These days, mention the word “church” and what people think of is a building. We say that we “go” to church, clearly indicating that we consider church a destination rather than a living body, the very body of Christ. We fail to see how limiting this idea can be, because we have drifted so far from God’s original plan for His churches. Here is Part 3 of our blank verse essay, Absimilation, entitled “An Unworthy Path.”

Christians today like innovation. All things new. New is the wave of the future, so we like to believe. But God calls us to hold on to old truths, old ways, and, yes, old words.

It’s likely that, should a believer from the first century manage to arrive in one of our churches, he would not recognize it as such. The Church today has drifted from the model we see in the New Testament, and we are unaware and unconcerned. But we cannot deny that the churches in this country are in a state of decline, and this situation bodes ill, not only for the churches, but for our nation as well. Here is Part 1 of Absimilation, an essay in blank verse.

John 2.23-3.21

And many people, when they saw what He

had done while He was in Jerusalem

for Passover, believed that He must be

the Son of God, as He had said to them,

and trusted in His Name. But Jesus knew

their hearts. He knew the motives of all men

and needed no one to advise or to

explain to Him the heart of any man.

Thus, to commit to them He would not do.

The primary reason to take up reading and studying both poetry and theology is that these can show us paths for journeying with Jesus through our lives. Poetry and theology can point us to Jesus, inviting us to consider Him in ways that can make His Presence with us more real and continuous.

To many readers, poetry represents a kind of mysticism. We know the poet is trying to say something, but we’re not quite sure what it is. Perhaps he’s just inviting us to have some sort of inward and personal encounter with his words, to lead us in making our own poem out of the lines, images, structure, form, and all the rest he supplies?

We have seen that among the aspects of a work of literature which identify it as poetry are a certain employment of form, rhythm, rhyme, and image.

The heavy lifting of poetry is by the images poets choose to convey meaning and experience, together with the rhyme schemes they adopt to add musicality to the verse. Images can be of various kinds, as also can rhymes. Images and rhyme are the muscle and flesh of a poem.

Images come into play when poets use one thing to stand for another. Images are primarily of two sorts, metaphors and similes, which are simply metaphors introduced by “like” or “as”. In a metaphor a poet gives us something familiar to help us understand and experience something less familiar. A good image can make a lasting impression and convey a deeply meaningful experience.