Purple Pastor

Strict Joy

One regret from my last sermon series.  I had hoped to do greater justice to the poet of Lamentation's choice of poetry as medium for his lament, through which God's Word is revealed to us sitting among the ruins of life at times.  Why poetry?  Why not just come out and say what you mean in stark, naked prose?  Why did the poet 'meditate misery and care it into song' (quote from below)?

Not being a poet, I felt my way through it, yet did not find my footing to unearth the 'why,' though I think many of us felt why.  This morning I discovered the 'why,' as described by an Irish poet.  I bought the new CD by the couple who delivered the wonderful musical movie last year, Once (saw it at Starbucks). The title song unearths century-old words from Ireland, that melancholy island of ages-old blues.  So, from "Strict Joy: The Swell Season," I give this gift:

Strict Joy - James Stephens

To-day i felt as poor O'Brien did
When, turning from all else that was not his,
He took himself to that which was his own
— He took him to his verse — for other all he had not,
And (tho' man will crave and seek)
Another all than this he did not need

So, pen in hand he tried to tell the whole tale of his woe
In rhyming; lodge the full weight of his grief in versing: and so did:
Then — when his poem had been conned and cared,
And all put in that should not be left out — did he not find and with astonishment,

That grief had been translated, or was come
Other and better than it first looked to be:
And that this happened, because all things transfer
From what they seem to what they truly are
When they are innocently brooded on
— And, so, The poet makes grief beautiful.

"Behold me now, with my back to the wall,
Playing music to empty pockets!"
So, Raferty, tuning a blind mans plight,
Could sing the cark of misery away:
And know, in blindness and in poverty,
That woe was not of him, nor kind to him.

And Egan Rahilly begins a verse —
"My heart is broken, and my mind is sad ..."
'Twas surely true when he began his song,
And was less true when he had finished it:
— Be sure, his heart was buoyant, and his grief
Drummed and trumpeted as grief was sung!

For, as he meditated misery
And cared it into song — Strict Care, Strict Joy!
Caring for grief he cared his grief away:
And those sad songs, tho' woe be all the theme,
Do not make us grieve who read them now —
Because the poet makes grief beautiful.

And I, myself, conning a lonely heart
— Full lonely 'twas, and 'tis as lonely now
Turned me, by proper, to my natural,
And, now too long her vagrant, wooed my muse:
Then to her — let us look more close to these,
And, seeing, know; and, knowing, be at ease.

Seeing the sky o'ercast, and that the rain had
Plashed the window, and would plash again:
Seeing the summer lost, and the winter nigh:
Seeing inapt, and sad, and fallen from good:
Seeing how will was weak, and wish o'erbearing:
Seeing inconstant, seeing timidity:
Seeing too small, too poor in this and yon:
Seeing life, daily, grow more difficult:
Seeing all that moves away — moving away
... And that all seeing is a blind-mans treat,
And that all getting is a beggars dole,
And that all having is bankruptcy ...

All these, sad all! I told to my good friend,
Told Raferty, O'Brien, Rahilly,
Told rain, and frosted blossom, and the summer gone,
Told poets dead, and captains dead, and kings!
— And we cared naught that these were mournful things,
For, caring them, we made them beautiful.

Excellent, Wayne

I had a coupla thoughts as I stood and talked to people at the end of  our Hope in a House of Blues series Sunday, and a stranger gave me the gift of encouragement.

A man told me he had attended the first and last weeks of HOB.  He drove three hours from near Blacksburg VA to come the first week, because he is a Mike Farris fan and learned of Mike's visit to Lake Forest through a concert website.  Then he told me, 'We drove three hours again to worship with you today, so I could bring my son and show him what excellence looks like in a church.  Thank you for the hard work, preparation, thought, and prayer that clearly goes into everything you do here at Lake Forest.  We were each edified by the worship and teaching this morning.  He has never seen this kind of attention to quality and care, and is tempted to give up on church.'  Tears sprang to my eyes and I did not know what to say, except 'you're welcome, and thank you for taking a moment to encourage me and our leadership- I will pass it along.' 

I'm just like you.  I'm hyper-aware of how far my personal and work life fall short of mine and others' aspirations for each.  Often.  So the occasional glimpse of something done well is a gift.  That is why God calls us to encourage one another - which stimulates us further to love and good deeds.

