Bad Poetry: The Clapping of the Trees

One local lurker asked why I don’t write more overtly religious things.

There is a hifalutin answer. It goes like this: I am a radical Christian. What I write about life, I write about the Christian life.

But that still begs the question of why I write about this natural life in the natural world we know, rather than about the supernatural life beyond.

There is a hifalutin answer to that, too—not mine, but Francis B. Schaeffer’s. Schaeffer wrote that when people start to detach “religious” from “secular” thinking the battle is lost; everything they think, do, and write is going to be “secular” simply because “An autonomous lower storey will always eat up the upper storey” in the thought of a mind that divides itself into upper and lower storeys. Such a mind, Schaeffer imagined, would necessarily be like an apartment building where the renters of upstairs units had no use of the ground floor. They’d have nice views but no way to get out at them; eventually they’d starve up there, lacking access to the outside world.

There is also a simple answer, which is my own, my very own, dating back to the teen years in which I read some of Schaeffer’s books. My answer was: When I write about this natural world that I perceive concretely through my natural senses, I can stand to reread what I’ve written later. When I write about the vast spiritual dimension of life that my mortal mind cannot directly perceive, I always reread what I’ve written and think that, to put it very charitably, other people have written this kind of thing better. I’d rather recommend other people’s “Christian” books, as being good, than add another bad book to a pile of “Christian” books nobody needs to bother reading.

A few years ago I posted a couple of adolescent writing exercises whose lack of reader visits, re-visits, or comments tells me all I need to know about this, but here, for those who want another proof, is yet another bad Christian poem I wrote at the age of, I think, seventeen.

Listen to the night wind, the leaves rustling in the dawning.
Listen, and don’t mind that you must rise to watch the morning.
Rise up now, prepare yourself, and put your best dress on.
Lose no time to think about the good times that are gone.
What you thought were necklaces have turned out to be chains.
Take them off, and from your face wash all of last night’s stains.
What looks grey within the house, in sunlight may be silver.
Slip out now and latch the gate, and walk beside the river.
I am the herald of the King who always said he loved you.
Knowing what you thought of him, still, gladly he forgave you.
You thought you’d live the fast, loose life; you never would behave,
But crime won’t pay, and suddenly you found you were a slave.
Oh you who slaved and took no wages, life is now to change
From the coarseness you have learned to know to something new and strange.
You will not be a slave again, and your sons and your daughters
Will all be princes crowned and throned, both here and o’er the waters.
So come with me now through the hills to where the palace glows
With supernatural radiance beyond what language knows.
High among the mountains here it gleams with pearls and sapphires,
Safe from storm and winter wind, from foes, from floods and fires.
A long time was it building, for he had it built for you,
And so it had to be the best the builders could ever do.
Oh listen to the morning wind and follow where it leads:
Listen to the singing of the hills, to the clapping of the trees. 

x