The poems the Holy Spirit creates...

The very best bit of my doctoral studies began with a glimpse whilst getting my master's degree.  It was then I first heard of the Secondary World.  Basically, this is when you get lost in a book, any text really.  Technically, it is the willing suspension of disbelief.  When I spend time in PERN, for example, in the world Anne McCaffrey created where dragons fly and share a telepathic lifelong bond with their chosen riders, I am willingly setting aside my very strong belief that dragons do not exist in order that I might eat and fly and fight alongside them.  Those who enter fully the Secondary World are the ones who lose sight of the world in which they really exist...the ones who do not hear someone enter the room or sit down next to them whilst reading. You have Michael Benton (1980) to thank for that lesson.

As amazing as it was to learn what was happening to me when I got lost in a book, the best bit of my studies came later, when I "met" Louise Rosenblat, the most brilliant of all brilliant reading scholars.  Back in the dark ages, she wrote Literature as Exploration (1938).  Forty years later, the culmination of her Transactional Theory of reading was published as The Reader, The Text, and the Poem (1978).  It is no hyperbole, to me, to state that everything that can be understood about reader engagement stems from her work.

She believed that every reading experience is an interactive event between the reader and the text, that meaning is made through that interaction.  Meaning does not lie merely in the words of the author.  Nor does meaning lie solely within the reader.  Instead meaning is made, meaning is created, in the interaction that takes place between the text and the reader.  Therefore, each event was unique because every reader is unique.  That transaction, that exchange, she termed a poem.  [A wonderful metaphor if you think about it.]  The very best part of her theory is the understanding that each poem is also unique to the reader.  By this I mean that when you re-read a text a new poem is created, because while you are still you, the you that you are in the next reading is unique from the you that you were in the previous reading.

The poem is created from your knowledge, your experience, your feelings...everything about you.  Every day of our lives we change, we grow.  Even the densest of us, even the most stuck-in-the-mud oafs, are still different because we have lived more, tasted more, heard more, felt more, seen more. Perhaps is it too blatant an example, but I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time before I was given the gift of faith and then again after.  Imagine my surprise when I realized this was a story of faith and the Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit are angels, not witches! How much more profound was experiencing anew The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe once I knew, once I was able to believe the work of the cross.

Of course, I also find fascinating how two Christians who are authors chose to wield their pens.  I admire them both. One wrote as a Christian author; one wrote as an author whose faith, as a Christian, colored her work but did not desire to write only Christian literature.  L'Engle's The Arm of the Starfish has one of the most profound poems I have ever experienced, one that created anew is deeper and richer each time I visit the story.  In a nutshell, there is a despicable man who causes the death of much beloved, innocent man.  When the evil man's daughter is injured, he turns to the main character's father for help.  The daughter is saved.  The main character is incensed that her father would help the enemy, angry and betrayed.  When she flings her anger and her betrayal at him, her father tells her that if you are going to care about the fall of the sparrow, you cannot pick or choose who the sparrow is going to be.

SIGH.  Good stuff there.

I re-read all the time.  All the time.  I have favorite series I visit often.  [Who wouldn't want regular doses of the brilliant pen of James Herriot?] I have authors for whom I own every single book that they published.  When reading the next book in a series, my "rule" is that I first re-read all the books that came before it. For one series, that count is currently at 22!  In this way, I prepare myself for the next serving by tasting again from the feast offered me.

Right now, I am currently re-reading a series that has floored me in the new poems that are being created.  They are not profound, I think, for anyone but me.  The fall of the sparrow truth, well, the whole world could take note of that one. But Kaylin's battles?  Well, I have been thinking of late that Michelle Sagara wrote this entire series just for me.

Here are a few excerpts...for me to remember...later:

Cast in Silence
It never went away. The regret. The guilt. Sometimes it ebbed for long enough that she could believe she was beyond it, but that was wishful thinking, another way of lying to herself. She didn't want to share this with Teela and Tain. Sharing bar brawls and near-death, yes. But this? [p.52]


~~~~
"Stop judging your life by the failures," he whispered.
 "What should I do?" she whispered, "I'm always going to fail."
"We all do," he said softly, his voice closer now. "We all fail, but none of us fail all the time." [p. 178]


~~~~
"I think," she added, "that's why you can't see what I see; I never let you. It's dark, it's horrible – it's everything I believe about myself. The tower is speaking to me, yes. Bit by bit, it's unraveling all the lies of omission, even the ones I told myself. Maybe especially those. It's pulling out the things that I kept hidden because I couldn't stand to think about them.


"I don't know who I am, Severn. I don't think I've ever known who I am. But I know who I want to be, now. Maybe that's all I'll ever know. What I was is so large in my own mind I can't break through it if it's hidden. And I keep it hidden because I'm afraid. Of what it says about me. Of what it'll say about me to people whose opinion I actually care about.


