CMI Newsletter March 2023

Noel Keating reflects: This poem draws me to say a word about why we open our online meditation each Thursday and Sunday evening with a poem. Essentially it is because reading a poem cultivates attentiveness. To fully experience any poem, we must stop whatever else we’re doing and give it our full and gracious attention, from start to finish, just as the poet did when writing it.
        But it also brings us from the head to the heart because poems use metaphor to give expression that which cannot easily be said. As Heidegger expressed it ‘Poetry is language in service of the unsayable.’ In The Redress of Poetry, the collection of his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Seamus Heaney claimed that poetry ‘offers a clarification, a fleeting glimpse of a potential order of things “beyond confusion”, a glimpse that has to be its own reward’ (p. xv).

        The theologian and poet Malcolm Guite observes that, however qualified by terms like ‘fleeting’, ‘glimpse’ and ‘potential’, this is still a claim ‘that poetry … is truth-bearing’. In other words, poems bear witness to deep truths that defy prosaic expression. Guite goes on to observe that ‘poetry offers not just some inner subjective experience but, as Heaney claims, a redress; the redress of an imbalance in our vision of the world and ourselves.’ And this is exactly what meditation does for us as well – it restores us to harmony by putting the mind in the heart and so changes how we see the world.
        Meditation too helps us to be fully attentive to the present moment without desiring to change it; to what is now, without judging it, or seeking to escape it, or clinging to it. Meditation helps us to encounter the present moment with a spacious awareness that makes us feel grounded and restored to our true-self. I love the poets description of how the poem she read opened her heart ‘so wide a whole life rushed through – such a current of love, somehow contained in the banks of a so few words’. It carried her throughout her day because her heart remained open, ‘its words not only cradling this heart, but becoming the heart itself.’ This is why we use poems so often before we meditate in these sessions and it is also why we meditate!