precondition for the eruption of the holy. I think that's what the cloud thinks.

00:41:40.640 - 00:42:02.400

I think that's probably also what Pseudo-Dionysius thinks. And it's a long strain in mystical theology. It's not unlike the people of Israel who wander in the wilderness until they have lost all memory of Egypt and all hope of Canaan. until they are simply alone in the wilderness.

00:42:02.400 - 00:42:32.240

And only then are they permitted to cross the river and enter the promised land. Maybe it's also like Mary, who is on her way to Bethlehem, without any hope of knowing where that road will take her, and not just to Bethlehem, but where beyond that. You say hopelessness may be the purest form of hope. and hope, another name for the holy.

00:42:33.760 - 00:42:48.320

Can you explain how hopelessness could be the purest form of hope in its relation to the holy? And maybe this is connected to what you were just saying about desperation as a precursor to hope. I think it is. I think it is.

00:42:48.960 - 00:43:07.920

Hopelessness and desperation are probably close cousins, maybe closer than that. I'm not sure. I'm thinking of the cloud again. When I talk about hope, particularly in the theological or eschatological sense, I'm talking about it finally as the yearning for the infinite.

00:43:08.480 - 00:43:41.440

Not just, you know, I hope I have a hot dog for supper, but what do I hope for? What is the goal, the telos of my existence, our existence, the existence of all that is? I'm hoping, if I can borrow that term twice in one sentence, to approach the holy. But if the cloud is right, then one only approaches the holy by stripping away, forgetting is the term it uses, stripping away everything one knows or dreams or yearns for in regard to ultimate reality.

00:43:42.320 - 00:43:59.960

So in this sense, the purest form of hope is an emptiness of hope. It is hopelessness. And if one can attain that hopelessness, One might just be in the presence of the holy, if the holy so chooses.

00:44:07.360 - 00:44:35.200

What are the three stages again in the via negativa? Well, as I recall them, if I know what you're talking about, it is the first stage is the stripping away purgation. The second stage is illumination, the learning of what one must come to understand. And the third stage is union with the divine.

00:44:36.160 - 00:45:03.520

Okay. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. So I'm trying to, when you, 'cause you have this hopelessness, the stripping away, everything which is, it seems like where your focus is in this, in those first two movements. But with holy, the word holy, there seems to be a gesture towards that union, which ironically enough has contour.

00:45:03.520 - 00:45:24.400

There you say things, it's not equally evil and good or hateful and loving or, I mean, so you can, so even if no word absolutely captures it, there's contour perhaps there that's undone. Is that right? Is that in holy? And so is,

00:45:25.520 - 00:46:03.640

So I'm reacting to the fact that it points, it seems so much of a pure stripping that I feel like holy is giving it a contour that's not in that. But it helps me to think in terms of the three stages maybe and think about what you're not willing to do is to, what you don't want to do in your poetry is to undo it by giving us that final. And that's what happens too quickly. But then, but the risk would be people who are so unnerved by that, that they are unwilling to go into it.

00:46:03.640 - 00:46:33.520

And so I think that it's an irony about the three stages that you've really got to not let the third stage come in and up in the early two stages, you know, in those things. I know I'm just kind of struggling here with that and wondering, you know, I think maybe a number of folks would too, is they, hear this. So, I don't know, this was not one of my questions that I had planned, but it's just kind of, is we dialogue, so maybe you could respond to that.

00:46:34.160 - 00:46:49.920

That's okay. Sure. Well, you know, what you make me think of is Dante and the Divine Comedy. You know, Dante's classic poem is built on the three stages of medieval and apophatic spirituality.

00:46:50.960 - 00:47:04.320

Inferno is the purgation. It's the stripping away of sin. To a certain extent, so also is purgatory. But about midway through purgatory, Dante goes through a change.

00:47:04.400 - 00:47:32.880

He enters a gate. And on the other side of that gate, he is beginning to be illumined about the things he must lay aside and that which will facilitate his movement toward the third stage, which is union. But it's interesting that purgatory is the only place in the Divine Comedy where anybody is moving up or down in the spiritual process.

00:47:33.120 - 00:47:45.200

Everybody in Inferno is stuck in hell. Everybody in Paradiso is in heaven and has no need to go anywhere else. It's only the folk in purgatory that are making any kind of progress.

