I can’t remember the poems, but I remember the complaining. In a rural high school in Pennsylvania, an English major is passing out copies of a Robert Frost poem. A student is asked to read a few lines aloud, “He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled, that lies unlisted now, come dew, come rust, But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust.”
The English teacher looks out into the classroom of students, and with hopeful exhaustion asks, “Now, what do you think Robert Frost is saying here? What metaphors do you see playing out on the page?” Their exhaustion is amplified by the sound of silence; we students hardly ever wanted to play the way the teacher wanted us to.
I can remember a few brave souls that would shoot their hand up to display to some kind of defiance rooted in boredom, “You know, maybe Robert Frost didn’t want us to sit around and dissect his poem. Why does there always need to be some kind of hidden symbolism?”
I now have more appreciation for the English teachers of my adolescence. Needless to say, there were no poetry open-mic nights in my hometown.
And still, a lover of poetry, of metaphor, of symbolism and imagery, emerged from that creative dessert, secretly loving listening to the weary English teacher talk about the cultural circumstances that Nathanial Hawthorne was responding to when he wrote The Scarlet Letter.
I grew up reading the Bible through practical, hard-working lenses. The Bible was a life-manual, giving us the do’s and do not’s, and if it got metaphorical on us, we’d let the experts interpret the true meaning of it.
This practical and uniquely protestant way of approaching our spirituality likely made Early Quakers sound all the more unhinged. When Quakers entered the fray, they brought with them a new vocabulary – that the Light or guidance of God was available to each person and could offer them words or images that spoke to their condition.
The task of Friends, in listening to Spirit, is to share what they sense God is saying to them. What an incredible opportunity this is, but also, a daunting one!
If we Friends gather with the belief that God will guide us, then we will need to frequently talk with one another about what this process is like. But I feel like we rarely talk about what entering into the quiet inner-space is actually like for us.
Quaker historian Gerard Guiton writes that early Friends would often “. . . hear Love’s language . . . [where] the invisible was brought into the visible and returned again to enrich the invisible . . ..”
Me thinks that my English teachers would stand up and shout, “SEE! I told you reading Robert Frost and breaking down the metaphorical implications mattered!”
Early Friends gave poetic language to describe [inward] places that seem to resist easy description – images of dark and light, of being in a river or stream, or discovering the seed. When Early Friends entered into these profound places of Divine unity, it was deeply moving and apparent, and they did their best to describe the feeling of it.
Read the unabridged version of this essay on Mark Pratt-Russum’s web page at: www.markprattrussum.com
Mark Pratt-Russum is a Quaker minister and spiritual misfit. He lives in Portland, OR, with his family and is the pastor of West Hills Friends Church (SCYMF).