So I pondered the man from Virginia's comment as I went to say goodbye to our guest blues guitarist.  We hosted more national blues artists this year than ever for HOB.  Mike Farris and Larry Mccray are seriously the Shakira or Lil' Wayne of their genres (hmm, bet they've never suffered those comparisons before).  Both of these world-class blues rockers simply LOVED playing with Kyle, our band, and vocalists.  They were struck by the environment, and our worship tech supported them wholeheartedly and skillfully.   

Having just been complemented on our 'excellence,' I walked into the worship center and thanked God out loud for the excellence of our building, our worship, our leaders - symbolized by the worship team that day.  Kyle has led them to be so excellent at what they do,  that national talent enjoyed playing with them, even learned and joined in on our stuff.  And they were able to do their own music at the same level of excellence they expect in large concert venues with their full-time professional bands and techs. 

Here's why this matters so much to me.   For our blues-guest Larry last Sunday, as far as I could tell, all this meant that a person of high excellence in his profession, who had 'given up on church but not on God' actually darkened the door of a church because of the excellence in it that he related to.  And Larry had a good experience, maybe even a God-experience.  Perhaps you've had that experience when an unchurched friend attended worship with you.

In a church, excellence honors God and reaches people.  Traditional church, rock n roll church, polka church. Whatever your calling, do it with excellence.  If you're a hippie/gen x-y-z church that values extreme informality and intentional shabby-chic imperfections, then do THAT with excellence (hmmm, how would you know if you were excellently shabby?).  In each case, unchurched people of that subculture will be reached.  Do it poorly, half-way, 'just good enough,' and only the committed saints will give it the time of day.  Why God uses excellence this way, I'm not sure (it would over-lengthen this blog to speculate).  But its a fact that he does. 

^"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."  Colossians 3:17    This is a verse we began citing in the early years of Lake Forest Church.  It meant to us that if we do 'whatever we do' at Lake Forest in the name of Jesus, as an expression of thanks to God, that would mean we would do our ministry aspiring toward excellence.  And holding one another accountable for that as leaders.

Oh come on.  If you know me at all, you know I'm not talking about perfection, not slick over-produced performance.  To protect against excellence leading into a performance mentality at Lake Forest, that means we always keep some sort of rawness or spontaneity in the mix, among other things.   It also means we don't measure excellence against others.  We measure it according to available resources, stage of life of our organization, and the unique vision and calling of, in our case, this particular church.  For instance, in our early days as a church in the skating rink, I remember Sundays when I was the full extent of our percussion and rhythm section.  Most of you would not have visited our church a second time back in those days, but we were attempting excellence with who we had at hand.  Mitch White still likes to call me 'bongo boy' on occasion.  I don't think he means it as a compliment.  Another example - many other churches would not call our shabby-chic concrete floors 'excellent.'  We call them 'most excellent.'

That's my take on the excellence principle and how it applies specifically to my life's work, and the work of the leadership team and all leaders of ministry at Lake Forest Church.  How does this apply to personal life?  Be careful, this principle could be twisted into one more reason to feel like a failure before God, and discount the sufficiency of Christ for you, since I can quickly make a list of all the things in my life that are not 'excellent.'  Instead, allow it to be a spur to know ever more clearly the few, very few, things you care about most and are decent at (raising kids, cutting a deal, generosity, protesting an injustice, etc.).  For the sake of glorifying God, and others being encouraged and even affected:  Keep kicking your own butt to do those very few things well, in this manner:

^"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."  Colossians 3:17 

Faith in the New York Times: Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard is one of the most profound Christian saints on the subject of suffering, the blues, doubt, faith, despair and depression.  Writing in the early 1800's, his thoughts have given many a seeker and saint better language with which to understand their own mixture of faith and doubt, blues and hope.  One of our Ministry Partners (thank you, Brian Lyman) alerted me to a current New York Times opinion column titled "Happy Days: The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times."  Today's excellent post is worth passing along to you - both as in introduction to Kierkegaard, and a philosophical understanding of a Christian's hope while in a house of blues.  Its a little dense - try to push through.  Enjoy.

October 28, 2009, 9:30 pm

Kierkegaard on the Couch

By Gordon Marino

All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has been become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced.

These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

Despair is marked by a desire to get rid of the self, an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are.

Called “the Fork” as a child because of his uncanny ability to find a person’s weaknesses and stick it to them, Kierkegaard’s lapidary “Sickness Unto Death” is a study of despair, which in the Danish derives from the notion of intensified doubt. Almost as a challenge to keep out the less than earnest reader, Kierkegaard begins “Sickness” with this famous albeit slightly ironic bit of word play:

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation.