00:47:45.760 - 00:48:07.040

And for me, the place where I almost wish Dante had stopped was at the end of Purgatorio, where Beatrice, you know, comes to him. Beatrice is his sort of muse in a lot of ways. She's not the one who guides him through Inferno and Purgatorio, but she is the one who will guide him into Paradiso. And

00:48:08.120 - 00:48:35.480

It's at that moment that he finally has to come to understand something about the limitations of all life, including the limitations of love itself. And I almost want Dante to stop there and not give me the vision of heaven, because the vision of heaven is only going to be a downer. That is to say, it's only going to be a disappointment after that. It goes back to what Matheson was saying, you know, about the

00:48:39.040 - 00:49:08.080

the desolation of success, that having anticipated this for so long, once you see it in some way or another, you're kind of disappointed. Well, paradiso has always seemed that way to me. I always want the spiritual process to stop before union because it's the union I can't get to. The classical way Reformed theologians have talked about this is glorification.

00:49:08.720 - 00:49:28.640

And glorification is that which stands on the other side of death. It's not something accessible to me in this life. I can be justified in the act of Jesus Christ on the cross. I can be sanctified by the regular access to the means of grace, preaching, sacraments, the life of prayer.

00:49:29.680 - 00:50:22.040

But glorification, the third phase of that process, is closed to me until I have died and am no longer me. So there's something about that union with the holy that I always want to sort of keep at arm's length, and I don't want to talk about in direct ways, and I always want to see in the sort of indirect way. I may be rambling here, not making any sense at all. No, I think there's, I mean, it seems to me consistent with the sort of closure or capture that you've wanted to avoid throughout that's consistent with the apophatic and which was reflected when you said, you know, the cataphatic is always apophatic and the apophatic is still a saying that has to undo itself.

00:50:22.240 - 00:50:49.920

So the constant cautioned against the closure because the capture then ends up being that God that's not God, that somehow. So this kind of sets us up for this next poem, not the point, which is about you visiting that little star in the floor of that grotto in Bethlehem, which is the traditional sight of the manger.

00:50:50.240 - 00:51:02.640

And I think a lot of us maybe have been there and can picture that star at that point. I think it'll be over you. A lot of people will smile at it. And on the one hand, it's not the point.

00:51:02.640 - 00:51:28.560

On the other hand, the point is still made. But this seems to me, and you're talking then about the incarnation, it seems to me this connects to To what you're saying about historical Jesus, what you're saying about seeing the snow leopard, can you just ruminate on that briefly and how that poem makes this point? Because it's not an undoing of the notion of incarnation, the significance of incarnation.

00:51:29.360 - 00:51:44.880

It's about it not being the point in another way. And I think it's important to say it's not also putting down those who, in other words, you mentioned the Orthodox, it's an Orthodox Christian Orthodox sites. There's all sorts of iconography and stuff like that.

00:51:45.040 - 00:52:11.240

But there's also a very non-literalistic way for the Orthodox to understand icons as not idols, but icons. In other words, it's a more subtle relationship. You want to comment all on that and maybe make that a connection. We do have sort of a recurring theme here emerging in a more powerful way than I think I had realized just when the first

00:52:11.360 - 00:52:23.480

reading your essays. Yeah. At some level, this is about symbols, particularly this poem. I did visit the Church of the Nativity.

00:52:23.480 - 00:52:57.600

I was on a tour in graduate school in 1990. In fact, we landed in Damascus the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. When we arrived in Bethlehem, I remember standing in that two-hour line in the afternoon heat so that I could go in to see the place of the birth of Jesus, or at least the so-called site of the birth of Jesus. When I got there, I was hurried along by a security guard who was much, much more concerned with the length of the line behind me and how much more time until he could close the door and get off.

00:52:58.120 - 00:53:24.240

than he was about the spiritual experience of any individual person kneeling before the grotto. And so I wound up spending very, very little time at this place where I had waited two hours to see it. And it largely lives in my memory and imagination. But there is something out of that moment that isn't imaginary, and that is the necklace, the Malachite necklace that I bought for my wife, Pat, after I got out of the church.

00:53:25.080 - 00:54:03.040

That malachite necklace stands for me as a symbol for the nativity, both the grotto that I was not really allowed to see very long, and quite frankly, which I sincerely doubt is the actual site of the stable and manger, again, who cares, and the stable and manger that live in my imagination and are something I care about poetically and in faith. And alchemy, I mean, symbols have a strange alchemy. The necklace becomes the locus of the incarnation every time I see the necklace. Because what I'm doing is the same thing you were talking about with icons.

00:54:03.840 - 00:54:19.600

I can see the necklace, but I can also see through the necklace to what the necklace stands for in my imagination. The same thing an icon does. Orthodox see icons, but they also see through icons to what lies behind it.

