Longing for Home

During the last week of September, I traveled to New Haven, CT, to curate a series of poetry and spirituality events at Yale Divinity School. Though I love New Haven and my alma mater; as I touched down in Laguardia I immediately and keenly felt a longing for Jackson, my new home. The wide and bright horizon, and incarnate drama of the Tetons calls to me, and now claims me. Yet, this October, I find myself facing the prospect of a month in which I’m gone more than I’m home. It is poetry that is obliging me to be away; and also poetry that has helped me realize what the word home truly means.

At the end of her beautiful poem “Spring Song” the acclaimed poet Lucille Clifton writes:

the world is turning

in the body of Jesus and

the future is possible.

Part of what Clifton names is the truth that God’s presence infuses and moves through all things—all that is, is nested in the reality of Jesus. Part of the power of poetry is that it not only helps us understand such truths intellectually, but it also allows us to feel and experience them emotionally. As language aspiring to the condition of music, poems are able to move us with the immediacy of music, connecting with the heart as well as the head. This is what I love about poetry. Poems give me a felt sense of a spiritual reality—such as Grace or Mercy or Anguish—that more straightforward theology cannot. Theology, it has been said, is like writing down a recipe; poetry is like serving up a feast.

Part of the work that contemporary spiritual leaders (a category that includes all of us love-spreading difference-makers, not just clergy) face is imagining new ways of presenting the gifts of the church to individuals who might never darken a church door. The institutional church has perpetuated such harm and injustice over the centuries; and yet there is such beauty and such goodness in the church’s essence. The church is “that wonderful and sacred mystery” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it; and each week we experience the embodied poetry of the liturgy, and the astonishing possibility of holding God within our hands, and taking Christ’s body into ours.

Poetry is the reason I am traveling. In 2018 I founded LOGOS Poetry Collective, a liturgically-inflected reading series that artfully, lovingly, nondogmatically folds aspects of sacred ritual into the format of a traditional poetry reading. Guided by the aim of “evoking transcendence through poetry, ritual, and conversation,” we began congregating 50-60 poets and spiritually-curious individuals each month at a brewery called Lazarus in east Austin, TX. Our hope was to cultivate a space where people could courageously explore a deeper connection with the divine and one another through poetry. We would read poems responsively like psalms, engage in curated conversation catalyzed by two poets’ readings, and culminate with ‘communion’ of tacos and libations. I now have the privilege of bringing the beauty of LOGOS to cities and campuses around the country; and I cannot wait to find more ways to share what I’ve found most meaningful in poetry with our community of St. John’s.

We are a pilgrim people: we crave and hunger for a deeper home that exists in loving communion with God our Mother, our Father, our Home. As we “pilgrim in place” this autumn, I hope we can find ways to live into the vision that Clifton gifts us: to recognize that all the world, each groaning grain of it, is infused with the sacred. As the Eastern orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann put it: there is no such thing as sacred and secular, as holy and profane. Our work as followers of Christ is to celebrate the entire created world in its sacred givenness, the way a priest celebrates the Eucharist. So let us celebrate, let us give thanks. It may be autumn; but we can always sing with Clifton a spring song:

the green of Jesus

is breaking the ground

and the sweet

smell of delicious Jesus

is opening the house and

the dance of Jesus music

has hold of the air and

the world is turning

in the body of Jesus and

the future is possible

All peace and blessings, Travis