Thoughts for the future and some notes on faith

You might not be able to tell just by looking at this blog, with its relatively low number of posts, but I've been veraciously reading and studying William Stafford for the past five years. The trouble is I don't always know how to turn my work into content for this blog. I'm considering spinning off a less blog-esque website to introduce new folks to Stafford without having to wade through a bunch of content they may or may not be interested in. I don't know what it would look like, but my brain's working on it. In the mean time I'll be completing an MA thesis focusing, in part, on Stafford over the next few months, so I'm not sure how quickly things will change around here. For now, I'll leave you with some of my latest (unedited) reflections on Stafford's work as it relates to spirituality and theology. I'll be taking a class in Narrative Theology this semester, examining WS's World War 2 memoir Down in my Heart, and this is what I started thinking about:


Religious themes occur often in William Stafford's poetry, with numerous references to Christian understandings of God, scripture, ritual, ethics and belief. Still, his poetry has generally been read as being not very religious. To be fair, he did not participate regularly in any church community in his adult life, and if any topic were to dominate his work, it would seem to be his opposition to war and violence, a stance that is not necessarily religious, and can even be understood as anti-church in a world where faith is used so often to justify wars of national interest.

Stafford, however, is one of postmodernity's most religious poets, even as he does not make many spiritual or theological claims by appealing to doctrinal language. Nor does he disparage Christian doctrine outright, although he may from time to time come close to parodying the ways in which believers sometimes shallowly express their faith.

Instead, Stafford reveals his particular brand of secular Christian pacifist spirituality by directing the reader to notice relationships between larger questions of faith and the experience of each lived moment. His insights that borrow language and image from the Christian tradition may seem too broad in and of themselves to catch the imagination of the reader, but that may be the point. Some of Stafford's most poignant religious poems ask theological questions too vague to really answer, but then respond in radically specific, embodied, lived scenes that catch the reader off balance in their depth of spiritual significance (“Serving With Gideon,” “Watching the Jet Planes Dive”).

Stafford teaches the theological world a valuable lesson that although we may seek to know the meaning of technical terms such as creation, incarnation, redemption, or resurrection, we can never fully comprehend what it means to be human in and for the world until we enter the depths of our very own (yet God-given) language and its relation to our daily lives. Stafford is more than a mystical pietist ignoring the lessons of theology; he is a theopoet drawing us deeply into theology's most important arena: the world we inhabit each moment of our lives—the very place we encounter God and know the fullness of our resurrection.