In this month’s blog, Bishop David Bard celebrates two things that help him deepen his connection with himself, others, the world, and God — music and poetry…
“When the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (Job 38:7, NRSVUE).
“To understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles” (Proverbs 1:6).
This is the final essay in my series written before taking renewal leave. My July essay was long and serious, grappling with contemporary issues from a theological-ethical perspective. Perhaps you agreed with much of it, were upset by some of it, or disagreed with parts of it. Perhaps you decided not to make your way through it, or perhaps it put you to sleep.
At the end of that essay, I offered this: “If we want to improve the condition of democratic politics, we need to occasionally do something together other than politics” (Robert Talisse, “Overdoing Democracy,” p. 4). Talisse thinks the health of democracy depends on stepping away from politics at times, particularly by developing relationships that may transcend it. This may mean taking in less news from time to time and ensuring that our whole lives are not focused on the latest headlines.
Maybe a similar principle applies to renewal. In an annual conference sermon from a few years ago, I offered this thought to those being recognized, commissioned, or ordained: “You are not only who you are as a clergy person, yet who you are is intimately intertwined with who you are as a clergy person.” For me, renewal leave is an opportunity to connect more deeply with who I am beyond my role as a bishop. It is not that I ignore soul work while I am working; it is simply an opportunity to focus on soul work and on my relationships. “So, friends, every day do something / that won’t compute” (Wendell Berry).
In this essay, I want to reflect on and celebrate two things that help me connect with who I am and deepen my connection to others, the world, and God. I consider these spiritual practices alongside traditional practices of reading Scripture and prayer. I want to briefly reflect on music and poetry. “Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why” (Ali Smith, “Summer”). Music and poetry impress mysteriously upon me, and in that, I sense the Holy Spirit.
Martin Luther said, “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.” More caustically, he offered, “A person who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God must be a clodhopper indeed.”
I don’t know exactly how my love for and joy in music began. My father liked music and liked to entertain. When my parents hosted parties at our house, there was often music. I remember Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and the Kingston Trio in particular. The first version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” I heard was the Kingston Trio’s. Music was ubiquitous on the radio when I was growing up, and I remember, as an early teen in northern Minnesota, trying to pick up AM radio signals from Chicago and Little Rock late at night.
When I gave my life to Christ, I found The Scott Ross Show on a local station. It was a radio show hosted by a former popular New York disc jockey who had become a Christian. He used contemporary songs to talk about faith. I remember singing Bob Dylan songs in a Young Life group, which piqued my interest in him. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and graduated from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota. This began a long interest in Dylan’s music. I will be seeing him in concert this summer.
I loved it when Target had a sale on all its record albums twice a year — five dollars each. I listened to popular artists and read about the history of rock ‘n’ roll. In college, I was introduced to jazz in a class on arts in America — I recall, in particular, John Coltrane’s “Central Park West.” My listening to jazz was minimal, though, until the Ken Burns jazz documentary aired on PBS. I heard that music with new ears. In the introductory segment, the drummer Art Blakey is quoted as saying, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” Jazz touched me in new ways.
This was during my time as a district superintendent in a large district in Minnesota. Road time often meant listening to music. One particularly deep experience occurred when I was struggling with my health. In my early twenties, I was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease ulcerative colitis. It stayed fairly controlled until one summer and fall, when the medications I was on no longer worked. I was sent to see a specialist who was helpful. While that was going on, I was driving to a clergy retreat at a camp in my district. It was a beautiful early fall morning, and I was listening to Miles Davis. The song “Fall” came on, and a profound sense of peace and well-being flooded over me. I consider it an experience of God’s grace.
Theologian James Luther Adams writes, “With a special sense of immediacy and inwardness authentic music redefines, illumines, refreshes, orders our experience. It is not an escape from reality; it is rather the rediscovery of a center of meaning and power, of a center that is a symptom and sign of faith — ultimately not a human achievement but a gift of grace” (“On Being Human Religiously,” p. 154).
Charles Wright, the poet, said in an interview: “The true purpose and result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries.” I have discovered a deep connection between poetry and my journey with Jesus. I experience the world differently because of the poetry I have read. I read the Scriptures with different eyes and a different heart because of my reading of poetry.
I recall encountering some poetry in my formal education — Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg in high school. My college majors, psychology and philosophy, allowed me to take other courses, and at the time, tuition was not charged per credit. A full-time student paid full-time tuition and could take additional classes. As my nascent interest in poetry and literature grew, I began taking English courses, starting with the literature of the Beat Generation, which influenced Bob Dylan. I fondly remember encountering the poetry of Robert Bly, a Minnesota poet, whom I later heard read his work.
Charles Wright is accurate when he says that poetry involves contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries. Poetry provides language for expressing feelings and experiences. Poetry helps one notice often-quiet dimensions of experience. Poetry helps me connect with God and with dimensions of myself.
I have often shared the serendipity of encountering the poet Seamus Heaney. I was driving home from meetings and hospital visits, listening to Minnesota Public Radio, when they broadcast a poetry reading by Seamus Heaney, the recent Nobel Prize winner in literature. I was enthralled — by the language and his lyrical Irish voice. The program was to be rebroadcast that evening, and I was waiting with my cassette tape to record it. When I later became a district superintendent, I would sometimes alternate between listening to music and listening to poets read.
Heaney also read a portion of his Nobel lecture, “Crediting Poetry.” “I credit [poetry] ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of the external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind’s centre and its circumference.” I have experienced what Heaney described, poetry as a help.
The poets whose works I have read over the years have enriched my life and enlarged my soul — Mary Oliver, Wallace Stevens, Jane Kenyon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lisel Mueller, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. The list is longer. If you ever want to read a poem that evokes deep joy and profound gratitude, read Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms.”
Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann also credits poetry and poetic language for helping us dream a different world: “Broadly construed, the language of the biblical text is prophetic: it anticipates and summons realities that live beyond the conventions of our day-to-day, take-for-granted world. The Bible is our firm guarantee that in a world of technological naïveté and ideological reductionism, prophetic construals of another world are still possible, still worth doing, still lovingly received by those who live at the edge of despair, resignation, and conformity. Our preferred language is to call such speech prophetic, but we might also term it poetic. . . . The poet/prophet is a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibility in the listening assembly. . . . It is this probe behind our settlements that makes newness possible” (“Finally Comes the Poet,” pp. 4, 5).
Brueggemann’s words about the potential power of poetic language to imagine a new world and energize efforts to realize it remind me of one of the poems Heaney read on that radio program some thirty years ago.
“Human beings suffer, / They torture one another, / They get hurt and get hard. / No poem or play or song / Can fully right a wrong / Inflicted and endured . . . History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme” (from Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy”).
In a letter, Emily Dickinson wrote this about poetry: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Poetry is for me a means of grace.
During my renewal leave, I will read some and write some. I will travel a little and spend a lot of time with family. I will go to baseball games and watch movies. I will read poems and listen to music. I will recall the words of a Wendell Berry poem, “Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.”
I hope you all have or will find time this summer to do things simply for the sheer joy of them and to connect more deeply with yourself. Connect with the “unforced rhythms of grace” (Matthew 11:29, The Message).
Last Updated on August 5, 2026