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“I just don’t get why the lines end like they do,” another student says.

Somehow, about sixth grade, something happens to a child, and the wonder of language seems to vanish. Years later, too many students arrive at the university thinking poetry is a code to crack or a crystal ball to interpret.

As a teacher of literature, I have developed a few strategies to try to help students rediscover the power of words. After all, words do matter.
In recent years, I’ve tried to surprise my students the first day of class with a couple of poems by a street-preacher and poet. One poem uses readers’ familiarity with Jesus’ words to his disciples, “I was hungry and you fed me not.”

The poet’s surprise-endings renew the plea for true charity. He writes, “I was naked and you put in new carpeting/I was homeless and your doors were locked/I was sick and your youth group had a Mickey Mouse banquet.”

When I pop these poems up on the screen the first day of class, students quickly inhale the power of words.

No more street poet. This fall, I think I’ll begin class with a new poem. It is “Baptizing the Dog at Nine” by Walt McDonald. Don’t you remember wanting to “baptize” your own dog to save his doggie-soul? After all, you loved him so.

McDonald and his wife, Carol, are members of the Broadway church, Lubbock, Texas, and his poetry is a great treasure to our faith circle.

In fact, Pepperdine University Provost and English professor Darryl Tippens writes, “McDonald is well known in the secular world as one of the finest poets of the land. It is high time that Christians discover this gem of a poet in their midst.”

McDonald’s recently-released collection of poems, Faith is a Radical Master, is available from ACU Press. (See www.acupress.org. Additional material about his work, including extended interviews, is on our Web site.)

I know the paragraphs above are sure to make Walt McDonald squirm in his saddle (yes, he really does ride a horse).

In fact, he may not want to speak to me after I write this. That’s just another reason I admire him, and why I hope he’ll forgive me.

He has published in every poetry venue that matters in this country, but he remains unassuming and eager to listen. He has not shouted his faith. Nor has he rhymed it plain or prettied it up beyond believing. He has achieved a reputation for excellence in his art.

Rather, just as the Psalmist reveals faith in the midst of all human experience, so McDonald’s poems reveal rewards and demands, blessings and temptations.

I want others to read his poems and find the sinews of faith there. I want others to read the joys of family and love. I want you to read about dry times and stormy times that come to all Christians. I want you to identify, as I do, with the angry prayers that follow a loved one’s early death or with the hope and mystery of our Lord as “loaf-keeper.” All these you will find in Faith is a Radical Master.

I also hope more congregations will seek to nurture and to share with the artists in their midst, for as God is the author of beauty and truth, so God’s blessing upon the artist is a special one. He instructed that the Tabernacle and the Temple be more than useful, but also beautiful. (Jeff Berryman, a Seattle playwright and novelist, reminded me of that a few years ago.)

If the Bible is full of poetry and story and the awful beauty of truth, then we must honor Christian artists who rise to the challenge of giving their best to the Lord. Artistic talent, like accounting or engineering or law, is a response to genius planted by God in the mystery of Creation.

Some congregations are creatively welcoming artists and spotlighting their artists’ gifts.

A few years ago, I stepped into a church foyer on a Saturday, just as several workers were helping a brother install representations of his conversion story in sculpture and painting. Each piece was accompanied by a story — usually related to the artist’s conversion.

Every visitor and member who saw that art also saw the artist’s great joy in finding Christ and being redeemed.

Why has it taken us so long to recognize art and its great power to build, communicate, shape and reflect faith? Some would argue we depended too much on Reason in our battle against Science as the only, true route to knowledge.

Perhaps we simply were too busy building congregations to worry about what adorned the walls.

CONTACT soctt.lamascus@christianchronicle.org