Bishop warms us with poetry

During this season of Lent, Episcopal Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish has been traveling around the state giving fireside chats about religious poetry.

The chats will not be appearing on everybody's list of "things to do today" — especially since Episcopalians can, at times, get as lofty as the London skyline. Episcopalians like a good intellectual stretch. The drawback to being so "high-minded," of course, is you sometimes talk over other people's heads.

But Bishop Irish is filling her poetry discussions with warmth, humanity and good thinking.

That's her gift as a person and her gift to her church.

I attended one of her "firesides" in Ogden the other night.

It touched my heart.

Instead of spending the whole time on poets like John Donne — who can wheel off into the cosmos like a Mars rover — or T.S. Eliot, whose poem "Four Quartets" is harder to digest than Aunt Edna's pound cake, the bishop gave them a curtsy, then quickly moved into the poetry that people always love to love: the words of the Christian hymns.

Before Christ's final "Passion," a hymn was sung in the upper room. And like bread itself, such devotional songs became a Christian staple.

I didn't recognize a lot of the hymns the bishop chose to talk about. But what I did recognize were the feelings of wonder, joy, hope and praise found in the words.

I heard about John Keble for the first time, a British poet who brought grandeur to the simplest rhymes.

He wrote:

Help us this and every day,

to live more nearly as we pray.

He wrote:

The first word the angels sang was "Peace."

We sang the words of Charles Wesley, who wrote "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," and Thomas Ken, who gave the world "Praise God, from Whom all Blessings Flow."

We read poetry by Christina Rossetti, who wrote "In the Bleak Midwinter."

At evening's end I left the hall not only informed but inspired.

I learned something new that also renewed me.