Sacred Sylvan Saunter
Kimberly Knight, MDiv • View bio

Poetry, Scripture and the Language of Holy Confusion
Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes • View bio

Our everyday use of language tends toward dissection. We cut the world up into this and that. It's a function of dualistic thinking in which everything means this and not that. Ideas, beliefs, descriptions are all ways of distinguishing something from everything else. Science and law are at the extreme end of the spectrum, with excruciating detail. But we all talk like that, a little. We mean to say what we mean to say, not something else. Poetry and scripture aren't like that. Because the world isn't like that. There's only one thing, and we're all part of it. It's an ecology, an interrelated web. Each bit of the world is a distinct bit, yes, but a bit of a whole. Everything has something of everything else in it. We are all part of the Body of Christ, the ecosystem of God. We are all con-fused. Poetry and scripture (all scripture!) are the language of interrelatedness, the native tongue of paradox. They don't dissect; they weave. They connect things. They say more than they mean to say. They work through symbol, allusion, metaphor and muscle memory. And they work on more than one level, especially in the unconscious. A parable, for example, is a paradox, meant to confuse you (that is, to contradict your dualistic assumptions and fuse you with the whole). In this creative immersion we'll explore ways of reading scripture as poetry, which means weaving instead of dissecting, which means entering into holy confusion, which means a different kind of clarity, which means prayer.