St. Stephen’s uses poetry in our worship every week. In these posts our rector, Karl Stevens, a poet himself who publishes as KPB Stevens, will reflect on the poems we use. The poems are chosen by our Canticle Club. If you are interested in joining the Canticle Club, send an email to Stuart Hobbs.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a very generous poet. She tries to write a poem every day, and she publishes them on her website A Hundred Falling Veils. That’s where the Canticle Club found this Sunday’s poem.

Amen

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I forget that the whole world
is holy, even the tiny dark bugs
that slip through window screens
and flock and stick to kitchen lights,
even the charred black remains of forest,
even the river as it floods bright red,
even when my cheeks are tear-stained
and my body tightens with fear,
that is when a kind letter from a stranger
arrives in the mail, or the rabbit will stand
on his back legs to nibble on mint,
or the meadow will blaze with the day’s
last slant of sunlight and my heart opens
so wide that inside the fear rises praise. 

“Inside the fear rises praise” is a great final phrase for a poem, and Trommer is a great thinker about final phrases and lines. In a 2013 interview with Bob King she thought through how a poet arrives at a last line, concluding that it’s best when the poem leads the poet to a satisfying ending. “I love when I am able to surrender to this,” she says. Writing poetry is an act of surrender that arises out of deep attention paid to many small things. The poem names holiness in this way as well. Holiness is attention paid to the body, to the night, to fear, to kindness.

Coincidently, that same interview begins with her defining praise as “coming to believe in the value of all of our experiences.” Amen is a litany of experiences, many of them quite mundane. Dark bugs and kitchen lights, kind letters, rabbits, mint. These things are interspersed with the more dramatic, the forest fire, the flood, the blazing meadow. But as a reader I’m hard put to say which I find more intriguing, which inspires the loudest amen in me. The wildness of nature or its ordinariness? The raging river or the dark bug? It’s this very question that Trommer wants us to consider. Fires and floods are fearful. Is it the small things, the nibbling rabbit, that allows praise to rise within fear? Do we save up such mundane observations so that they remind us of the holy when disaster comes? In an earlier interview, Trommer said “I challenge myself to rub the mundane till I find where it shines.” The shining mundane. The praise within fear. This is the holiness that the poem asks us to consider.

The Gospel this week is Luke’s telling of Jesus’s parables of losing and finding. The householder who diligently seeks a single lost coin might be accused of delving into minutia. But it is exactly this careful delving that Trommer names as holy. Most of our lives are composed of lost moments. What were you doing five minutes ago? An hour ago? What did your body feel like, or your environment? It’s all gone so quickly. What would life be like if we treated each moment like a lost coin, something small and fleeting to be sought and found, something to remember so that the memory of it can rise as praise when fear wants to claim us?