The Poetry Prescription -- FPC sermon excerpt

One snowy night in Vermont, a large group of rowdy teenagers broke into an empty summer house near Middlebury College. In a bout of drinking and partying, they trashed it. They broke a chair and threw it into the fireplace, discharged fire extinguishers, tossed beer cans, smashed china, and soiled the carpet with vomit and urine. The damage exceeded $10,000.

The offenders were caught, and then things got interesting. Since the house had belonged to the great American poet Robert Frost, the kids were sentenced to … poetry.

Yes, that’s right. Poetry. You could call it “poetic justice.”

According to The New York Times (June 8, 2008), the criminal justice system called on Jay Parini, a Robert Frost biographer and literature professor. He had been writing a book called “Why Poetry Matters,” and this assignment challenged him to put his theory into practice. His job was to try to use poetry both to punish and to rehabilitate them.

One of Parini’s lessons revolved around the poem “The Road Not Taken,” which begins with the words, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It cautions us about the fateful choices we make in the dense woods of life, and how our choices matter — with one path leading to another. Frost concludes it by saying,

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The young offenders began to wonder about the choices they had made, and where those choices were leading them.

And even harsher lesson came from the poem “Out, Out,” which tells of a young man’s precious life spilling away in a buzz saw accident in Vermont. The boy is cutting firewood in his yard, and the day is almost over when his sister calls him to join the family for supper. Suddenly, the buzz saw leaps and cuts off the boy’s hand. “Then the boy saw all,” writes Robert Frost,

Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart —
He saw all spoiled.

The doctor is called, and the boy is sedated. His pulse is taken, and they listen to his heart. They hear little … then less … then nothing. They cannot believe it. The boy is dead.

Jay Parini reports that the juvenile offenders in his class seemed shaken to their foundations. This was, for them, a wake-up call: “Don’t waste your life.”

The poetry prescription can be powerful medicine. “Poetry is about life and death and who you are as a person,” says Parini, quoting Robert Frost. Poetry gives us images, figures of speech, similes and metaphors that help us make sense of life. Frost once said, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”

So how can we get educated in metaphor? How can we learn about life and death and who we are as people?

I’m convinced that the best place to start is in the words of the Bible.

The apostle Paul knew all about metaphors — figures of speech in which comparisons are made between unlike things that have something important in common. High school English students, you know metaphors, don’t you? Love is a rose. That man is a snake. God is a rock. These are all metaphors. We use them every day.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that faithful Christians are athletes. This is a metaphor, of course, since we have no evidence that any of the Corinthians played sports. But Paul wants them — and us — to be educated in metaphor, so that we’ll be safe to be let loose in the world. He uses poetry to teach us about life and death and who we are as children of God.

Paul knows that metaphors are powerful, and he uses them constantly: “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27). “You also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:22). “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light” (5:8). “You are all children of light and children of the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:5). Temple of the Holy Spirit. Body of Christ. Dwelling place for God. Children of light.

That’s who we are. This kind of poetry can actually shape our lives.