Nativity Catholic Church
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The Sound of Things The Book Café will take an interesting twist in reading material for the month of October—we’re delving into a tasty smorgasbord of newly published, contemporary poetry. Some people, just at the mention of the word “poetry,” start getting itchy under the collar and the hair jumps up on the back of their necks—something to do with scary memories of English 101 and literature survey courses, which are probably the last times most people have encountered any significant amount of poetry. Not exactly the best way to engender a love for the craft—holding the literary equivalent of a loaded gun to someone’s head. There are those who drink in poetry from the moment of their first encounter with it, but for the vast majority of folks, poetry, like a fine malt scotch, is an “acquired taste.” In order to help our Café readers savor this opportunity for the lushness of language they will be encountering, I’ve spent some time developing a little thumbnail tick-sheet of “Tips on Reading Poetry.” In the course of gathering this information, I came across a phrase that not only speaks to me about the nature of poetry, but the nature of a lot of things we do in our relationships with each other, whether on our personal palette, or whether on the larger-scale canvases, like church, school, work, nation, and world. Poetry, as we can so easily see, involves aspects of SOUND as well as meaning—poetry is best enjoyed when read aloud. In fact, it may be said that in poetry “the SOUNDS of words are raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning. Poets think of how they want something to sound as much as they think of what they want to say.” How many times in life have we struggled with some relationship because, in the course of a conversation, we have not liked the way it “sounded” when someone said something? I could fill volumes with tales of encounters I’ve had, just in the course of my pastoral ministry, where people have repeatedly said, “You know, it’s not so much what she said, it was the way she said it!” In other words, the “sound” of it made all the difference. I sometimes wonder if this is what the gospels are trying to communicate about Jesus when we hear them recount: “They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’ “(Mark 1:27; see also Matthew 7:29 & Luke 4:32). Was it, at first, so much the content of what he was saying, or was it more the manner in which he said it—the sound of the teaching? Even as Jesus was “commanding” demons to depart from sick and troubled bodies and souls, perhaps it was the sound of his voice that caused them to scatter in dread rather than the intricacies and minutiae of scripture, doctrine, incantation, and law he could have been tempted to spout. This is not to suggest that we need always to “sugar-coat” things we want or need to say to others in our relationships. In the end, simply “making nice” doesn’t do justice to the quality of our relationships with one another. It seems, however, to suggest that we pay more heed to what our words sound like as they come from our mouths. Taking our lead from the beauty of poetry, it seems to suggest that our tongues neither be set at the continuous “bombast” level, nor barely audible at the “purring” level. Truly, in the give and take of healthy relationships, the way we share the words we ultimately speak, the sound of our voice, carries far more power than what we think we want to say. Poetry is created to be read aloud, if we truly are to experience the power of the written and printed words. And perhaps, this isn’t so bad a method for us to imitate, when we prepare to speak something of importance to someone. Maybe we need to spend time hearing ourselves “aloud” before approaching someone else with what we want to say.
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