Daytime Moons, a book of poems

I'm excited to share that I've recently released a book of poems, based on poems that have appeared on this blog at one time or another over the years. It's called Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, and it's illustrated by my amazingly talented son, Leland.

If you're interested, you can order it by clicking [here], or click the cover image to the left.

To pique your interest, this is the preface I wrote for the book, a reflection on the mysterious connections between pastoral work and poetry.

Eugene Peterson once pointed out that the first Christian ever to have been formally called a “theologian” was St. John the Seer. The Greek term they gave him was theologos—one who speaks “God-words”—and Peterson humbly notes it down that as theologos, St. John’s great contribution to the life of the Church was that scintillating, exhilarating, sometimes terrifying work of unparalleled poetry, the Book of Revelation. Despite the centuries-old habit of reading it as though it were simply God’s survival guide for the coming apocalypse, the Book of Revelation is, in fact, a poem—a marvelously, majestically, mysteriously theological poem, to be sure, but still, for all that, a poem.

I find it both sobering and inspiring to think that whatever else he was, the first Christian theologian was a poet. It is sobering only because so little of the work I do in the discharge of my day-to-day duties as a pastor is actually poetic. There are plenty of God-words to be spoken, of course, but most of them are of the practical, pedagogical, pedantic kind, exhorting the wayward and edifying the seeker. I preach and I propound and I pray, and certainly there are opportunities in all these activities to wax poetical, but seldom does the moment seem to call for an unqualified, unapologetic poem per se.

This strikes me as especially curious, given the fact that such vast swaths of the Scripture were written in verse. From the vivid praise of the Psalter to the visionary oracles of the prophets, from the dark debates in the Book of Job to the sensual Song of Solomon, the authors of the Bible seemed to think that any season of the soul was an occasion for a good God-poem, so long as the Spirit was in it. Even the Master himself—the Living Word who gave us the Beatitudes and inspired Mary’s Magnificat—seems to have been perfectly at ease among the arresting rhythms and piercing imagery of a well-turned line of poetry.

It is not simply sobering, however, to realize how important a role good poetry played in the spiritual lives of those first Christians; it is also inspiring. Anyone who has agonized over the best way to say it precisely, what God was up to in a given moment of their lives—anyone who has stumbled unexpectedly across a metaphor so perfect it untangled a knot in their hearts they didn’t even know was there until it had opened—anyone who has had a line of verse flare suddenly in their spirits and so illuminate an otherwise impenetrably dark night of the soul—anyone, that is, who has ever had just the right words at just the right moment coalesce beautifully with something God was intimately doing in their lives, will be encouraged to know that the Christian faith has always made ample room for good poetry in its vision of the spiritual life.

If one or more of the poems in this small collection were to have something even close to that effect—easing some agony, untangling some knots, or flaring in some darkness—I would consider this book to have been well-used by God; they certainly did that and more for me as I wrote them. A handful of them date from the early days back when I was still an English teacher, and a handful more date from the heady days in seminary when I was training for the ministry. Most of them, however, were written between 2009 and 2021, in the nooks and crannies of a very full schedule as a pastor. When I couldn’t find my way through what I was trying to say in a sermon, for instance, or when an encounter in prayer, maybe, or with Scripture left me grasping for the best way to contain it, I would now and then reach for a scrap of paper and scratch it out as a poem instead. Over the years these accumulated, flotsam in the tidal undulations of one man’s spiritual journey, until there were enough worth sharing to fill the book you’re holding now.

In the following pages you will encounter prayers, laments, meditations on Scripture, reflections on spirituality, and every-day scenes from the life of a pastor recast as the stuff of revelation. My great hope is that you might find something here to inspire you in your own spiritual journey, and that you will find opening within yourself a deep well of refreshingly clear God-words as you do.