00:54:20.720 - 00:54:32.000

That's as close as I can come to anything tangible in the life of Jesus. It's that necklace. And it's in my wife's jewelry case as we speak right now. In that sense, I guess I'm a little like Matheson.

00:54:32.000 - 00:54:59.520

I got only the briefest glimpse of the holy, which I guess is more than he got. He didn't see it at all. And I rely on other things to be the symbol of that moment. But I can't help wondering, if I had stayed longer at the grotto, would I have been so put off by the opulence of all of the appurtenances in that place, beautiful as they appear to be?

00:55:00.560 - 00:55:36.040

so as to have missed the presence of the holy altogether? And is the nativity of my imagination, like the snow leopard of Matheson's imagination, better in conveying the holy than the so-called real thing is? Your next poem in the thing is Hagar's Prayer. And let's remind everyone of the story of Hagar, and I'll let you do that, since you have the PhD in Hebrew Bible.

00:55:37.840 - 00:56:14.400

But let me do it in the context, in relation to my suggestion, that you go way too easy on Abraham when you describe him as a dutiful husband who carried out the deed, and then suggest, and I'm wondering if there's any textual backing here, I don't know, one way or the other, that he had divine reassurance about Ismail's future. And let me go ahead, because you're going to have this in mind. Let me go ahead and say the other place I go with this is, I loved your attention to Hagar and Ismail.

00:56:16.000 - 00:56:50.000

And again, how your poem, it reminded me of the poem about Mary, invited us to face these events concretely and realistically. I mean, that's really something I loved about the poetry. But the discussion of the poem, you move rapidly from Hagar back to Mary, which seems to be typical of Jewish and Christian thought. And something which is not entirely without risk, given the geopolitical dynamics, historically and enduring in what we call the Middle East.

00:56:50.840 - 00:57:13.120

And so I want you also to comment on the Abrahamic lineage of Hagar and Ismail. And if there is divine reassurance, how would we maybe go there in ways your poem doesn't do as it's written, but maybe open us up to? So if you could explore all of that kind of confluence of reactions. Do I have a week?

00:57:15.760 - 00:57:44.560

Yeah, okay. just to acquaint readers with the story of Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Abraham, which actually begins in Genesis 16, not in Genesis 21, which is the epigraph of this poem. Sarah, as you may recall, was unable to conceive a child, and so she gave her maidservant, Reed's slave, to Hagar to Abraham for the purposes of procreation. I mean, if this doesn't sound like Margaret Atwood and A Handmaid's Tale, then you're not listening.

00:57:46.080 - 00:58:00.880

Hagar bears a son. His name is Ishmael. And then later, Sarah becomes pregnant with Isaac. Once Isaac is born, Sarah becomes insanely jealous of Ishmael and fears that Ishmael will threaten Isaac's inheritance.

00:58:01.000 - 00:58:29.600

And so she demands that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert to die. At which point, and this is now we're in Genesis 21, God speaks to Abraham in a dream. and tells Abraham to do as Sarah says. And he goes on then to say not only that his inheritance will be passed on through Isaac, but also that Ishmael will be made a nation.

00:58:30.480 - 00:58:56.080

So I think I've been fair, at least at the point of saying God does in fact tell Abraham to do what Sarah requires and does give Abraham reassurance that Ishmael will be a nation. Whether or not Abraham is fairly described as a dutiful husband, I will leave to the reader to decide. But it's altogether possible that I do let Abraham off too easily. Certainly, modern sensibilities would be harder on him.

00:58:58.800 - 00:59:29.440

I can only say, maybe in my defense, that the point here is not Abraham or Sarah or even Ishmael. The point of this poem is Hagar in extremis. Ultimately, I suppose, I'm pleading poetic license, but I would argue that I'm not trying to conduct, or construct rather, a text-based theology of comparative religions. I'm not trying to do a feminist reconstruction or deconstruction of the narrative.

00:59:29.920 - 00:59:53.680

I think those are all legitimate undertakings, and good scholars do them on a regular basis, and I applaud them, but they are not what I'm doing in this poem. This poem is about Hagar and what it's like to watch your child die. Now, as I understand it, this is not a scholarly work. It's not a political statement.

00:59:54.160 - 01:00:15.200

It's a work of imaginative rumination. I'm not trying to deny the Abrahamic lineage of Islam. I'm not trying to make comments about the geopolitical situation between Israelis and Palestinians. I'm not trying to reduce the Hagar story to some sort of limited Marian typology to make Hagar a little merry.

