The Grace of Incorruption by Donald Sheehan

Author:Donald Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612617015
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this context, then, let us reflect for a moment upon the sacred essence of psalmic poetry. In the fourth century, when the Nicene Creed was composed by two separate councils some sixty years apart, the Greek word employed by both councils to describe God the Father was poietes, “poet,” usually rendered in English as “Maker.” Despite the rock-solid foundation in both Greek and English for “Maker” as the proper rendition, the Greek word poietes carries primary meanings sometimes blurred by that rendition. To repeatedly profess our firm belief in “one God, Father all-mighty, Poet of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible,” is, I think, to disclose how very weakly and narrowly we usually conceive the essence of poetry. And in the light of the Creed, to conceive in weakness the essence of poetry is simultaneously to conceive in weakness the essence of God. Let us, then, explore the credal significance of poietes for a moment.

The key to the credal comprehension of the Father lies in the assertion of God’s oneness of power to create distinct worlds, heaven and earth, each of which possesses both visible and invisible dimensions. Note very carefully: the invisible world of heaven also possesses a visible dimension while the visible world of earth also possesses an invisible dimension. The essence of the Father’s creativity may thus be seen as residing in His power to hold open four dimensions in two realms—and in doing so in such a way that the Son of the Father becomes the fashioner of all things. The Father’s essence is thus at once exceedingly complex and divinely simple: complex, in the sense that the Father is steering four dimensions in two worlds at the same instant He is giving to His Son the power to create all things; simple, in the sense that the essence of such complexity is the action of loving.

Now, when we turn to the sacred essence of psalmic poetry, we can see how the complex simplicity—and the simple complexity—of the Father’s essence is perfectly expressed in the way wherein the diapsalmic intensities of the nine words are giving shape, in each of the twenty-two stanzas of Psalm 118, to two distinct worlds in four dimensions. That is, in Psalm 118, the nine words connect at every moment the heavenly “thou” of the Father with the earthly “I” of the psalmist; and this connection is, at every moment, being initiated and sustained by the Father’s divine invisibility unceasingly giving itself in love to the psalmist’s earthly visibility—and this action of the Father’s love becomes at every moment incarnate as the psalmist’s song. “Thy statutes have been my song,” says the psalmist (Ps 118:54)—that is, the Father’s acts of self-emptying love have, in their essence, become incarnated in and as the actual shape of the psalmist’s poem—and they have done so (the psalmist continues in the same vein) “[i]n the house of my pilgrimage” (ibid.)—that is, in the actual dwelling place of the psalmist. To have

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