A Lot of the Way Trees Were Walking
Poems from the Gospel of Mark
Cynthia Briggs Kittredge
A LOT OF THE WAY TREES WERE WALKING
Poems from the Gospel of Mark
Copyright © 2015 Cynthia Briggs Kittredge. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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[Scripture quotations are from] New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Permission has been granted to reprint “Fierce Industry” from Lifting Women’s Voices © 2009 Church Publishing Inc. New York, NY 10016.
I dedicate this book in gratitude to the students at Seminary of the Southwest with whom I have read, interpreted, and proclaimed Holy Scripture in classroom, in chapel, and in community.
“And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
—Mark 8:24
Preface
“…and he was with the wild beasts.” —Mark 1:13
That fragment of a line from the gospel of Mark provokes and intrigues me. It epitomizes Mark’s laconic and austere style. “With”? How “with”? Are these beasts friendly or fierce? Are we to imagine Eden or enmity? Other gospels supply dialogue and overlook the animals, but Mark has that empty desert with Jesus, Satan, and those unidentified beasts. The lack of explanation refuses answers, but invites inquiry and wonder.
For many years I have read the gospel of Mark with classes of students and explored the world of the text from its first word to its final conjunction. I have insisted that we stick with Mark only, seek to recognize Mark’s own logic, and to live in that symbolic world. Working through the narrative, year after year, I have only grown more entranced by the repetition, the limited vocabulary of elemental words: “ground,” “seed,” “way,” and the insoluble parables and paradoxes. In the course, Biblical Interpretation for Preaching, students learn to read carefully, to use scholarship judiciously, to see each episode in the context of the whole narrative and then preach a sermon.
I wrote these poems in the early mornings during one semester of the course where we read Mark. I read the gospel from the beginning; I tackled whatever puzzle or detail seized me; and I set out to work it through or play it out with a poem. I stayed as long as I wanted in a place in the gospel, moved on when I wished, and I didn’t try to cover everything. For many days I thought I would never move beyond “beginning.” I did not go back to poems from earlier days. I kept reading and writing forward until the day I reached the end of Mark.
The experience of writing this cycle of poems was unlike Biblical Interpretation for Preaching in many ways. Different because I didn’t follow the rules of the discipline of biblical studies: I asked questions the text wasn’t answering. I read from the point of view of animals. I thought about plants. I mixed up the gender of characters. I read myself into the text. I thought about the resonances of English words in translation as well as the Greek vocabulary. My experimenting was fueled by inexhaustible fascination with the gospel and supported by appreciation for the Markan scholars who had taught me so much about this text. Unlike biblical interpretation for preaching, there was no goal to “translate” a passage into spiritual learning or a moral lesson. There was no pressure to find relevance. In this way my exploring of scripture was, as my colleague Ellen Bradshaw Aitken describes, “immersive” rather than “instrumental.”1
At the same time this project originated in my teaching. In teaching scripture at a seminary I have ventured outside the rationalism of the discipline. I have encouraged immersion and attention in addition to and sometimes instead of, analysis and solution. In an early assignment preaching students have performed passages from Mark. In their performances they do not say what a parable or an account of a deed of power “means” with other words, but they interpret through their telling of the text in the text’s own words. Many of these tellings are as powerful as any sermon. In other courses I have given a final assignment to interpret a passage from the scripture we were studying using a medium other than discursive prose. Students have written songs and poems. They have used watercolor, made collages from found objects, cooked meals, thrown and fired pots. The exercise exhibits that every interpretation is a re-making. We were often amazed how we would have a fresh encounter with the scripture through these projects. For many years I appreciated and affirmed these things they made without realizing how I hungered to make myself. So I returned to pleasures of my childhood. I began again to play with color and materials. I began again to write poems. Then one autumn I made this poem cycle “from” the gospel of Mark.
These poems reflect my engagement with the gospel of Mark. The book is an account of my genuine experience of a stunningly beautiful, cruel, and hopeful text. It represents a “reading” of the text, a re-making, but one that is not comprehensive, final, or universal.
I think that it is difficult to have a genuine experience of reading scripture – to be open, to suspend disbelief, to enter it wholeheartedly, and to discover. All the “shoulds” around the Bible create obstacles to genuine experience. There are centuries of commentary telling us what it means. It has to be serious. It has to be profound. I have to like it. It should make me feel good and holy. Everyone else understands it, but me. All these expectations inhibit attentive, immersive reading and deny distracted twenty-first century people the ability to be curious and possibility of joy and wonder incited by these texts.
I hope that these poems might encourage your own entry into the gospel of Mark and instigate your own conversation. They may serve as a means of immersion and attention.
Next to its mystery, the other striking feature of the gospel is the courage of its heroes – those who dig through the roof on behalf of their friend, the one who chases, and the one who throws off the cloak. It might be that these poems make you bold. To read. To make. To have faith.
Austin, Texas June 2014
1. Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, presentation at Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD 2013. Aitken uses the term “saturated” for “immersive” in “Relentless Intimacy: The Peculiar Labor of an Anglican Biblical Scholar,” Anglican Theological Review 93/4 (2011) 563–580.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to those who read these poems and encouraged me to share them. I thank the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars for inviting me to read and speak about the project at their annual dinner in 2013, and Ellen Jockusch, Jane Patterson, Claire Miller Colombo, Ruthanna Hooke, Jared Houze, and Jim Crosby for reading the manuscript in its early stages. I thank Greg Garrett for his experience and advice. I thank Peter Cunningham and Ara Fitzgerald for both listening and hearing. I thank Peter also for his photograph on the cover. Finally, I thank Elizabeth Struthers Malbon who helped to shape this collection by her close reading and perceptive editorial suggestions.
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