Poetry, Peace & Wild Prophets: Finding Beauty in Life's Contrasts | Rev. Tonetta Landis-Aina

Words have been my companions since childhood, particularly beautiful words arranged with precision and grace. Or to put it more simply: I have loved poetry since I was a little child.

I can still vividly recall a defining moment from second grade when each student was tasked with memorizing and reciting a poem before the class. With my parents' help, I chose what I believed was an appropriate piece. But as I sat watching my classmates deliver their Shel Silverstein selections one by one, a growing sense of unease settled over me. Had I misunderstood the assignment?

When my name was called, I forced my small body to the front of the room. With all the confidence I could muster, I began to recite Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son":

Well, son, I'll tell you,
life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare...

I delivered those words with all the elegance and verve an eight-year-old could summon. When I finished, I was met with blank stares from my classmates who clearly didn't grasp the sophisticated use of Black English vernacular in modern poetry. Truth be told, neither did I. I was simply enchanted by the sound of the words lifting off the page.

The Evolution of a Poetry Lover

That early love of poetry followed me into my teenage years, when I began writing my own brooding, angsty pieces—perhaps some of you remember doing the same. For me, these poems often explored the particular pain of holding what I believed at the time to be forbidden attractions.

Later, as an English teacher, I both taught poetry and discovered more of it during my morning commutes, listening to NPR's poetry segment at 6:35 each day. It was during this time that I encountered Ann Porter's "Music," a poem that captured me completely:

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

The poem poses a haunting question: "Why is it that music at its most beautiful opens a wound?" It goes on to suggest an answer through an ancient legend—that we were made for paradise, and when we encounter transcendent beauty, it awakens a deep homesickness for our true home.

The Essential Nature of Poetry

These days, I read less poetry than I once did, and I feel this as a profound loss to my soul. We need poetry. It has the power to slow us down, to help us pay attention, to move us from appreciating words on a page to recognizing the poetry of the world around us.

As Richard Beck writes about Celtic Christianity, "Poetry is a spiritual practice and a resource for re-enchantment. Poetry sees the world through enchanted eyes, bringing into view the deeper meanings, signs, and mysteries at work in everyday things." Reading and writing poetry is practicing a sacramental imagination—a way of seeing that looks both at things and through them to reveal the divine.

Not everyone loves poetry, of course, which raises the question: What makes a good poem? In 2002, Marilyn Singer posed this question to writers and editors, and three responses particularly resonated with me:

J. Patrick Lewis said, "A good poem is a blind date with enchantment."

Joseph Bruchac offered, "A good poem is like medicine. It can be made up of almost anything, but only when its ingredients are particular and the right proportions—neither too much nor too little—can it affect your life."

But my favorite definition came from Patrice Vecchione: "Good poems can tell us what we already know in our bones but had never seen or heard or even put into words before. Good poetry gives us ourselves as we've never had who we were before. It gives us each other, shortens the gap between one and another."

The Poetry of Advent

As we move through Advent this year, I'm convinced we need the poetry of Christmas more than ever. After a challenging election season, after watching devastation unfold in Gaza that Amnesty International has now officially called a genocide, through our personal disappointments and losses—many of us could use a blind date with enchantment, could benefit from medicine in just the right proportions, need other ways of knowing that align with the logic of our dreams.

This is why we're incorporating more poetry into our Advent services. Today, I want to explore a traditional Advent text about John the Baptist through this poetic lens. John can sometimes feel out of place during December's merrymaking, but we need him. As one Advent devotional puts it, "The love that descended to Bethlehem is not the easy sympathy of an avuncular God, but a burning fire whose light chases away every shadow, floods every corner, and turns midnight into noon."

Consider Lucille Clifton's stunning poem "John":

somebody coming
in blackness like a star
and the world
be a great bush on his head
and his eyes be fire
in the city
and his mouth
true as time

John makes his home in the wilderness, the same physical and spiritual geography that shaped the Israelites' new identity after their liberation from slavery. He lives beyond empire's reach, eating the food of the poor—locusts and wild honey. His message echoes what Jesus will soon preach: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

Finding Peace Through Contrast

Richard Rohr once observed that John's diet of locusts and honey reminds us that prophets willingly encounter both the good and the bad, the bitterness and sweetness of life. They don't shield themselves from either. This is true for anyone seeking to lead a prophetic life in Jesus' way. Just as Jesus both wept and feasted under empire, so must we.

I have a deep conviction that genuine peace—for ourselves and our world—can only be found by willingly encountering both sides of life. By experiencing both bitterness and sweetness, we align ourselves with reality's truth, even when that truth appears paradoxical.

John uses the image of a winnowing fork—a tool used to separate wheat from chaff—to speak about transformation. While this is often interpreted as separating people into saved and unsaved, I prefer to think about it differently during Advent: each grain has a husk that must be blown away before it becomes nourishing. What are the husks that hold us back from becoming nourishing in the ways God intends? What old thought patterns, addictions, attachments, or performances of goodness need to fall away?

The Path Forward

Our tendency is to believe that peace will come when others change. But John's message doesn't allow us to pass the buck. Our own willingness to change is intrinsically linked to our ability to welcome peace. The good news is that the Prince of Peace is coming—it's not a matter of if, but when and how often.

Our work, as Mary Oliver would say, is to pay attention from within both the bitterness and sweetness of the world. Our work is to change, to adjust our hearts' terrain, to allow the limiting husks to be blown away so we can receive peace when it comes.

Let me close with Oliver's "First Snow," which offers another image of the peace we seek:

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty
and what the meaning...

The poem ends with the observer walking out "into the silence and the light, under the trees, and through the fields," finding that though questions remain unanswered, the very act of walking through beauty feels like an answer in itself.

This Advent, may we nourish our imaginations with the peace John sees on the horizon. May we use the poetry of creation and the poetry of the world to guide us. May we remain open to both pain and beauty, ready for transformation, awake to the sacred in every moment.