Between Poetry and Prayer: The Mystagogy of "Primary Wonder"

There are times, early in the morning when I arise or late at night before I retire, that I find myself nostalgic, pining for days when belief was easier. In actuality, I do not think belief has ever been easy, though it may have been easier to take it for granted in earlier eras. Sometimes, though, I wish I could feel something of the ardor of the great saints—a Therese Lisieux, a Julian of Norwich, a Thomas Aquinas. Every now again, usually in the midst of my annual retreat, do I experience intimations or stirrings that, if not launching me into states of ecstasy, do reassure me that in prayer I am not simply talking to myself. On one occasion, not long after entering the Society of Jesus, I flung myself down before the Blessed Sacrament after a very dry and difficult week. Someone had left a copy of Thomas Aquinas's Adoro te devote in the chapel and, listless and cranky, I took it up and read.

At first, probably owing to my sour disposition and frustration, I read it solely as a poem, a quaint but disconnected bit of pious verse. As I tried to "make sense" of it, I found myself caught up in a process not of my own devising. Speaking metaphorically, it was as though cracks appeared in the poem and I found it praying for me and through me. You might call it a Romans 8:26 moment when, "the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings" (NRSV). Without stirring from my seat, I knew myself to have been moved in a profound way. This experience has led me to consider the relationship between poetry and prayer and how some poems might serve as privileged sites where the willing reader might risk encountering anew the mystery abiding at the heart of all creation.

In this essay, I explore the mystagogical sensibility I detect within Denise Levertov's poetry. Although it would be instructive to canvass her entire oeuvre, my focus will be on "Primary Wonder," a poem written a year before her death in 1996.¹ As both a resource for my own prayer as well as within the classroom, I have found the poem speaks well to contemporary audiences in an age skeptical about the possibility of encountering God. In fact, several students have reported back to me that this poem has served as a propaedeutic for their embrace of contemplative prayer and their return to Christianity. Poetry can serve as a locus for a graced poiēsis, leading to a transformation of how one perceives the world (aesthesis). By drawing on the work of the Irish philosopher William Desmond, I believe we can appreciate how Levertov's poem can be the site for a mystagogical poiēsis, a transformative re-making in which one is grasped by and led into the heart of divine mystery. As a priest and fellow sojourner in our secular age, I want to probe the threshold between poetry and prayer by considering how Levertov's "Primary Wonder" evokes and provokes the experience it describes.

Readers may not be acquainted with the word mystagogy, so allow me to clarify how I intend to use it. Jesuit theologian Paul Crowley, adhering closely to the work of Karl Rahner, employs the term "in its root sense of guiding an initiate into the world of faith, into its depths as they are realized interpersonally in God."² Mystagogy engrafts an initiate into the larger narrative of faith, finding their reality transformed. It describes a process of "making," a Spirit-led poiēsis through which one's mode of apperception is graciously retuned. To traverse the mystagogical itinerary is to be led by Divine Mystery into Mystery's very heart where one is neither annulled nor annihilated but rather renewed and reoriented by sojourning in intimate communion with the Holy One.

Tracing the mystagogical or mystical-poetic itinerary found in Levertov...