Let Us Return to our Nursery Rhymes

“You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm, with which the LORD your God brought you out. The LORD your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear” (Dt. 7:19), says Moses in his final sermon to the nation he led. And with these words he reminds them of the something even greater than the history that, if you’re in Deuteronomy, you probably read in Exodus. This particular portion of the sermon is a call to courage and out of fear, to not be afraid of what could possibly happen as they conquer the land given to them. It’s not just about the history, the signs and wonders. Though those are brilliant and deserve your full attention. The movies don’t do the story justice because they can’t. Even were you to have a time machine and be able to stand in Pharoah’s palace and see it all go down, that would still not trump the Scriptural account of what happened in those days. It was amazing. It was incomprehensible. It was wonderful.

But, as we said, Moses is not simply reminding the nation of what they lived through. He wrote the story down so that he wouldn’t have to. No, he is doing more than simply capturing the history for their sake, he’s capturing their own imaginations. Not in the way that conjures up a rainbow in your mind when I say that word (a fascinating association that we cannot tease out here), but in the way that he is saying to them “Remember the things you saw and imagine the things that a God like that will do for you when He tells you He’s going to conquer for you.” Play it out in your mind. Can you? Better yet, can you get past the Dreamworks version (however good you think it is) of the story playing in your head to even see the story playing out on the page before your eyes?

Let us put that on the table for a minute and speak of another point. There is something of a paradox that exists for poets that, if you’ve never tried to write a poem, you might be unaware of. If you have never written a poem, put this down and go attempt. It’s a good exercise. Now, if you’re back, or still reading, you might notice that what we mostly write, when we start on poetry, is something like “Roses are red, Daisies are yellow, Little John is a silly fellow.” Or, in slightly more technical terms, we rhyme. Most novice poets do this. Some, perhaps, because the only poetry that they know rhymes. Others, (and more to the point) because it is, in their minds, simpler. Leave the free-verse to the professionals, you might say. To which they may be partly right and partly wrong. Give me two poets who churn out the same number of poems each year, one writing only free-verse and one who only writes in forms, and the good money would be on the formulaic poet as the superior. But, you may say, how can that be? The one man is bound by all these rules and conventions that he may only bend but never break; the other has no rules except those of spelling (though even those remain up for grabs). You would be right, but it would be our understanding of the little bird imagination that has become the sticking point.

This seems to be a particular failure of our modern era to think in such terms. Whitman is generally credited as the first around 1855, though it really came into its own during the Modernist period following WWI. The greatest poets in history are rarely free-verse exclusive poets and the greatest poems in history are generally formulaic. The evidence simply does not bear out the assertion. Free-verse is newer, but it is by no means better and even those who do it well, do well only in drawing on the shadow of forms. There is a reason for this phenomenon, and it is the reason for our little idiom. Imagination must be captured. The bars and perches of form and rhyme in a poem help us as readers better appreciate the glorious bird of imagination, and as poets they help us cage and preen our bird. Without them, at best we catch a glimpse of her overhead as she flies by, or maybe the flash of plumage at the other end of a field as we look around. She is certainly not fed and preened. She is wild and, being wild, she is somewhat unproductive. Most poets of any caliber have figured this out, and so the general lifecycle so-to- speak of the poet is to begin with nursery rhymes, throw it away for “adult” free-verse, and then find that they need the form or at least the illusion of a form for a brilliant poem to materialize. The bird is too wild without it. Thus, the paradox has appeared that those poems that we think of as “professional” or “adult” are, in fact, rarely the most professional and most adult of poems. They are, at best, a medium proficiency poem.

It is to this paradox that I appeal when I remind us of our Lord’s words, “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it,” (Mk 10:15). By which He, in part, means “let us return to our nursery rhymes”. As the Church, we have let our imagination free, thinking that without the bars we might better admire her. But she is wild and lazy. She flew just out of sight and sits until you run up after her and then does it all again. We thought we were doing the modern thing, and in one sense we were. Yet, that is the same sense in which Shakespeare will be memorized for centuries and E. E. Cummings, though famous, will only be in literature books. One was modern. One was profound.

