Poetry, Life & Mystery

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
   In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they –
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
   Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.

(Excerpt from "Mayflies" – a poem by Richard Wilbur)

Unless your favorite poet is Dr. Seuss, most of us understand that a healthy dose of mystery is inherent to all good poetry. It’s what makes a poem special and satisfying or, in its absence, trite and predictable. Just imagine someone trying to win your heart with the line, “Yo... Sam, I am.” No, I think the poet king of the Song of Solomon, had a much better approach:

Place me like a seal over your heart,
       like a seal on your arm;
       for love is as strong as death,
       its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
       It burns like blazing fire,
       like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love;
       rivers cannot wash it away.

(Song of Solomon 8:6,7)

But what does it mean to put a seal over a lover’s heart? Is the poem’s message literal or symbolic? Is it about death and graves – water and fire? Or is this, really about that? Is the author pointing toward a bigger story here? Questions add to the intrigue and challenge of interpretation. The process of solving these lyrical riddles is part of what makes the reading of poetry enjoyable and worthwhile.

Most church-folk are too prim and proper to admit it in public or from the pulpit, but the poetic symbolism used in this particular book of the Bible often disguises extremely erotic subject matter capable of making even the most experienced veterans sitting in the pew blush like schoolgirls. But it is because these intimate verses are so artfully cloaked in mystery that they become so powerfully holy, and accurately descriptive of the beautiful and sacred love between a man and a woman – between God and His bride. All good stories – whether told by film, literature or around a glowing campfire, depend on the use of mystery in some capacity. Nothing is more maddening than when a clumsy-mouthed friend divulges the end of a movie that you haven’t seen yet.

Why? Because we love mystery. We love not knowing. We love the thrill of discovering the twists and turns for ourselves. We’d much rather experience the story firsthand than be told how it all turns out in the final scene. And it doesn’t matter what kind of ending it is – whether the awkward boy finally wins the love of the beautiful girl that’s way out of his league, or the virtuous hero dies an unjust death at the hands of evil men – we still want to see it for ourselves. Whether it results in tears of joy or tears of sadness, there is a beautiful satisfaction experienced in both tragic and “happily-ever-after” endings.

It’s obvious why we enjoy happy endings so much. They give us comfort. They make us laugh and hope for the same good fortune in our own lives. But what about the not-so-happy endings? Some friends (Lauren and Randy) came over my house one time to watch a movie about two boys (one Jewish, one German) who formed a friendship in the very shadow of a Nazi concentration camp. The film’s ending is absolutely heart-wrenching. As the final credits rolled, Lauren buried her face in a pillow in a futile attempt to muffle her intense weeping and tender heart. Randy and I sat there helpless as the weight of the moment pressed heavily upon us both.

But if you asked what we thought of the movie, I’m sure the consensus would be that, overall, it was good. But didn’t you cry? Weren’t you saddened? Aren’t you disgusted by the horrors of the Holocaust? Of course! That’s exactly why the movie was so good. As painful as it is to witness, it is a good thing when we recognize evil and suffering for what it is because, in doing so, we acknowledge the reality that something has gone wrong in the world – things are not the way they’re supposed to be. The good that God created has been corrupted. Stories like this provoke us to become agents of change who make things as good as they can be now, but also remind us of a better time to come in the future.

Whether we laugh or cry, most stories have one thing in common. When we get to the end, the book goes back on the shelf, the actors come out for a final bow, the house lights slowly fade up. We wipe the tears from our eyes and say, “Wow, that was good.” We can appreciate both kinds of endings because we know that, eventually, the temporary veil of storytelling is lifted to reveal the real world as it truly is.

Many people seem incapable of reconciling the sophisticated complexities of good storytelling when it comes to love, retreating instead to a polarized world of oversimplified extremes. Some live with their heads in the clouds, always searching for Prince Charming, never finding the idealized fairy tale promised by Hollywood. Others (often the self-appointed advice-givers in our lives) are only concerned with the facts – no drama, no romance, just pure compatibility – oddly enough, a term more often associated with computers than people. But a spreadsheet with rows and columns filled with desirable income, education and age doesn’t leave much room for a love worthy of epic poetry – an art, so it seems, much too inefficient in this information age.

In the movie Dead Poets Society, the main character, Mr. Keating, demands that his students rip out the entire introduction of their poetry textbook because it made the ridiculous assertion that the greatness of any poem can be determined by simply graphing quantifiable literary characteristics on a chalkboard. But is this cold, lifeless exercise any less absurd than suggesting that love can be measured according to qualities contained within a Facebook profile? I tend to agree with Mr. Keating’s assessment of such ideas that try to mechanize matters of the heart – excrement!

However, when it comes to love, there are certainly gritty non-negotiables that go much deeper than butterflies and goosebumps. 1Corinthians 13 contains such a checklist of what true love looks like: Love is patient, love is kind, it keeps no record of wrongs, always protects, always trusts, always hopes. It is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. True love remains all of these things whether the story ends how we wanted it to, or not. It always perseveres.

But are there not just as many intangibles to love as well? Chemistry. The music that we dance to. That “thing” you can’t seem to put into words. Or as C.S. Lewis allegorizes in his Narnia series, “deep magic”. Why else would the poet in the Song of Solomon tell his lover, “Turn your eyes away from me; for they overwhelm me.” There is no biological explanation for such an enchanted moment. An encounter like this is filled with unwritten poetry swirling in the invisible air around two people who are gazing into each other’s soul – hearts that speak to each other
without words, sometimes with just a glance from across the room.

But all this talk about hearts gazing and speaking to each other begs an enormous question: What is the heart? Is it just an organ that pumps blood to your body? Or is it a vast and untold mystery? One that beats like a tribal bass drum in your chest when reunited – one that aches in the dark shadow of loneliness. Science doesn’t provide satisfying answers for such phenomena, but would anyone deny that the connection is real? It is a mystery, and a beautiful mystery at that.

Life itself is a story, an epic poem – every chapter filled to the brim with mystery, romance and conflict. But in a society suffering the symptoms of microwave-mentality, most seem merely interested in flipping to the last page instead of plowing through to the end. We’re all tempted to tear open a corner of the wrapping paper before we’re supposed to. And we whine and complain about how long we have to wait. Is there anything more excruciating? But is there anything more magical than the moment the long-awaited gift is revealed on Christmas morning? Isn’t the pain of waiting, and wanting, and longing part of what makes the whole experience so wonderful in the end?

No, not every story ends with a shiny new bicycle under the tree – some people find disappointments, a brain tumor or the death of a child. But if you believe that there is more to all this than just what our eyes can see, you also know that it’s not the end of the story. Love, so it seems, is much like faith – it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. This, is really about that.

Though the trials are real and the tears run deep as we watch our own stories unfold across the stage of life, one day the curtain call of the ages will erupt in thunderous applause when we realize that the stuff of this world was merely a foreshadowing of what was to come – an ancient plot development that was written before the foundations of the world. The stage, the masks, the props – it will all dissolve and our eyes will finally see reality in its fullness – that we were performers in what was merely the first act in an unending drama that will unfold throughout eternity.

So regardless of how “till death do us part” ends for you: for richer or poorer, in sickness or health, thrills or disappointments... it will be then, that we are reminded that all good stories have their ending shrouded in mystery. And, this time, as the tears are wiped from our eyes, we’ll look to those on our left and right and say, “Wow, that was good.”