For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the room, the magister continues, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.” Despair occurs when there is an imbalance in this synthesis. From there Kierkegaard goes on to present a veritable portrait gallery of the forms that despair can take. Too much of the expansive factor, of infinitude, and you have the dreamer who cannot make anything concrete. Too much of the limiting element, and you have the narrow minded individual who cannot imagine anything more serious in life than bottom lines and spread sheets.

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. Kierkegaard writes:

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it … precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he cannot bear to be himself.

In America, there is endless talk of the importance of having a dream — that is, a dreamed-up self that you will to become: a millionaire, a surgeon, or maybe the next Dylan or George Clooney. But master of suspicion that Kierkegaard was, he goes on to note that while the man who has failed to become Caesar would have been in seventh heaven if he had realized his dream, that state would have been just as despairing in another way — because in that giddy self-satisfied condition, he would never have come to grasp his true self.

On the issue of depression of which Kierkegaard and his entire family were very well acquainted, Kierkegaard could have been a reductionist. He seems to have recognized that we could be born into the blues. In 1846, he sighed:

I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality, riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its basis in a mis-relation between my mind and body, for (and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and body, has gained an uncommon resiliency.

The spirit is one thing, the psyche another: The blues one thing, despair another.

How might Kierkegaard have parsed the distinction for the Doubting Thomas who will only believe what he can glean on an M.R.I.? Perhaps he would describe it this way.

Each of us is subject to the weather of our own moods. Clearly, Kierkegaard thought that the darkling sky of his inner life was very much due to his father’s morbidity. But the issue of spiritual health looms up with regard to the way that we relate to our emotional lives. Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects. Does the depressive identify himself completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind of fever without significance?

If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to the mental health clinic.

---

Gordon Marino is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. He is author of “Kierkegaard in the Present Age,” and co-editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard.” His new book, “Ethics: The Essential Writings” will be published by Random House this summer. An active boxing trainer, Gordon covers boxing for the Wall Street Journal and is working on a book on boxing and philosophy.

Help H.E.L.P Help N. Meck

I am a founding steering committee member of a local, congregation-based justice initiated called H.E.L.P (Helping Empower Local People).  A group of Lake Forest ministry partners have participated with me in the organizational startup of this new remarkable collection of diverse churches (see below) for the purpose of making a difference in our local communities.

You can help HELP help N. Mecklenburg county by attending our first public launch celebration this Thursday, 7-8:30 pm at Torrence Chapel AME Zion Church (exit 28, toward LKN, right onto Torrence Chapel Rd).  Members of the various congregations will be present to worship together (led by AME Zion!).  Members of local governments (the mayors of Hville, Cornelius and Davidson are all confirmed attendees) will also be present, including candidates for next week's election.  We are celebrating this action-oriented partnership of congregations, while announcing our first concrete action - obtaining house weatherization for local low-income home owners, in order to reduce their energy costs.  Myself and other steering committee members will address the gathering, as well as local people expressing needs in our community.

I make two promises to you if you attend:

1. you will be encouraged/energized/lifted up by worshipping and talking with members of diverse church about local needs - a great example of what we call 'being on the missio dei' with others

2. you will see democracy in action - pointed yes/no questions will be addressed to our mayoral candidates regarding issues we have identified over six months of listening to over 800 local residents; you will also add power to HELP's ability to influence resource allocation in our towns simply by being there.  I hope you can attend!

Here's the invitation/explanation that was sent to area Mayors - it explains HELP more fully:

October 7, 2009

The Honorable ____, Mayor of Cornelius/Huntersville/Davidson, NC

Dear Mayor ___:

We are writing to you on behalf of the North Mecklenburg Sponsoring Committee of Helping Empower Local People (H.E.L.P.), a local non-partisan, broad-based organization of 48 member congregations and organizations, representing over 110,000 people in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.  Fifteen of our congregations make up the North Mecklenburg Sponsoring Committee.  H.E.L.P. works to bring together, train and organize the communities of Charlotte-Mecklenburg across all religious, racial, ethnic, class and neighborhood lines for the public good.

Our primary goal is to strengthen local congregations and institutions, develop local leadership and organize power to act on behalf of justice and the common good.  We hold public and private power holders accountable for their public responsibilities, as well as to initiate actions and programs of our own to solve community and economic problems.

