Rita Mae Reese: “Once on a road trip to Atlanta, Georgia, I came across a copy of The Habit of Being, the collected letters of Flannery O’Connor. Then, I had no faith to speak of, not even in myself. In one of the letters, O’Connor wrote to a friend: ‘If I live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what could be more comical or more terrible than an angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch grinding her teeth?’ I return to O’Connor’s stories and letters again and again, each time recognizing more of my comical, terrible self and—more surprisingly—the seeds of faith.” (web)
Peter E. Murphy: “December, 1971, a month before Bloody Sunday, I was hitchhiking through Londonderry, too drunk to realize it was a war zone. When my ride ran a barricade, soldiers lifted their automatic weapons and opened fire. A week later in Limerick, I met Bahá’ís. They said it was a new religion. I said they should disband before they start another holy war. They said they were building a social order centered around world unity. I said if you believed in alcohol instead of God, I might be interested. Four months later I woke up in a gutter in Cardiff, Wales. Later that day, I attended a Bahá’í meeting in Newport, the city where I was born 21 years earlier, and enrolled. Call me corny, but it was a second birth. My experience with the Bahá’í Faith has been one of transformation, which I hope is reflected in my poems.” (web)
Peter E. Murphy was the guest on episode #22 of the Rattlecast! Click here to watch …
Kenny Williams: “I’m an animal by nature, an animal-eater by design, a pagan by sensibility, and a Catholic by conversion. The phrase ‘of faith’ seems to me highly problematic. Like the word ‘Christian’ nowadays, it could mean anything or nothing. To call yourself a ‘poet of faith’ is a dangerous move, something like calling yourself a saint or a genius, but since I’m playing by the rules, and since I take the Catholic dogmata as my model of reality, and since I take the unfashionable view that art is a useful tool by which the audience (that brilliant goofball) may deepen its appreciation of the predicament of being human within the all-demanding context of objective truth, i.e. reality, I call myself, quite possibly in error, a poet of faith.”
Linda Whittenberg: “I began writing poetry after retirement from Unitarian Universalist parish ministry. I find it has been a natural outlet after years of giving sermons. Now, my practice is to begin each day long before dawn, when, in the quiet, I can reflect and write. Like so many have said, sometimes I don’t know what I think or feel until I write it. The practice of rising early and going directly to my writing desk has produced a large number of poems, enough for the three books I’ve published and for a meditation manual I’m assembling for the Unitarian Universalist Association.” (website)
Sherrill Vore: “As a professional in Christian education I spend a great deal of time trying to help people name the ways in which the tumble of daily events in our lives intersect with the story of faith. For me, being a person of faith means that I try to remember to practice attentiveness. And then I try to use what vocabulary I have to speak of patterns and mystery, pain and wonder and, finally, of hope. Poetry—both my own and others—helps me do that.”
Laurie Uttich: “Every week, I sit on a hard pew and I say the words I learned as child, many of those words spoken first by Jesus … a teacher, a healer, an activist, and, for me, a savior. I believe in activism. I believe in living as Jesus taught: feed the poor, house the homeless, care for the imprisoned, speak for the marginalized. I believe Jesus wouldn’t ask for immigration papers or drug tests or care if two men loved each other; and I’m often troubled by the label ‘Christian’ and the way it has come to mean intolerance and, sometimes, hate. I am also weak and worry at times what others think of me—my smart, cynical friends who find my beliefs to be at best ‘quirky,’ and, at worst, a construct I’ve created to feel better … something I should have outgrown by now, especially as an ‘academic.’ So, while I may at times stay silent—as guilty and ashamed as Peter who denied Christ three times—I am a Christian and, hopefully, a bit of a poet. It’s more difficult to communicate how my faith affects my poetry. It shows up unexpectedly, and it’s not always welcome. I once wrote an essay about what it means to be a writer and I realized that as a child I found God on a white sheet of paper. It would not have occurred to me to leave it blank. On good days, it still doesn’t.” (web)
Colette Tennant: “I am a professing Christian, an imperfect but forgiven lover of Jesus, the dearest bread, the sweetest wine. I can find the Garden of Eden story in almost any piece of literature I teach. I like quoting what Francis Schaeffer replied when someone asked him what he would say if he had one hour to tell them about his faith. Schaeffer replied, ‘I’d listen for 59 minutes and talk for one.’”
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