There are many ways that we have done this to ourselves: “contemporary” worship; non-liturgical service; abolishment of membership; lack of catechesis; etc. The thought was that by removing these bars, opening up her cage, we might usher in a new era of Church artistry. This was not the case. Any good poet would have told us so before we began. Let us examine the evidence, the experiment has lasted at least fifty years now, depending on where you start it, (McGavran in the 50s? Azusa Street? The First Great Awakening?) so tell me, where are the great artists? Are there any better musicians/composers than Bach and Handel? Even if there were, you wouldn’t hear them at any church today, which opt instead for Hillsong and Elevation. Maybe that’s the best we have to offer. What about painters? Anyone to raise a brush against Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Raphael? Poets better than Eliot, Milton, or Alighieri?

The paradox is in great effect on a large scale. We have produced almost no one of historical note with our free-verse Christianity. We have moved away from the forms of doctrine and our poems have simply suffered. That which should have produced more greatness, unrestrained, unburdened, has only produced chaos. For that is what a poem with no form at all devolves to – chaos. I have yet to see a poet really take that freedom as seriously as possible, for spelling, grammar, and even definitions are still a sort of form. The end of free verse is not even Cummings’ “I(a) A leaf falls on loneliness”, it is a similar sort of poem that the poet must come out and grunt at us (for defined words are a form), by which we, the audience, are supposed to understand that the poem we read about leaves was in fact about a wave in the sea. Divorced from some rules we become the cavemen that Evolution says we once were. If any poet were serious enough to take his free-verse work to this degree I admit that he would become the first missing link that these scientists have been combing the earth to find. He would do that field, at least, a major service.

However, it is not the civilizational scale that I am primarily interested in. It is the personal. Not all, or even many, of us had the potential to become Bach. And though we have asserted that, robbed of his nursery rhymes, there could be no Bach, we have yet pointed out what the average armchair theologian has become without his nursery rhymes. Make no mistake, every Christian is a theologian, though every Christian may not consider himself a musician or poet.

While we have let our imagination run wild, we must occasionally notice that our attention is flying around with her. Birds of a feather. Without our nursery rhymes, without our forms, we have lost not only our imagination but also our attention. Tradition has become some collection of dusty old tomes that don’t matter to our imagination and church has become merely the entertainment that can make at least our attention sit still for a bit (though our imagination will never sit to watch the mind-killing drab that goes on most auditoriums on Sunday). We have convinced ourselves that one bird slightly close at hand is better than two in the bush, which we would have if we went back to that dreary liturgical stuff.

Moses couldn’t give his sermon to us today. Firstly, because he likely didn’t have a light show and some extreme prop to illustrate his point, thus our attention would have flown off, and second, because the imagination he’s trying to capture lies too far out of reach for most of us to even see it. The first error is seeing these birds as the same. Attention is a common bird, a hawk, that can be trained and will go and sit and fly when told-if trained. But imagination is a raven, cunning and glorious. Stare at her plumage and it will shift and draw you deeper, but she can and will escape our cage as soon as she can. Keeping her is hard, but training her is impossible. Yet, if you keep attention close at hand, she won’t fly away nearly as much. The ancient way was not to entice attention to a close branch, but to train her and thereby keep imagination near.

In this way, our faith is not at odds with our imagination and attention but is fostered by them. Attention points us at some words of Scripture, some idea of our Savior or St. Paul or some other, and our cage, our doctrines, tell us that such idea is infinitely deep. Captured such, our imagination can draw us in with fractal patterns on her feathers, ever deeper, ever filling. We cannot exhaust her beauty, if only we can keep her in the cage.

We must not let our heads and some assumed embarrassment tell us that the rhymes are for the nursery and the cages and bars are for the dark ages. We have tried to make do without them and failed miserably, our imagination has flown the coop, our art has done the same, and our children threaten to follow the bird right out of our upholstered seats and well-tuned lightshows and into the secular world. You saw the signs and wonders with your own eyes. You’ve feasted at the table of the sacrificed lamb. You were buried and reborn through the water of your baptism. You’ve seen the wonders. Don’t let any tell your imagination to leave these in the nursery, for that’s where our beautiful imagination likes to nest.