Finally comes the poet
In Passage to India Walt Whitman is speaking the praise of poetry and telling us how important it is because it sees the invisible in the visible and the glory in the ordinary. His agenda is his own but his words express well the Christian's sense of Jesus and how he offers an entirely new way to look at the world. Here's what Whitman says:
After the seas are all crossed,…
After the great captains and engineers have
accomplished their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists,
the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy [of] that name
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
Whitman is celebrating the critical importance of poetry and the Christian would celebrate the vital importance of Jesus. For Whitman the poet would justify all the work of invention, power, skill, technology and industry—would give it all meaning and enable people to see the glory beyond the brute facts. The Christian would celebrate Jesus as doing all that Whitman says poetry would do and then he would do so much more than poetic vision could do. The poet would see what's there but Jesus is the one who invests reality with the glory that the poet in his better moments helps us see. Biblical poets do for us what Whitman's poet at his ideal best would do but biblical poets insist that apart from God as he is seen in and as Jesus there is no glory to be seen.
All our intellectual brilliance, our great advances in technology, our achievements in honourable endeavours, our inventions that make life easier for millions in each generation and whatever else—all these are the gifts of God but only the "Singer" (as Calvin Miller has taught us) can make sense of it all. Only the true Son of God can make all our possessions and advances something meaningful and something to sing about because he helps us to see that they're than what they are.
Only Jesus can take golden harvests and make them more wonderful than they are. Only Jesus can take two lovers and make them more beautiful than they appear to be. Only Jesus can take a child and show the child means the world to God (as Harold Shank has taught us). Only Jesus can take a little out of the way planet and make it The Visited Planet (as J. B. Phillips has taught us). Only Jesus in a prayer can make us see that the vast and lengthening corridors of deep dark space and the flaming and collapsing monsters we call stars are all in the hands of someone he called "Father" in Luke 10:21.
There's something profoundly comforting in all that and there's something in all that that allows us to look at the heavens and the earth with a new understanding and a new assurance of faith.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.