It took me quite a few years to warm up to poetry. Of course, I read the poems that were required of us when I was an elementary and high school student, but I didn’t think much of them. When I went to college, I read a few poems, mostly romantic ones. I tried my hand at writing poems, but didn’t produce anything significant. For the most part, I simply didn’t take poetry seriously at that point of my education. College was, for me, a challenge. Keeping up required a lot more reading than I had been accustomed to accomplishing. I had to teach myself new study habits, including outlining reading assignments, ceasing to read in bed, and other practices. I started drinking coffee regularly as a college student because I found it enhanced my capacity to remain focused as I read. During that phase of my life, I did little recreational reading. I think that the only fiction I read during my college years were the books required for course called “Christian Faith and Contemporary Literature.” While I was in graduate school, I discovered the writings of Elie Wiesel, who wrote both significant fiction and poetry. I read everything I could find of his writings.

From Wiesel, I began to read more fiction, but I still wasn’t much of a reader of poetry. It is possible that I have read more poetry in the most recent decade of my life than I did in the nearly six decades that preceded it. Reading poetry requires a different pace, a different mindset, and a different style. I often will read a poem multiple times, sometimes reading out loud to grasp the rhythm and pace of the words.

There are some aspects of human experience that are better expressed in poetry than in other language forms. I think that reading poetry has brought me to a deeper understanding of metaphor. Symbolic language, of course, is part and parcel of theology. A graduate education in theology combined with a career as a pastor means that I have immersed myself in symbolic language. Metaphor is a particular form of symbolic language that on the surface appears to be talking about one thing, but on a deeper level is talking about something else.

“America is a melting pot” is not a description of a container for making soup. It is a metaphor for the blending of cultures that occurs in a large country of highly mobile people. “All the world is a stage,” is not a description of gigantic theatrical sets. It is a reminder that there are aspects of our lives that are witnessed by others. In a sense there is always an audience for our behavior. A metaphor is a remarkable feature of language because it both means what is says and what it doesn’t say. A metaphor stirs the imagination of the hearer or reader. It is not so much a process of figuring things out as a process of entering into the experiences of another and shifting perspective to a fresh point of view.

One of my seminary professors insisted that we write poems. He gave us assignments including writing lyrics for hymns. He designed exercises in sparse language. One of the first assignments I turned in to him was returned with the comment, “Say the same thing with half as many words.” He taught me to self-edit my work and one of the first steps involves going back and removing unnecessary words.

It is in my later years, however, that I have returned to the poets. I have read some of the classics that I didn’t read earlier in my life. I have read famous contemporary poets. I have taken note of the poet laureates of the United States and of the state in which I reside.

All of this is important to me because there is so much poetry in the Bible. It is not just the Psalms, which are poetry. All of the prophets were poets. And those who don’t realize that try to literalize their words and draw strange and unintended meanings from them. Biblical prophets don’t predict the future so much as they call people into deeper relationship with God.

People who don’t understand metaphor often miss the point of Jesus’ teachings. One of the common misinterpretations of the Bible has to do with Jesus’ frequent reference to the Kingdom of God. Some people assume that this is a reference to a future afterlife, when Jesus clearly is speaking about how to live in the present.

The legendary biblical interpreter, translator, and pastor Eugene Peterson wrote, “Poets tell us what our eyes, blurred with too much gawking, and our ears, dulled with too much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. . . Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.”

A little more than a decade ago, near the end of my career as a pastor, after a year that was particularly shaped by personal loss and grief, I began to dive more deeply into Holy Week. Instead of simply adding a couple of services for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, I took a look at the entire week as an opportunity to explore grief, loss, and to practice those emotions and experiences as preparation for the realities of life. We planned special worship events for every day of the week. We invited church members to set aside the usual, much as they would do if they experienced a death in the family - to deeply experience the reality of human grief in preparation for wrestling with the mystery of resurrection. It took a while, but the church shifted. Attendance at holy week services began to rise. After several years, the total attendance at Holy Week services began to exceed the Easter attendance. As the congregation took a dive into a deeper understanding, so did I. I gained in my ability to walk with families through grief, to prepare meaningful funeral services, and to sit with trauma, grief and loss with the people I served.

Once again tomorrow, we begin Holy Week. My perspective has shifted. I am no longer the pastor in charge. I am an education worker, shaping faith formation experiences for a congregation. Still, I know how important this week is. It is a week of poetry - a week of metaphor. I lean back on my seminary education and remember the advice to use fewer words to say things that are really important.

May I choose my words carefully this week.