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As stores are converting their seasonal sections to Valentine’s Day and many people have been celebrating “Christmas” throughout the month of December, for Catholics the liturgical season honoring the Nativity of Our Lord has just begun.
With a short fourth week of Advent, if the reflection series you used to prepare for the great feast of the Nativity is over, I have a solution for you: “Lumine Verbi: By the Light of the Word” invites readers to pray with poetry through the entire Christmas season until the Baptism of the Lord.
Catholicimaginations.substack.com offers the “Poetry for Pilgrims” series, presenting religious poems and hymns with simplified literary commentary and a focus of entering into prayer through the metaphors, images, and poetic form. Daily emails connect the poetry with the daily Mass readings.
My intended audience are those who feel intimidated by poetry, or who haven’t engaged with it since high school or college. My brief reflections focus on the connections between the two texts in light of Catholic spirituality rather than offering literary criticism.
With an express interest is building bridges between Catholic literary artists who write in a more openly religious style — from the likes of George Herbert to St. John Henry Newman to Joyce Kilmer and one of his contemporaries and friends, Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, CSC.
Who is Sr. Madeleva?
Sister Madeleva is a native of my home Diocese of Superior in Northwest Wisconsin. I discovered books of her poetry and an autobiography in the local history room at the library in Sr. Wolff’s hometown of Cumberland, 20 miles from where I live. Immediately, I was drawn in by the vivid metaphors the nun used and her focus on mysteries of the faith.
Studying poetry under Dr. James Mattew Wilson as a uniquely-approved concentration within the Master’s of Faith and Culture at the University of St. Thomas, Houston’s Nesti Center for Faith and Culture, I have been researching the writings and legacy of this Holy Cross Sister, the most famous poet-nun in the English speaking world when she died in 1964.
She studied a Master’s in English at the University of Notre Dame, later earning her PhD in Medieval Literature at the University of California-Berkeley; one of the first two women religious ever to do so. She went on to further study at the University of Oxford where her friendship and correspondence began with C. S. Lewis.
Wolff, tasked by the U.S. Bishops, began the first Master’s Degree in Theology open to women religious and lay people in 1943: the School of Sacred Theology at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, where she served as President from 1934-1961. Her poetry was widely published during her lifetime but none has been republished since the 1980s. The Incarnation of Christ and the Christmas mystery are topics Sister Madeleva deeply and creatively reflected on in many, many of her poems.
The following poem, “Dialogue,” reflects on the Word in its layered meanings and contextual settings from Mary’s Fiat at the Annunciation to the born fruit of her word become the Word of God made flesh.
A Word, a Word
Thou, Lord, didst utter which Thy willing handmaid heard,
And infinite, small Life within my own life breathed and stirred.
A blessed space
My Lord in me and I in Him found resting place;
In such divine repose I waited, silent and full of grace.
Answer is nigh;
O God, I lift a Child up heart-and-heaven high
And say, “This is my Flesh and Blood”; Thy Word is my reply.
Reflecting with poems like this slow one down, they engage the mind trying to understand the meaning, they cultivate a sacramental sense of the imagination that enters deeper into divine mysteries beginning with our tangible senses.
Awaken the awe of Christmas
“Praying with poetry” further awakens and aligns our spiritual senses with God’s presence and providence — it integrates faculties of mind, heart, and strength — opening a person to the astonishment and wonder of seeing some familiar thing as if it were a brand new discovery.
If you are seeking to continue deepening a relationship with God this Christmas season, to refresh how you approach prayer, praying with poetry is worth trying for the two-and-a-half weeks of the Christmas season. If Jesus could leave Heaven and be born in the body of a helpless infant among animals, readers might be surprised, as were the shepherds by heralding angels — God’s presence is among us, but sometimes it takes astonishment by unexpected beauty to unlock our spiritual senses to Reality itself.
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Note: You can also consider the Sacred Art and Prayer reflections found at christian.art.
