Welcoming Christ Again, and Again - A Conversation with Luci Shaw
Obviously NOT the photo that ERB printed in their journal. This is the framed photo I keep in the poetry section of my bookshelf. It’s me meeting Luci Shaw at a Laity Lodge retreat in 2010.
Welcoming Christ Again, and Again
A Conversation with Luci Shaw
Interviewed by Tamara Hill Murphy for Englewood Review of Books, Advent 2017 print issue
I read Luci Shaw’s prose before I ever knew about her poetry. The anthology, The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing (edited by Leland Ryken), included her essay, “Beauty and the Creative Impulse,” that taught me about the mutuality of art and faith. Throughout the more than 30 books of prose and poetry she’s written, Luci Shaw’s words reflect a Damascus-sized jolt that awakens readers again and again to the tandem beauty of body and spirit, heaven and earth. It was an honor to interview Ms. Shaw for this Advent issue.
Englewood Review of Books: In books like God With Us and Accompanied by Angels, your devotional writing and poetry have helped me better understand and appreciate the season of Advent. Did you grow up celebrating the liturgical year with your family? How has marking the weeks of Advent formed your relationship with God?
Luci Shaw: The season of Advent, or Arrival, celebrates the extraordinary moment in time when Jesus, God's holy seed, entered our planet through a human birth canal. It is only in the last few decades that Advent has become real to me, other than as a family time for giving and receiving gifts. Back then it was a jolly time of presents and roast beef, but low key, with a suspicion that its origin might have been a pagan feast. Since my entry in 1986 into the liturgical embrace of the Episcopal church Advent has become an integral and significant part of the Christian year for me. A time for welcoming Christ again, and again.
I have always found in Mary, the mother of Jesus, a model for loving obedience. I've loved imagining how overwhelming the surprise announcement by Gabriel must have been, as was the enormity of the God-given role required of her, to be God's little mother, open to both shame and glory. I long to be as welcoming as Mary, whose response to the Annunciation was Fiat mihi--”Be it unto me as you have said.” I realize more and more that we too can become pregnant with God by the Holy Spirit -- “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Col. 1:27)
ERB: In the introduction to Accompanied by Angels, you describe yourself as a young girl handcrafting cards, including original poems, to give to all your friends and family - a tradition you’d kept alive up to the printing of that book. Do you still send your friends an original card each year?
LS: Every year, the designing and sending of a Christmas card absorbs me and my husband John. I've already (in October) written a poem that John, who is a skilled artist in pen and ink, will illustrate for sending sometime in December. Postage is costly, and our list of friends is long, but I hope that our card will assure them that we love and remember them
ERB: As we approach Advent each year, it feels like the weight of tragedy and crisis grows heavier. Where does the poetry of lament fit into the season of Advent?
LS: T. S. Eliot wrote “The Journey of the Magi” and much of his poetry dealt with discouragement with the condition of the world of his time: “A cold coming we had of it, / Just the worst time of year / For a journey, and such a long journey. . .” We can almost read our own times of crisis into Eliot's poem, with its conclusion: “No longer at ease, here, / in the old dispensation. / With an alien people clutching their gods.”
ERB: The poems in this issue of Englewood Review of Books, like so many of your others, gain layers of meaning each time I read them. Thank you!
As I read “Anew”, I confess that I had to look up the definition for the word “hellebore”. I loved the sound of it, but didn’t know its meaning. I can think of other poems you’ve written that gave me the same opportunity. Is that something you intend for your readers - to expand our use and understanding of language?
LS: I've always been fascinated by botanical names and their origins. The hellebore, is also known as “the Christmas Rose,” for its habit of blooming in winter. Language introduces us to the richness of etymology. Linnaeus introduced this system of naming and categorizing plants. I had four years of Latin in high school, and then Greek in college. We can trace how words and their origins enrich our understandings of culture and history. So yes, I long to spark in readers an interest in words.
ERB: “God’s Acts in Acts” contains a new favorite phrase for me: “A wildfire, it licked / the heads of the locals…” In the next lines, the poem contrasts the visual of a fire expanding from the location of the “locals” until it engulfs “across borders.” Beyond the vivid description of one event in Acts, does this poem also include an exhortation for the Church today?
LS: When we read the history of God at work in human beings, and realize that this work is ongoing, even miraculous events in Scripture become glimpses of the possible for any period in history. So yes, revival, renewal by the fire of the Spirit is possible and to be our expectation. Too often we are content with the ways things have always been done and are on- going. Yet as the old Christian camp song says: “It only takes a spark to get a fire going.” When I think of fire, I have to consider its properties. It can be both destructive (think the wildfires in California) but also warming and enlightening. I'd like to believe that Christians continue to fulfill the latter definition—our lives alight with God's divine fire, and re-ignited when we've grown cold and careless.
ERB: Your essay of many years ago, “Beauty and the Creative Impulse,” that taught me how to perceive art as a Christian. In particular, one of the paragraphs you wrote became a signpost for my own work:
We were each, in the image of our Creator, created to create, to call others back to beauty, and the truth about God's nature, to stop and cry to someone preoccupied or distracted with the superficial, "Look!" or "Listen!" when, in something beautiful and meaningful we hear a message from beyond us, and worship in holiness our Creator who in his unlimited grace, calls us to become co-creators of beauty.
Could you contextualize that call in light of current events that seem to daily increase our appetite for the ugly rather than the beautiful? How can artists respond to the continual disaster reel of current events with a focus toward truth, goodness, and beauty rather than sentimentality or cynicism?