We are multi-issue.  The issues we work on come from within our institutions, from the concerns of the people.  We cross neighborhood, city, racial, religious, and class lines to find common ground and act on our faith and democratic values.  Each year we organize large and participatory meetings of our delegates in order to discuss our vision, develop relationships, strengthen existing partnerships and celebrate public commitments.  Our meetings are hosted by different member institutions throughout Mecklenburg County in an effort to increase ownership and participation.

On Thursday, October 29, 2009, The North Mecklenburg Sponsoring Committee will host its first Public Assembly from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM at Torrence Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church (21517 Torrence Chapel Road, Cornelius, NC 28031). We expect 250-300 H.E.L.P. members to attend, and we would like for you to join us.  We have invited the major candidates for mayors in from the towns of Huntersville and Davidson, and Town Commissioners and Candidates from the three towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, and Davidson, NC.

In 2009, we are taking action to have resources for weatherization services released to our seniors, improve the placement of non-school hour activities for our middle-school and high school youth, job development for our members in transition, and to improve safety in traffic hot spots in our neighborhoods.

We want you to be with us on October 29, and we are willing to meet with you prior to the assembly to prepare you for the event and to clarify any questions you may have about the agenda for that day.

Please confirm your participation.

Sincerely,

The Rev. George Erwin

Senior Pastor, Torrence Chapel AME Zion Church, Cornelius,NC

And Members of the North Mecklenburg H.E.L.P. - Steering Committee Member,

The Rev. Dr. Mike Moses

Senior Pastor, Lake Forest Church, Huntersville Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Byron Davis

Senior Pastor, Mt. Olive Baptist Church, Huntersville, NC

The Rev. Carl Yost

Senior Pastor, Community in Christ Lutheran Church, Cornelius, NC

The Rev. Dr. David Buck

Senior Pastor, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Davidson, NC

The Rev. Vernon Dodd

Senior Pastor, Huntersville Presbyterian Church, Huntersville, NC

Whatever You Do

Today, I'm reblogging from Seth Godin (have you setup up an iGoogle homepage so you can click rss feed on blogs you like, and the most recent post from those blogs all appear on your homepage?  then you can click that recent blog entry when you have time).  It spoke to me big time.  I've been a part of some spectacular 'successes' in Kingdom of God work, and I've been a part of many ho hum days and years (yesterday was not ho hum - i wish I could tell you each of the God-stories from the 6 people-meetings I had yesterday - God's grace on display!!!! but its too private, bummer).  I'm guessing you've done both as well:

Top this!   Diablo Cody on the pressure to outdo herself:

So what kind of pressure did you feel, post-Juno, to write something good?
None.

I don’t believe you.
Seriously. How could I possibly? The experience that I had with Juno is something I could never replicate, ever. First of all, you never have your first baby again. Second, the whole production was really charmed from start to finish. I mean, every moment of it was special. And then it culminated in Oscar nominations...I’m so fortunate that I got to have that experience. Now I almost feel this great calm coming over me. I’d be feeling a lot more pressure if I was still striving for that goal.

Sometimes, the work is the work and the goal isn't to top what you did yesterday. Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record.  (Seth's blog is found at http//www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ )

Mike here again.  Colossians 3:23 says "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men."  Not 'when you think you're about to hit a home run, make a big splash, be the hero, land the get-rich-now-deal.'  But 'whatever you do.'  Which is comforting to me, when I feel the siren song of temptation to top myself every day, or even worse, when I feel that life-sapping temptation to focus on someone else's massive achievement in my field, and live under the gun to measure up or even 'top' that. 

Chill.  whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.  Work hard, with your heart in it - as an act of worship.  When the results rock and you earn the equivalent of an Oscar at work - greeeeattt.  When they don't, greeeeaaat.  Your work was worship.  Done that way, its soul-dignifying and good.  On the other hand, if you can't honestly say you worked hard 'with your heart in it,' as worship to God, then a) you will probably never achieve something that needs topping, and b)your work is sucking your soul, not dignifying it.  I do not wish that for you.  More importantly, God created you for better than that, no matter what your work may be.  I pray this Word from God over your work and mine today - join me.

So what kind of pressure did you feel, post-Juno, to write something good?
None.

I don’t believe you.
Seriously. How could I possibly? The experience that I had with Juno is something I could never replicate, ever. First of all, you never have your first baby again. Second, the whole production was really charmed from start to finish. I mean, every moment of it was special. And then it culminated in Oscar nominations...I’m so fortunate that I got to have that experience. Now I almost feel this great calm coming over me. I’d be feeling a lot more pressure if I was still striving for that goal.

