My God Speaks in Poetry

My God speaks in poetry.

He whispers in the rhythm and meter, telling wonders in rich images woven together into a glorious pattern of order. He does not merely fling color onto a canvas expressing some inner truth about Himself that I need to divine by searching my inner soul for some meaning or reflection. He does not present himself in definitive, exegetical prose that starkly outlines fact to be assimilated. He dances in metaphor and ripples in simile, reaching out to me in the terms of human familiarity, yet reminding me that his images are not like ours, not as comprehensible as we might like to think.

My God speaks in poetry,

stanzas formed with the power or rhyme and meter, following traditional measures even as He reshapes them with the power of message. The wonder is communicated more strongly within the form, shaped and shaping in the flow of metrical feet, speaking to the beat of breath and heart, echoing the form of life itself. He spurns free form verse – there is no need to defy order when it is beautiful, shaping, making. It speaks to my need for order and my need for intimate transaction in the same flow.

My God speaks in poetry,

giving images rather than rules, inviting me to bring my own dreams, my own memories, and my own experience to the milieu, meeting the imagery half way, letting it speak to me and speaking back. There is an individualism of experience, a transaction between being shaped by the verse and shaping it that reforms the form or rhyme and meter into something that is mine, something that calls out the soul beyond the every day and elevates it. Poetry transcends prose, for it demands more of its reader, speaking truth and beauty and demanding the same in return.

My God speaks in poetry,

saying things that cannot be expressed so directly, pulling in nuance and image, drawing out tears and truth. The music and the images say all the things words cannot, a dance of creating language, drawing nothing into something, formed, yet demanding participation. The music of words, the Logos that undergirds the universe swells around me, and the stanzas stretch on ahead.

My God speaks in poetry.