Margaret's Bench -- March 2008
 “These
are the first two poems I’ve ever written in my life,” said
Jeff. He had ventured out with others to the East West Bookshop
in Seattle to write haiku in response to sacred texts. As the
class instructor, I was glad to hear both surprise and pleasure
in his voice.
The people in the class came from a variety of religious
backgrounds. They were on a variety of paths in their spiritual
lives. Some practiced within a tradition, others did not. We’d
started the evening with Rumi’s poem “Hurry
to the Source of Light.” We read the poem out loud and
shared reactions to it. Then, from some of their reactions I
wrote a rough haiku as an example.
After that introduction, class members wrote their own
individual haiku, using a word or two from Rumi’s work in their
own. Most were happy to share what they wrote with the others.
Each offering was a gift, a jewel formed and cut from an
individual soul.
For our second passage, I had chosen verses from
Psalm 116. To my ears, the passage
carried some of the same themes as the 13th century mystic’s
poem, especially the beautiful line “Return, O my soul, to
your rest….”
But halfway through the first reading of the Bible verses, I
could tell that the psalm wasn’t going over with my eclectic
class anywhere near as well as Rumi’s verses of longing and
homecoming. We came to the troubled lines—“The snares
of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I
suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the
LORD: ‘O LORD, I pray, save my life!’” — and the LORDs
seemed to thud onto the room's carpeted floor.
After we read the psalm out loud, out of a rather uncomfortable
silence, someone asked, “What’s Sheol?” Another class member
answered, “Hell.” Then I said, “Or death. Sometimes it’s seen as
hell, other times as death.”
Another uncomfortable silence. I can’t read minds, but I
imagined thoughts in the room along the lines of: “I would never
say that hell laid hold of me, or that some LORD might save me!”
Still, they were game. They wrote more haiku and shared them. In
the sharing, we came together, if not over the psalm, then over
the sharing. When I asked if I could post their poems on my web
site, one of the participants said okay, as long as I knew that
her haiku was definitely not inspired by that psalm! (She liked
her haiku, I’m glad to say.)
At the end of the evening, people said they had enjoyed the
process, and Jeff commented that he had just written his first
two poems. Then someone asked me, “Why are you doing this?
What’s your mission?”
Mission? My mind went blank.
“What are you teaching?” she asked. “Is this a writing thing? Or
is it a spiritual thing?”
That I could answer. “It’s a spiritual thing. I’m into God.”
It can be a writing thing, of course. Some people who take this
class go on to write lots of haiku on their own, either in
response to scripture or just for the joy of it. Knowing that
makes me happy. And yet, for me, the big payoff comes in our
time together.
When I’m by myself and write a haiku in response to scripture,
something always happens—a change in me, in my
relationship to the text, in my relationship to God.
In a group, something more is created, a new thing that's made
only in the presence of others. We may never see each other
again. Yet, after reading, reacting, and sharing, we are related
to each other, and we know it. Without having to spill big
secrets, we share spirit and find communion in our unique
voices. In telling our own stories, we bring a part of God's
story to life.
The technical qualities of the newly-written haiku—the facets
that would be polished in a professional writer's critique
group—don't matter in this context. Each haiku need only be true
to the heart of its maker.
My mission in these classes is to foster a place in which a
handful of people can come together and, inspired by sacred
poetry, catch the images that rise out of our own hearts and
offer them to others. Sharing those images—sharing truth through
the medium of imagination—we escape deadly isolation and come
alive. We are saved from Sheol and set free—separately and
together—to be wholly ourselves.
-- Margaret
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