Our Lady of Assumption Church

For fifty years Emily Dickenson lived quietly in her parents' home until her death in 1886. She was a great letter writer, but during her lifetime no one knew that she was a prolific and an extraordinary poet. She wrote more than a thousand poems, of which only four were published during her life time. One that I have chosen today was #919 written around 1864 and published four years after her death in 1890. Her simple, intense feelings are recognizable even today.

My friends, unless we are spoiled, you and I are natural poets. A child becomes a poet without having been taught. A child is playful with life and reverent in its presence. The most effective persons we meet in life are those who never get over their childhood. Life never really begins for the human heart - for you and for me - until we behold beauty and deem it worth remembering.

A child or a poet is sensitive to experience as a crucial factor in relating to life. Experience is the most immediate consciousness of reality which we have. It tells us what happens to us when we touch reality.

Experience is the record and impression of the world on a human being… it is what happens to a person as he or she begins to see and hear; to converse with and wonder about the reality in which one lives. Experience happens when the poet in us runs free into the world and takes the shock of its pain and its joy. It is an implicit act of reason, a perception not learned but lived, assimilated into one's flesh and blood rather than by one's intellect. It can, of course, be misused as can reason or will. Nothing, including God, is impervious to our misuse. Yet, for all this, experience, immediacy with life is what we need desperately today not only to be secular in a human manner but also to be religious in a God like manner.

My friends, there is no such thing as a poet who is not open to the transcendent. Every poet has heard the song of mystery which life is and sings one's response, sometimes in measured words, sometimes in broken syllables, sometimes, like a dancer, with the rhythm of one's own body… sometimes with the tears in one's eyes… the laughter of one's heart… the searching touch of someone who loves and is loved.

No poet is bound to one age of history, confined to a country, entangled in only one world, be it secular or sacred. Every poet strains for the mystery beyond all the mystery of life, the song which makes us all sing… the light which without physical presence illumines life itself. If we have lost touch with the transcendent thankfulness for life, lost contact with God and the gifts of his nearness, if we have wandered so far from life that we can no longer believe it has a Creator or that the Creator had grace to give. This has happened because we have ceased being poets. Humankind is a natural poet and every poet is instinctively religious.

Oftentimes, we become like the child who has too many gifts and who no longer plays with any of them. We must put aside our toys and touch life again. We must become poets or else we shall die. We must become poets so that our efficiency will cede again to tenderness and so that we might come to feel life rather than manage it. We must become poets who are no longer strangers to our emotions, no longer afraid of our tears, hesitant with laughter, ill at ease with affection.

Make this time of the year a homecoming… home with family, friends, but first of all with ourselves. It is a time to become poets again. Give thanks to God with gusto, enthusiasm, with laughter, with dance, with a poetic heart. Is there poetry within me? Yes, there is… it is within all of us and thank God for that… thank God for everything. Become a poet again!