Coming into Oxford on the park and ride a fortnight ago I noticed a small street of red bricked houses on the outskirts called Elizabeth Jennings Way. The poet Elizabeth Jennings died a few years ago and is one of several women poets whose work I’ve particularly enjoyed. I rememebr encountering her for the first time in The Tablet, with an advent poem.
Her poems are humane but unflinching in their awareness of all those experiences which give our humanity its rich textured feel – love gained and lost, vitality and mortality and our consciousness of each, art as human language transcending words, suffering as diminishing, frightening and the last thing any person should glamourise with over-inflated claims of its spiritual value, fighting, hurting and forgiving. And because humans are finite with inarticulate longings she explores the ordinariness of human existence against the backdrop of infinity, eternity, but with no cheaply bought settled certainty, more with a faith that’s learned to live with frustration, ambiguity, provisionality.
Many a time reading her poetry I have been aware that this poem, or that poem, captures in 14 lines (she is a tireless player-around with the sonnet) the connection between particular human experiences and specific Christian doctrines. When all the philosophical and moral theologians have had their say about original sin, whether children are born with a propensity to sin, or are environmentally, genetically, behaviourally determined, or are free until their responsible conscious choices can be given moral significance; when the theologians think they have it sussed, Jennings’ poem ‘Warning to Parents’ upsets the tidy theological game being played with the surprise finality of a cat jumping on a chess board.
Again, whether reading Gregory Jones’ remarkable book Embodying Forgiveness, or weighing the truth laden words of Miroslav Volf who knows a few things himself about forgiveness and human evil and the Gospel, I find that this woman sees with unnerving clarity, the necessity for forgiveness, the apparent impossibility of such a thing, but yet the life-saving quality of the language that both says, ‘You are forgiven’, and asks, ‘Forgive me’ – and thus turns enmity to friendship, hostility to love.
Another sublime poet, identified the immensity and mystery of sin and love, and the agonsing tension they create in the heart of God. George Herbert’s ‘The Agony’ in its first verse states that tension:
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walked with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast spacious things,
the which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and love.
Amongst those who have made the attempt to ‘sound them’, is Elizabeth Jennings. In her best poems she explores the mental, emotional and spiritual turmoil of what it means to be a human being capable of sin, and love. Next couple of weeks I’d like to post a few of her poems, in memory of the woman who put Elizabeth Jennings Way on the map.
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