I have just had three poems published in As Surely As the Sun Literary Journal. You can read them by following this link. I’m going to publish commentaries on each of them in the next three weeks, starting today.
Sometimes I simply want to be inside of a story as if I were inside of a painting. The colors, the scene, the shape of clouds on a far horizon, the figures in the foreground, they all invite me in. But my participation is enhanced by noting the artist’s skill, the way that one color speaks to another. The way that an array of tones and tints leads the eye around the canvas, and gives it balance. When I sit to practice *lectio divina* with a scripture story, my prayer is enhanced by whatever small knowledge I’ve gained of the story’s artistry.
The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is beautiful, as much for its craft as its meaning. Jesus and the disciples are on the other side of the Jordan, where they are safe from Herod, who is seeking Jesus to take his life. The Jordan, of course, is the river that the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land. Moses died within sight of it but never crossed it himself. John the Baptist called the crowds from Jerusalem to come to the river and cross it again, and have that crossing be their baptism, the entry into a promised land of new life. He baptized Jesus there, and Jesus came up out of the waters, like a new creation. Given all of this, the disciples’ retreat to the safety of the other side of the Jordan feels like a surrender, as if they are giving up on the promise and the possibilities of living in a new way.
Mary and Martha don’t know where Jesus has gone, but the Jordan River is still part of their story. After all, water circulates. It evaporates. It comes down as rain. It flows. The waters of the Jordan are in the air around us, particulate and unnoticed, there to be breathed in, or to condense so that we can drink them. Lazarus lays dying, and his sweat contains some atom of the Jordan, the most minute promise and possibility. The allegory of rebirth.
Water. It flows everywhere in this poem. Sweat and tears are returned to the air. The river marks a boundary and a passage. Water flows from mothers at birth. It seeps slowly from the body after death. It washes away the dust of the grave. It is the blue of the painting. It is in the painted sky, in the embroidered flowers on the sister’s robes, in the flow of the river, in Jesus’s robes as he wades across. In the droplets that linger as he steps along the road, making his way into the hills. Its movement is its explanation, its need, and purpose. The poem serves nothing less than water.
KPB Stevens 