I have a confession to make. See, um, it’s like this …

I don’t like a lot of Christian music. Some of it I even hate.

There! I said it. Of course I could say the same thing about a lot of non-
Christian music too. You might say I find myself drawn to quality, and I’m not finding it in very many places.

But that prompts an obvious question: why is music that claims to honor
the Creator so often bereft of creativity? Why doesn’t “Christian” art have an indisputable reputation for quality?

In his book, After Strange Gods, poet and social critic T. S. Eliot posed a similar query. “Why, I would ask, is most religious verse so bad, and why does so little religious verse reach the highest levels of poetry?” Then he gave his answer: “Largely, I think, because of a pious insincerity.”

Eliot noted, “The capacity for writing poetry is rare; the capacity for religious emotion of the first intensity is rare; and it is to be expected that the existence of both capacities in the same individual should be rarer still.” He concluded, “People who write devotional verse are usually writing as they want to feel, rather than as they do feel.” ¹

Let’s put it another way: inauthentic poetry is no poetry at all. It’s either drivel, or it’s propaganda. Sometimes it’s both.

I recall the moment my musical landscape and my life changed forever—the moment I knew I’d discovered something simultaneously lyrical and musical. To that point, I’d spent most of my years in Ghana as the adopted son of missionaries. But now I was attending fifth grade at a school in northern Michigan. Once a week we had music class, a welcome hiatus from the unbearable strain of sitting quietly in precise rows while the playground beckoned barely eight feet to my left.

One day the teacher introduced a new piece to us. The song was Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The entire class loved it. Each week, three of us got to choose a favorite song for the class to sing. When it was my turn, I always asked for this one.

What was it about that folk song that so appealed to a skinny boy trying to navigate a new culture, new friends, and cold weather? Was it the plaintive questions? Was it the simple nature of the haunting tune? Or maybe it was Dylan’s elusive answer: “blowin’ in the wind.”

Probably all of that. I’d already seen a few things young Americans aren’t typically privy too. I’d gained a strong sense of impermanence, uncertainty, and injustice. I was getting an education about the condition of our world.

Something about Dylan’s lament tapped into my soul. Still does. His “protest song” was a spiritual cry, and even the most profane among us is spiritual at our core. Dylan put voice to his questions—questions about unnecessary wars, and senseless deaths, and indifferent human beings. Questions that seemed unanswerable. Dylan was writing not as he wanted to feel, but as he actually felt. His message not only resonated with my spirit, it reverberated.

The good news is that there are Christians capable of poetry of the highest order. Perhaps my favorite line ever written in the English language belongs to Richard Crashaw:

Conscious water saw its Master
And blushed.

If we’re familiar at all with Jesus’s first recorded miracle, those seven words compel us to consider it in a new way. That’s what real poetry does; it invites us to consider things from another perspective. Turning water into wine at a Jewish wedding feast announced that someone different had arrived. ² Crashaw’s transcendent line invites us to peer into the very relationship between miracle and Miracle Worker. As the Creator of everything, Christ has dominion over his creation—even water poured into stone jars.

Thankfully good poetry neither begins nor ends with Crashaw. We have many examples of first-rate poetry penned by capable poets who acknowledge the Creator. Their work may be weathered with the years, yet their voices resound across the generations. These are the poems that tower above the rest.

“Amazing Grace,” penned in the eighteenth century, is loved today by religious and irreligious alike. With simple yet exquisite phrasings, the song is John Newton’s timeless praise offered to God for his infinite grace extended to his creatures.

But tucked in the middle of that familiar hymn is a verse that has long hit my ear as not quite belonging. The stanza begins, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years.” Newton didn’t compose the verse, nor would he have been likely to. The concept of time melts into insensibility when it encounters eternity, and Newton understood this. The arbitrary units of human measurement (“ten thousand years,” “no less days”) clatter noisily against the elegance of the poet’s imagery.

Newton did, however, write the last, nearly forgotten verse:

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.

Newton’s quatrain considers the fleeting nature of this life and the solar system upon which it depends. And he understands we have come to something unimaginably wonderful. It is our spiritual connection to the One who has called us to be his children. This relationship with the divine, for which we all ache, is without end. “When we’ve been there ten thousand years” is not bad; it’s quite nice actually. But it’s substantially inferior to Newton’s artful turn of phrase. He has made the transcendent personal for us. Newton has put his heart onto the page.

Isaac Watts (1674–1748), born a few decades prior to Newton (1725–1807), grew weary of the third-rate poetry cluttering the lyrical landscape of church music. So he made a fuss about it to his father. The elder Watts challenged him to write something better. He did.

As a teenager, Watts began composing new songs. Eventually he wrote “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” one of the finest English hymns ever written. In the third stanza, Watts confronts us with the tortured body of Jesus on the cross. To consider the lyric at all is to invite an intense emotional reaction. We feel awe, revulsion, reverence, shock, astonishment, love. Watts’s poetry compels a spiritual response from us.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

And then the poet’s magnificent conclusion:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

If Christ’s sacrificial love demands our “all,” as Watts asserts, then perhaps our poetry ought to aspire to that standard. Saint John the disciple introduced Jesus to us as “the Word.” When our poetry invites appropriate wonder of this Word, we’re more likely to see excellence emerging from the muddle and drivel we’re prone to produce. Our lyrical efforts will begin to hint at the timeless authenticity characteristic of genuine poetry. We might even call it poetry for the Poet’s sake.

1. Source: (T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, London, 1934) pp. 30–31

2. John 2:1ff