LS: Beauty and art and creative living are medicine for the wounds of the world. Art builds, reconstitutes, reconstructs, enlivens. Creators made in the image of the Creator, we become signposts for life and the celebration of meaning and beauty rather than ugliness and destruction. Of course art is meant to reflect reality, and how we interpret that actuality shows up in what Renaissance painters called chiaroscuro, (literally, clear/obscure), the technique of allowing shadow to show up light, by contrast. Current events and disasters and the cynicism they generate may be negated and redeemed in the lives of those who make beauty a signpost in their lives and art.
ERB: In light of that, what do you read to understand current events?
LS: It's easy for us to get sucked into pessimism. We are deeply discouraged about the state of the world. The news media call our attention to disasters and calamities, of which there seems to be an abundance. Somehow evil in action seems more exciting than the ideals of truth, goodness and beauty. I'd like to think that lives of love and heroism and acts of generosity can outshine narcissism and cruelty. Jesus is our prime example. I also ponder the lives of the prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah and their dire messages into the confusion and perfidy of their day. Not everyone is called to be a prophet, but prophetic lives and actions speak in our day as well in the traumatic upheavals that may lie ahead.
ERB: You’ve given young writers the advice to “read the best writers and poets.” Who have been the best writers for you? Whose work has fed your soul?
LS: I avoid self-help books that often seem formulaic! I like memoirs, if they tell the truth. I love humor (for instance, cartoons in the New Yorker, which I also read for penetrating articles on culture, books, films, music and politics). I appreciate The Christian Century and its analysis of issues, its poetry, and its book reviews. I love biographies, including Malcolm Guite's new Mariner, a biography of Coleridge and Paul Mariani's biographies of major poets. I also enjoy collections of letters (Flannery O'Connor), and of course, volumes of poetry by poets such as Mary Oliver, Paul Willis, Tania Runyan, Jeanne Murray Walker, Scott Cairns, Wendell Berry, Richard Wilbur—so many fine writers of faith. I read the quarterly journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery and find that such literature is full of truth, not dead, not corrupted. Greg Wolfe, Image editor, is my hero, persisting in spite of financial obstacles to produce one of the country's finest quarterlies.
ERB: You have long been generous to the next generations of artists of faith. How can we continue that legacy going forward?
LS: As my generation of writers ages and enters whatever's next, new cohorts and gatherings of writers will always be stirring into life. The English language is both rich and slippery, and styles and schools of writers will evolve, cohere, split and regenerate. The creative spirit is more than a single lit candle, vulnerable to the winds of change or a dying cause. Those of us who have pioneered and sustained such growth have tried to model life in the bewildering context of culture. God's Holy Spirit will always be available to those of us who believe in the transcendent power of literature, its beauties, its revelations, its power to enlighten.
ERB: You’ve written and spoken about various mentors in your life such as your Wheaton English professor Dr. Clyde Kilby, the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, and your friendship with Madeleine L’Engle. Who else would you add to that list?
LS: I'm lucky in my life to have had influencers for good. I think of them as my heroes--Clyde Kilby, my professor at Wheaton, who encouraged me to write, Madeleine L'Engle, my friend for thirty-five years of writing, editing, and challenging the system. (We traveled, conversed, and joined in Eucharistic communion for many years). Barbara Braver, who was Madeleine's house-mate, became a “telephone friend” of mine since we now live on different coasts of the U. S. My own father was my hero--a surgeon, photographer, adventurer, explorer, and missionary; his zest for life was contagious. He loved my early poems and showed them off to his friends. My friend Karen, with whom I have camped, knitted, written, and played Scrabble is another. She is a brilliant writer, and part of a monthly writer’s group that also includes Mike Mason, and the actor and playwright, Ron Reed. I have poet friends with whom I workshop my writing over the Internet, and this includes my son John, a doctor and poet. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and mystic, has given me insight into the creative process as an aspect of spiritual life.
ERB: What superstar would you like to invite into your home for a conversation?
LS: Bishop Tutu, Barack Obama, Bono, Leonard Sweet, Mary Oliver, Philip Yancey, Walt Wangerin, Rumi, G. M. Hopkins.
ERB: In some of your more recent nonfiction books, such as The Crime of Living Cautiously and Adventure of Ascent, you’ve approached the reality of aging with enthusiasm and a sense of adventure. This is such a countercultural viewpoint. Thank you! I loved what you said about aging during an interview with Leslie Leyland Fields last year, “I’m very curious about what it’s going to be like to have to give up my freedom [as I get older].” What does that sort of enthusiasm look like for you now, as you approach 90?
LS: I’ll be reluctant to give up the freedom and spontaneity of driving, and the delight of camping in the wilderness. As my world will inevitably begin to close in, I hope my spirit will still respond to beauty and love. I hope my memory will still be able to find the worlds to express images and ideas, and my heart to give and receive love and grace. It’s hard to anticipate future restrictions, but I know the stresses of air travel make me think twice about plane trips!
Aging is something you are never quite prepared for. It is incremental, cell by cell (including brain cells), inability to do what has always seemed easy and natural, aching bones, depleting energy, fear of losing common skills, including vocabulary, concern about the fulfilling of responsibilities. Deafness and blurring vision. I'm very curious about what will come next, and I hope it includes poetry! I have a vision of heaven as a place where I can play Scrabble with little mother-of-pearl tiles, a thought that delights me with its utter fantasy!
Luci Shaw is a poet and essayist, who since 1986 has been Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver. Author of over 35 books of poetry and non-fiction prose, her writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals. In 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Find her online at LuciShaw.com