Sometimes, the work is the work and the goal isn't to top what you did yesterday. Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record.  (Seth's blog is found at http//www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ )

Newspaper Interview

Yesterday the Charlotte Observer included an article on our church's 'Hope in a House of Blues' series.  It was in the Lake Norman neighbors section.  The writer did a nice job capturing what we are trying to do.  Here are her questions and my written answers in full.(if you're looking for the blogs I mentioned in church yesterday, they are the last two before this one - scroll down to 'God Never Speaks' 1&2)

1) How did the idea for Hope in a House of Blues come about?  ANSWER:  Our Sunday services are always organized as 4-6 week long 'series' covering a particular subject.  In a planning meeting Kyle Dillard, our worship arts pastor, simply blurted out, 'what if we experimented with four weeks of combining blues-music-as-worship, the blues in peoples’ lives, while you teach what the Bible says about suffering.’  Year after year, we never run out of material – the blues in this world and in our lives are so ever-present.

2) How does the series use art and music to connect spiritually with people?ANSWER:  We use this series to point out the fact that art and music are inherently spiritual activities, allowing us to express both the human spirit and our desire for God in ways different than prose or rational discourse. We aspire to be part of a fresh movement to recapture the vitality of the arts for the purpose of worship.  Blues Music simply does connect spiritually with people.  Our first guest artist, Mike Farris, stated that when he plays the blues based on the American slave worship experience, even naked pot-smoking hippies at the Bonaroo Festival get quiet, tearful, and deal with God in their soul.  This year’s visual art includes paintings in our lobby by residents of the Urban Ministry Men’s Shelter in Charlotte, as well as our Lake Forest visual artists evoking the look and feel of a destroyed city in our worship center.

3) How would you describe the experience of attending a Hope in a House of Blues concert? ANSWER: The experience is usually surprising first and foremost, because every year we fuse the music, visual arts, worship environment, and Bible teaching differently, hoping for something that is more like transformative spiritual performance art as opposed to typical church expectations.

4) Is there any preaching/teaching that goes along with the concerts? ANSWER:  Yes.  Every year I choose a book of the Bible that addresses the collision of human blues with the love of God.  This year, I am teaching the book of Lamentations, which is a set of five ancient Hebrew poems expressing anguish over the destruction of a city, a nation, and individual lives.

5) What do you hope people will experience/take from attending a Hope in a House of Blues event?    ANSWER:  I hope people will experience the presence of God in this fusion worship.  And I hope we will each learn new facets of God’s wisdom for handling the pain and suffering in our lives, as well as being agents of God’s hope to everyone we know who’s currently living in their own House of Blues.

6) How did last week's concert go?   ANSWER: Great.

7) Any other comments about Hope in a House of Blues?    ANSWER: We constantly experiment with a concept of ‘ancient/future worship’ at Lake Forest.  This series does so by combining ancient Biblical teaching, with modern rock and video ambient backgrounds, all held together by 50-200 year old blues and gospel music. It’s always a unique ancient/future blend.

God Never Speaks pt 2

The main commentary I've chosen to help me study Lamentations is "Lamentations & the Tears of the World," by Kathleen O'Connor.  O'Connor on God's silence in this unique book of the Bible:

"God's speechlessness in Lamentations must be a calculated choice, a conscious theological decision...No matter what God said, Lamentations would come to premature resolution, and the book's capacity to house sorrow would dissipate.  Any words from God would endanger human voices.  They would undercut anger and despair, foreshorten protest, and give the audience only a passing glimpse of the real terror of their condition.  Divine speaking would trump all speech."

"The missing voice of God leaves suffering exposed.  In the language of poet Nelly Sachs, it creates an opening between "the rocks of yesterday and tommorrow, held apart like the rims of a wound" (Sachs 220-221).  God's silence in Lamentations leaves wounds festering, open to the air and possibly to healing.  The benefit of exposed wounds is that they become visible and unavoidable.  Left exposed, they require us to see, acknowledge, and attend to them, and then perhaps there can be energy to attend to the wounds of the world.  

God's frightening silence...makes of the poetry a haven for voices of pain.  It prevents us from sliding prematurely over suffering toward happy endings.  It gives the book daring power because it honors human speech. (O'Connor 85-86)."