TRIPTYCH TO RUDOLF BULTMANN, TRYING TO SAY SOMETHING OF WHAT HE GIVES ME

 

XI.

TRIPTYCH TO RUDOLF BULTMANN, TRYING TO SAY

SOMETHING OF WHAT HE GIVES ME

                “The Poet who feels that poetry is born from this strange punishment—from the punishment                     that                 creates the strange--”

                        Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”

This morning, four men at coffee.

Poet, photographer, jeweler.

I no longer know what to call myself.

Between it all. The photographer’s

birthday, 78, the youngest. The jeweler’s

85. Two poems. I took notes on the poems.

Four of us making an odd bunch. Friends

over decades, historical eyes and ears,

listening in a snow storm. Before coffee,

this from my friend Terry, poet friend given

cancer as a retirement gift ten years ago:

Look to the Margins, from Richard Rohr,

priest who runs a center for meditation.

Path of prophets, an essay from Cassidy Hall,

Queering Prophecy. First a word about margins.

Everywhere not geographical—we’re

everywhere. The illuminated margins

of El Salvador: Los Marjinados.

Those who live between railroad tracks

and the street, building casas de carton.

Mi amiga que vive en los marjinados

me envieron café desde esta frontera.

If the prophetic is queer, Cassidy writes,

..roots from 16^th Century Scots, when

the word meant things like odd, strange,

transverse, or oblique. Ezekiel ate a scroll.

The poet at coffee reads his poem

celebrataing the birthday of his friend

and the history of photography,

light and dark. There’s a hidden

eye in the jewelry torched by fire--

and our nation queered by an election.

●

            “Maybe poetry always begins with such a double

            awareness, of sorrow but also of something else: not necessarily of God…”

                    Michael Edwards “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”

El Salvador is always somewhere close to me,

Professor Bultmann. Five decades ago, Stanley Marrow,

Iraqi Jesuit priest, confronts me with my own questions

and brings me the end of the world. At first

I think I can tell others, This is how.

This is how to change your life.

Like Rilke said we must.

This world and the beyond. Right here.

A tiny cross on my dresser before me

where I put my glasses the night before.

I place it around my neck, sitting in the pew.

The Subversive Cross from the small

Lutheran Church in San Salvador.

The cross that went to prison, prisoners

painting the sins of the state on the cross.

Injusticia social, violencia a los derechos

humanos, sea pobre y marjinado.

Descriminación contra la mujer. Hambre.

After decades of failure to show others

Christology in daily walking, God

fed me pupusas, liberating nuns

and a Jesus who walked with the poor.

Obispo Medardo Gómez, Fr.s Jon Sobrino,

Ellacuria and Dean Brackley. I sat

in the pew where Rutilio Grande

gave the Santa Biblia to campesinos.

After the murders of Romero and Ellacuria,

I read the letters Sobrino wrote to Ellacu--

and Obispo Medardo—bishop to the poor,

walked me through barrio-soaked tsunamis,

taking me into his home, telling me how

he told the president to return his cross,

the Subversive Cross, the replica I place

around my neck this morning. All of this,

part of my walk, Medardo promising

I would be given this poem to write--

his great unsaying, the bewildering

unsaid, gift of a simple amen.

All of this written down in a notebook.

A Chinese koan.

●

            “If a threshold is meant, we perceive even more clearly the ability

            of poetry to open the world for us, to cross

            a trembling limit, to penetrate into the otherness of things.”

                    Michael Edwards, “Poetry and Isaiah’s Burning Coal”

Your sermons open in many ways.

Today I’m looking at your homily from 22 June 1941,

not the news that Germany’s now at war with Russia,

not the text your preaching from, but this calling

for more understanding for spiritual, intellectual life

of our time...the burning questions and struggles—I want

to speak here of American voices who listen deeply

for prophetic presence. Dropping names--

American crisis calling. Calling Bultmann?

You’re part of this, How shall I live with myself?*

Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder.

Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit.

So many names caring for our dying planet,

names who speak in the world as you spoke, ones who

mentor and confront. Snyder you could have

known, born in 1930. Trailmaker crossing

into Japan, coming home Buddhist. Lopez

stared into melting glaciers. In our town,

where I sit at coffee with friends, where

I worship, still—unsettled, with my wife,

I ask the pastor to sit with me beside

another cross, on three chairs, one for

her dog, Goldie, trying to talk between

the poem and the pew, the pew and the pulpit,

that between place. She listens.

She lets me. She isn’t afraid of Bultmann

or the poets. Of pastors or pews.

You wouldn’t know Michael Edwards,

of course. He comes later, now.

Poet and Christian. English writing in French,

translated.back to English. I read him now, reading

your sermons, This world and beyond.

P.S. This short thanks—for taking us there, and always, for courage,

for believing in us, the ones in the pews. For words in dangerous times.

●

*In a letter to Karl Barth, Bultmann states, asking, What shall I say to my children?” but consists of the question: How shall I say it to myself? Or rather: How shall I hear it myself? #94 Marburg, 11-15 November 1952. Karl Barth—Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922/1966.

Jim Bodeen

3-10 February 2025