01:00:15.920 - 01:00:50.400

I'm not trying to suggest that Abraham is supposed to be resolved, or rather absolved, of his responsibility in exiling Hagar and Ishmael. All I'm trying to do is to draw imaginative connections between the particular moment in which Hagar sits beside the bush and the particular moment in which Mary sits at the foot of the cross on Golgotha. I had never thought about that connection until I began to read this text in anticipation of writing this poem, which was an assignment I received.

01:00:50.880 - 01:01:27.120

But now I cannot read Genesis 21 and Hagar without thinking about Mary observing Jesus as he dies. And my question, I think, made it too defensive, although I think it's good to get all that out. But then to go to the constructive, the positive, what is it about the connection there? And again, this is one of the things I love about the poems, both poems, but the other poem makes us realistic about Mary at the beginning.

01:01:27.360 - 01:01:57.520

This poem gets us realistic about Mary at the cross and Hagar. in the wilderness. What is it about that moment that you talk about, which leads you to say, the holy is death, but also life, which is what you say as you comment back on the poem. And so you have this sort of, so the poem brings us to that moment in a way that I think it's too easy for us not to,

01:01:58.480 - 01:02:22.960

be awakened to as we read the passage because we're doing other things. But then how is the holy death? What is it about that moment which then you find, it seems like revealing, revelatory in a way, which again, the holy is death, but also life. Again, it's one of those surprising things you say, which would be interesting to hear unpacked.

01:02:24.640 - 01:03:01.440

earlier on, we were talking about, or I was talking about beauty and death and terror as liminal experiences that, these are experiences you have at the edges of human life and human reality, where you look over the chasm toward a kind of ultimate reality that you neither control nor participate in, or, you may be affected by. I'm How to say this? Increasingly, I think that all things that we experience as opposites are, at their deepest level, one.

01:03:02.720 - 01:03:46.160

We think of light and dark as opposites, good and evil as opposites, life and death as opposites. But what if, in fact, at the liminal edge of our existence, light and dark, good and evil, life and death are one thing and not separate things? I've spent some time reading Jewish esotericism, Kabbalah and other material. And if that has anything to offer, it is that Ein Sof, which is the infinite, the reality that underlies all other reality, even reality is a problematic word in that sentence, but that the infinite contains no distinction, no dichotomy.

01:03:46.560 - 01:04:16.880

All things are one thing. in Aim Sof, in the infinite, literally means without limitations. And increasingly, I wonder whether within the holy, the things we experience as disparate realities, like life and death, are in truth one reality, and that what we experience as the progression of time is in reality one eternal moment. And so it's that wonderment I am pointing to in this sentence.

01:04:17.920 - 01:05:15.120

that in some way or another, what we experience as disparate realities is gathered up into a hole in the holy. The final poem you have is The Magi We Call the Star. Where did the inspiration for this poem come from? And what of the holy do you think you're communicating here when you talk about the eyes of the child who-- and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit here-- but seen me and called my name, and what that does to us or did to the Magi?

01:05:16.720 - 01:05:35.280

in terms of where this poem came from, probably I owe this poem to T.S. Eliot's classic poem, The Journey of the Magi. I read that poem every epiphany. In Eliot's poem, one of the Magi finds himself shaken and transformed by the birth of the child he has come to see.

01:05:35.600 - 01:06:04.560

You know, Eliot situates it in such a way that the Magi are there at the birth. The poet says he has witnessed birth and death before, but, and he goes on to say, and this is a quote, this birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. So he goes back to his palace, but he's no longer at ease there in the old dispensation, he says. concludes the poem with this line, I should be glad of another death.

01:06:06.000 - 01:06:35.280

And that line jumps all over me every time I read it. I am intrigued by the notion that the encounter with the child, the holy incarnate in this child, alters the interior landscape of the Magus to such an extent that the life he has lived now seems drained of meaning, and that he desires another death of the sort he witnessed in the birth. Now, there are other elements in this poem, too.

01:06:35.280 - 01:06:59.840

There's astronomical phenomenon of the star-going supernova and Herod's insecurity, which may or may not have overtones of politics. It was, after all, written in 2018. Part of what I do when I write a poem is to pour various ingredients from disconnected origins into the same pot, stir them around together, and see what rises to the surface. And I suspect that's what I was doing with this poem, too.

