Preface

      A Whisper

      Our life is but a whisper

      amid the screaming world.

      Acknowledgments

      Deep praise is due to my wife, Barbara, with whom I had delightful tête-à-têtes on the meaning of these poems, so raising their levels, and to David Reynolds, who never seems to tire of improving my style, grammar, theology, and the overall impression a book can make.

      My gratitude spills over to Wipf & Stock for continuing its commitment to publishing worthy Christian poetry and to Kyle Lundburg for exceptional typesetting skills.

      Thanks, too, belong to Robert Meier for developing my film and making such wonderful prints. Also, I should commend Rockbrook Camera in Omaha for putting my negatives onto a CD.

      I shouldn’t forget family, friends, teachers, and neighbors, who had to endure my “creative” eccentricities.

      Credit is given here for first publishing the following poem:

      “My Mystic Eclogue” in Old Hickory Review

      Introduction

      Bearing a New Song into Your Presence

A “characteristic common to God and man,” mystery writer Dorothy Sayers declares, is “the desire and ability to make things.”1 In the book of Genesis, creation is not a one-time event, but a continuous, ongoing process. God did not wind up the world like a clock, as many eighteenth-century Deists insisted, then let it tick away on its own.2 Rather, God is always creating, sustaining, preserving, animating, and coaxing his universe into fruitfulness. Augustine posited that if God did not exert his creative will at each and every moment, the universe would simply collapse.3 “All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond,” notes the Russian Orthodox theologian Philaret of Moscow; “above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.”4

The ultimate philosophical conundrum, according to seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Leibniz, is “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”5 Multiplicity, instead of zero? Or, as William James boldly asserts, “from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.”6 Christians believe that God gave birth to the universe ex nihilo. He did not stir together a brew of pre-existing matter; no, he invented time and space, setting the great chain of being into motion—stretching from amoebas to primates. In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis has the lion, Aslan (who stands for Christ), sing the land of Narnia into existence. With “gentle, rippling music,” he made the valley “green with grass.” From the “deep, prolonged notes” of the creator, “a line of dark firs sprang up on a ridge . . . And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes,” primroses began “suddenly appearing in every direction.”7

Second-century theologian Irenaeus draws on a quite different metaphor to describe creation. He refers to the Son and Holy Spirit as the “hands of God.” By this, he meant that God needed no tools external to himself to accomplish his work. The Son and the Spirit, who are so very close to the Father yet still distinct from him, resemble the two hands of a human being. 8 With these bare hands, as it were, God formed the entire cosmos—everything we see and all that we do not even know how to detect. Think, for instance, of angels or the modern scientific notion of “dark matter.”

In Genesis, God calls, fashions, distinguishes, and names a broad assortment of elements—sun, moon, stars, seas, land, birds, fish, and creeping things. This universe, with its billions of worlds, stretches in every known direction; the findings of modern astronomy even indicate that it is actually expanding. “And if God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us,” insists the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, “if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths . . . we have misunderstood . . . the words of Christianity.”9 Or, as nineteenth-century American actress Charlotte Cushman declares, “[W]hen God conceived the world, that was Poetry; he formed it, and that was Sculpture; he colored it, and that was Painting; and then, crowning work of all, he peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.”10

Each of us is an actor in God’s great play. But I am afraid that he did not give us a script to memorize; instead, he encourages improvisation. In fact, a number of the great discoveries in history appear to have been accidents. Serendipity is a word coined by Horace Walpole to depict that happy condition of someone who fails to find what he originally sought, yet, in the process, stumbles upon something just as good or even better.11 This was based on what happened to the heroes in the old Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip.”12 But to experience serendipity, we must ever be vigilant, with our eyes wide open. One is reminded of the lad who was called upon to read aloud in class. After the teacher had thanked him for his elocution, she asked if he would kindly explain what he had just read. “I don’t know,” he mumbled, “I wasn’t listening.”13

Fortunately, there are moments when God makes us acutely aware. “Everybody knows such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,” notes novelist Dorothy Canfield, “when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child’s eyes moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature, a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.”14

      Each day I take time for prayer