the verb ‘to hymn’

“Come with me to the akathist if you’re missing liturgy,” Professor Perrin said, her Wednesday afternoon punctuated precisely by liturgical leanings. “It’s a service to commemorate the beheading of John the Baptist.” Christine Perrin, lecturer in English, taught my first-year seminar and now advises my senior honors project. She also remembers Italy with me, Italian mass and vespers and the Istituto San Ludovico where we lived in Orvieto.

Today I am having my first meeting with Professor Perrin about this senior honors project: a cohesive body of 20 poems before finals week next spring, followed by a reading of the work. “Bring a mug,” she said, “and a recent poem, and we’ll talk.”

For me, it is the idea of disciplined daydreaming, as introduced into my mind by Professor Perrin’s first-year seminar (she introducted us, tentative first-year students, to Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rainer Maria Rilke: minds on fire with the surrounding world), that bridges the gap between liturgy and poetry. Both are rhythmic and require discipline, both are bathed in verbal play. And, as so often my struggles to face God are the subject of my poems, my liturgical understanding is the subtext, propelling my search with the belief that metaphor or symbol or simile can be as much an answer as usual church dogma.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition every service is sung. Even though I’m Mennonite, when I participate in an Eastern Orthodox service I’m engaging a centuries-old attempt to hymn the shape of God. It’s the same attempt that permeates my poetry work. I am creating (according to tradition I’m not sure I understand but which I love) a ritual structure, a rhythm and trying to imbue it with some lively, vibrant narrative.

I’m trying to hymn the shape of God and my own life, too.

After Italy (that phrase seems to find its way into every waking hour of my day; I am defined sometimes solely by being post-Italy), I find that I delight in participating in outward liturgy that reflects my attempts at inward poetic energy.

I especially love participating now that the services are all in English and I am able to clearly see how this narrative liturgy is forceful.

Yes. It works that there is correlation here, between liturgy and poetry. But in the case of poetry, I’ll decline to say “amen,” for the simple reason that I am not done working out this hymn yet.

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