01:07:03.760 - 01:07:55.360

But I do think that there is something transformative of one's identity and of one's future if one gazes into the eyes of the holy. It seems to me that I think that's where I wanted this poem to come out, was to ask the question, if I am in the position of being the Magi, being the Magus, how is my reality altered by the sight of the light in the dark eyes of the child? You, and You may have just answered this question in a way where you talk about birth and death, but I'd love to hear you unpack this line.

01:07:55.360 - 01:08:22.320

You say encounters with the holy reverse the polarities of existence. Could you give some example of the polarities you're talking about and how they're reversed? Well, you know, one of the examples is the one we just mentioned out of Eliot's poem, where the birth becomes a death. Paul talks about, not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

01:08:22.560 - 01:08:42.480

I have died and been raised in Christ to a new life. I suppose for me, the polarities I think about when I think about how the holy reverses polarities are mostly theological or spiritual perhaps. Over the last few years, I've spent a lot of time reading and exploring mysticism. And the more I do that,

01:08:42.960 - 01:09:13.760

The more I sense that the spiritual and theological polarities I have lived with my whole life are at best shaky and perhaps don't hold at all. Polarities like sin and salvation, law and grace, love and justice, all the stuff John Leith taught me in Intro to Theology when I was a student at Union Seminary 45 years ago. Maybe also there are vocational polarities in this too. what I thought I'd be doing for a career has not been what I have done.

01:09:14.320 - 01:09:47.040

And much of the work I have done and the places where I've done that work are both work and places I can remember at some point saying I would never do or never go. So it is as though the journey following the gazing into the holy, if one can speak that way, has been the opposite, or at least a misdirection, from what I anticipated that journey would look like. Now, I'm sure others have much more dramatic stories than I do.

01:09:47.680 - 01:09:54.640

After all, I had no Damascus Road experience. You know, the heavens didn't open. I didn't hear voices. But the point, I think, is the same.

01:09:54.640 - 01:10:35.040

Something about the encounter with a holy, however it's mediated, alters the pathways we take away from that encounter. In some of your closing paragraphs, you mentioned Annie Dillard, a very well-known nature writer, particularly for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Martin Buber, the well-known Jewish philosopher and mystic, and then the poet, I believe that's the right label, Gerald Manley Hopkins. When you think, I'm sorry, Gerald, is it? Gerard.

01:10:35.360 - 01:10:40.200

Gerard. Gerard. Oh, I haven't actually missed it. Gerard Manley Hopkins.

01:10:40.800 - 01:11:02.280

Would you, when you think of those three and you put them in relation, what do you find most compelling? most distinctive about them? And how are you, put them in some tension, it seems like a constructive tension, but how are you putting them together? How do you read them off of one another in a creative way in relationship to what you're doing?

01:11:04.080 - 01:11:32.080

Yeah, Well, the Dillard quote comes from her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, which is a book and a collection of essays. And it's from the essay within that book, also titled Teaching a Stone to Talk. And in it, she is wrestling with what it means to live in the presence of the holy. She spent some time talking about the ancient Israelites tearing up all the sacred groves worshiped by the worshipers of Baal.

01:11:33.200 - 01:12:08.240

And she draws on Buber's comment that the crisis of mankind or humankind comes with the discovery of the not holy, the realm of that which is not holy. And she draws on that comment as a way of decrying the loss of mystery and wonder in the wake of what I would call, I don't know whether she'd use this term or not, enlightenment rationalism. She's right, of course. We have reduced the world quite largely to what we can explain on the basis of empirical evidence.

01:12:08.480 - 01:12:41.200

Now the whole world is not holy, she says. And I think that forms one of the poles of the conversation I'm trying to have in this little essay. The other pole is Gerard Manley Hopkins' wonderful poem, God's Grandeur, which ends with this awareness that the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world, or the Holy Ghost is bent over the world, brooding with bright wings. Hopkins wrote in the middle of the English Romantic movement,

01:12:42.320 - 01:13:05.440

And there are lots and lots of people who think of Hopkins as much too sloppy and religiously sentimental. I am not one of them. I think Hopkins was a good bit more realistic than we give him credit for being. He spent much of his ministry after he graduated from Oxford and became a Jesuit, either teaching or preaching in rural

01:13:05.800 - 01:13:36.880

I'm sorry, urban poverty centers, either in the north of England or in the slums of Dublin. And he looked out at his students and his parishioners who were blackened and hardened by a kind of industrial poverty, the like of which the world had never known and maybe hasn't known since. And yet when he looks at them, he sees, and maybe he sees with the eyes of faith, or maybe he sees out of just sheer stubbornness, Hopkins was famous for being stubborn.