"I'm not proud of it," she added." But I can pretend I accept it – as long as I never have to acknowledge it. And this," she said, throwing her arms wide, "is what it is. It's too big. I need to let it be what it was." [p. 296]




Cast in Secret
Epharim waited until she had joined them again and said softly, "You fear discovery. You fear your own thoughts." And he said it with pity. Kaylin was not the world's biggest pity fan."Fear, we all know," he added. "And we all know rejection and pain. But none of us have ever suffered this fear of being revealed, this fear of being seen as we are." He was serene, and without judgment. [p. 80]


~~~~
[Kaylin] "Would you change your past?"
[Severn] "Parts of it. In a heartbeat."
He shrugged again.
"You wouldn't?"
"I can't. I don't waste time thinking about changing what can't be changed."
"And you're never afraid that someone won't judge you? That they won't misunderstand you or misconstrue you as you are now?"
"People judge me all the time. Be careful of that," he added, pointed at a trellis that grew near the roadside. Vines were wrapped around it, and they rustled in the nonexistent breeze.
"But they don't have the right –"
"They have the right to form their own opinions. I have the right to disagree with them in a fashion that doesn't break the Imperial Laws."
"But-"
"I'm not afraid of the judgment of strangers," he told her quietly. "I live with my own judgment. That's enough. And I judge others, and live by those judgments, as well."
"I don't-" want to be despised or hated. She couldn't quite frame the words with her lips, they sounded so pathetic as a thought. But Severn had her name; she felt it had between them, it's foreign symbols not so much as sound as a texture. Ellariayn.
He stopped walking and caught her face in his hands, pulling it up. She met his eyes. "Then stop despising and hating yourself, Kaylin. We're not what we were.  We're not what we will be. Everyone changes. Everyone can change. Let it go. If you're always afraid to be known, you'll never understand anyone else. If you never understand anyone else, you're never going be a good Hawk. You'll see what others see, or what they want you to see. You won't see what's there." [pp. 99–100]




Cast in Chaos
"I...I don't know how." It was hard, to say it. To admit it. Especially to Nightshade.   Ignorance was weakness.
No, she thought. Ignorance was only weakness if you clung to the damn thing. [p. 107]


In re-reading this series, in having all of these things I had not noticed before reach up and grab my heart, shake my soul, very much trouble my waters, it suddenly struck me why it is...from my scholar's view...that I love the Psalter so very much.

Each time I pray my beloved Psalter, each time it is prayed to me and for me, the Holy Spirit is conducting a new transaction with and within me, creating a new poem.  The reason those poems are so very powerful is that they are living transactions, my experience with the text is changing not merely because I have changed, because I have lived more and experienced more, but because the text itself is also living, the text itself, the Living Word, is changing me in the process.

It seems too small to say that every day I will read/speak/hear a psalm and find myself in disbelief.  Again. Not the secondary world, but struggling to believe that the Creator, the Lord of the Universe, could and would cause men to write down words thousands of years ago that are for me each and every time they are voiced, each and every encounter, for me that I might taste and see that He is good, that I might have faith kindled in my heart, that my soul might be washed clean of my sin and the sins committed against me.  That this might be so always.


Rosenblat was a genius in a way I believe few understand.  Yes, she had her day in the sun, but scholars have this distressing tendency to chase after the latest and the greatest, leaving behind truths that could continue to inform and frame new academic discourse, new discovery.  The true depths of her work have yet to be plumbed.  Its profundity never truly measured.

But...here's a thought.  I am no longer Dr. So and So.  My tenure as a college professor was too brief, my addition to the academic discourse of literacy studies but a flash in the pan.  It is not arrogant to say that my dissertation was and remains rather unique.  The ideas I proferred would still stand out despite the literacy world spinning round for years and years since my study.  But I never published.  I never did the work it would take to drive my stake into the ground, to post the banns of my work to the world.

For that, I oft feel the failure.  My doctorate really does not matter to anyone but me.  No one really pays attention to the scholarship I acquired or what I can still leverage from it.  Failure thrums through every thought I have about the diploma hanging on the wall and the limp cowl crumpled in a bin in the attic.

However, what if...

What if what I studied, what I learned, was never more than this grand lessoning I needed so that in the fullness of His time, God would bring me to the pure doctrine and the truth that the Psalter is not really a collection of Hebrew poetry no one is ever really expected to understand, but a collection of prayers that Christ prayed and prays for me, a collection of prayers that are inexplicably, ineffably the very words of my heart given to me, for me so that even when I am lost in darkness, even when I am so very overwhelmed by the wounds I bear I would still be able to pray in confidence, to know that they are words okay to speak, to whisper, to cry out because God created me, loves me, and knows that I would and will need them, because God's greatest desire is that I might be saved.

What if I needed two degrees, needed to explore the journeys of Benton and Rosenblat, so that I might understand the Holy Spirit is creating poems in me, for me, through the Living Word, in order that I might receive faith and believe in a way that speaks to the very academic, the very thinking mind God created in me.

I am His beloved.
I am forgiven.
I am pure and spotless...even now.


Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!