01:13:37.960 - 01:14:03.280

What he saw was Christ playing in 10,000 places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes, not his. That's a line from his poem, or two lines from his poem in verse Nade. Christ plays in 10,000 places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes, not his. I want to situate this essay between those two poles.

01:14:03.520 - 01:14:58.240

Aware, on the one hand, of the gritty realism of arthritic limbs of that broken old monk who was the llama that Matheson could not expect, aware of the gritty realism of scientific rationalism and poverty-ridden hopelessness, and at the same time, constantly aware of the possibility that despite all expectations and evidence to the contrary, the holy might just peek out at us through, and here's Hopkins' line again, eyes not his. So for me, Dillard, Buber, Hopkins form a kind of troika, or maybe Dillard, Buber, Hopkins, and me form a kind of quartet in which we can have this conversation about how the holy is perceived in the world in which we live. I want to ask two questions in closing.

01:14:58.560 - 01:15:12.240

Okay. The first is, there a question that you wish I'd asked that I didn't ask, and how would you answer it? Okay. Well, I'm not sure I wished you'd ask this because your questions have a way of getting deeper sometimes, and I really want to go.

01:15:13.040 - 01:15:49.360

But I am a little surprised you didn't mention the final word of the article. The article ends with the conjunction or. And I ended it that way because I wanted to suggest that this litany of the revelation of the holy that I'd recited there in that last few sentences goes on in the imagination and experience of the reader. And perhaps also to hope that in some way the exercise of reading this article might have provided some small encouragement to be attentive to that litany of revelation and the possibilities that the holy might emerge

01:15:49.680 - 01:16:09.600

in altogether unexpected places, in moments where we are simply not paying attention. Which, and this is my final question, but I think you just answered it. But I'll say it again, and you could repeat, we can say, look, this is what I just said beautifully. What do you hope your essay has provoked in readers?

01:16:10.960 - 01:16:31.200

And how did writing it maybe remind you of truths or realities to which you hope to awaken us all? And The idea here being you brought out your poems and then meta reflected on them. So it's kind of a double process writing the essay for you.

01:16:33.200 - 01:16:54.960

Well, I suppose, first of all, Bill, when you told me, when you invited me to write this, you said this piece does not have to be a scholarly piece. And I decided I would push that boundary just about as far as I could take it. I think I did, maybe too far, I don't know. But what I hope is that the essay has given readers a chance to think a bit differently about poems and poetry.

01:16:55.840 - 01:17:19.200

It's hard to read poems, and it's not a skill. One has to learn it, I think. Also, I hope perhaps it has given readers an opportunity to think differently about the holy and about ultimate reality, to step back from the over-personalization of God and to be a bit more circumspect about what one thinks one knows.

01:17:20.000 - 01:17:59.360

That's a tall order. Perhaps it's well more than meager words like this essay will be able to accomplish, but I guess that's what I'm hoping nonetheless. I think I also hope that we who are in the church, in whatever ways we are in it, can be reminded that faith is not reducible either to social justice or to evangelistic formulae or whatever other reductionistic forms many of our preachers want to reduce it to. Important as those things may be, that at the very core of faith there is a mystery we cannot contain nor comprehend

01:17:59.840 - 01:18:21.720

but which is vital to our lives of faith. I think maybe that at least as far as I'm concerned, writing this essay has enabled me to get a little bit closer to that mystery, to appreciate it maybe a bit more. I certainly hope that comes through. thank you.

01:18:21.720 - 01:18:49.680

Usually I close by trying to sum up what's just happened, but that seems to me to run entirely counter to the spirit of your entire project. So I'm simply not going to do that. And these words of yours, which are really openings, invitations to openings, be the closing words. But I do want to thank you for your time and for your courage in a way to put these sorts of issues out there, which

01:18:51.200 - 01:19:13.960

can be threatening, can provoke in ways in which also are a vulnerability for you to put out there. So I appreciate all of that and for you inviting us into this wisdom, which is a product of all these years of ministry and reflection. I've enjoyed this very much and thank you. Thank you for this conversation.

01:19:14.480 - 01:19:33.520

Bill, thank you. And thank you for the seriousness, the sensitivity, and the engagement with which you have read my words, both the poems and the prose. That's the dream of every writer, is to be taken seriously by one's readers. And I am so deeply grateful.

01:19:33.520 - 01:19:37.600

I don't know how to say it. Well, thank you, Paul. This has been great. All right.

01:19:37.680 - 01:19:39.200

Thanks so much. You bet.