John Terpstra

In the church where we go to now the white wings of seagulls 
float among the rafters, above the sand …

John Terpstra led the writer's workshop segment of the graduate-level summer program in Art and Theology developed by the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto), and hosted by the Studio for Art, Faith & History in Orvieto, July 2015. Terpstra's ten books of poetry and four works of creative non-fiction have won the CBC Radio Literary Competition as well as numerous Hamilton Literary Awards, and have been short-listed for the Governor-General's Award, the Charles Taylor Prize, the BC Award for Canadian Non-fiction and the Raymond Souster Award. He has served as Writer in Residence at McMaster University and Hillfield-Strathallan College. He divides his time equally between writing and his chosen trade, which is woodworking. Find more of his work at www.johnterpstra.com.

Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I joined a small Presbyterian Church named St Cuthbert's, in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. At the time, I had two published books of poetry to my name. A number of months after we started attending St Cuthbert's, the music director, Bart Nameth, approached me and said, "You write poetry. Do you want to write a poem for Pentecost?" My reply was an immediate, "Not a chance. I am not a religious poet." Religious poetry, to my mind, meant predictability of subject, knowing before you begin where you will end, and sentimentality. 

But I respected Bart. He played the piano for our church services. A grand piano, with which he accompanied the hymn singing and responses (many of which he wrote) and from which, during the Prelude, Offertory and Postlude, those times in the worship service when he was free to roam, could come the strains of composers from Bach to Frank Zappa to Miles Davis to Bjork. To Bart’s way of thinking any music on earth can be brought into that space on a Sunday morning and become praise and worship.

And so, out of that respect him and for his catholicity, and trusting his perception over my own, I agreed to give it a try. I set one rule for myself: anything I wrote for Sunday morning should also be readable in any other context, when I gave public readings. Let’s not call it a rule, but a challenge. I was challenging myself to walk that line of tension between church and world.

In fear and trembling, I sat down to write, taking what I had in front of me, which was the vague sense that the street and house lights we saw laid out below us when we drove down the escarpment that runs through our city was somehow connected to the flickering tongues of flame. Also, that the wrenching disagreement I was experiencing at the time with a longtime friend was also the subject of Pentecost. We couldn't speak to each other, after all. Our tongues were confused, even though we spoke the same English language.

The surprise for me once I began writing was that this new hermeneutic of the text took everything that I had internalized about the story over a youth and childhood of churchgoing and channelled it through my own experience and into my own words. It sent me down avenues new, holy and wholly unexpected. It felt as though I was living the scripture. Nothing in my past or present thinking had prepared me for this possibility.

I gave a copy of the completed (as completed as possible before his deadline) poem to Bart a few weeks before Pentecost Sunday. He read it and let it wind through the hurdy-gurdy of his musical mind. In the week before Pentecost we rehearsed a few times, and on Sunday morning, during the Offertory, I stood at the back of our small church, where the piano was also placed, in front of amicrophone, and read the poem to the music that he had composed. It is a form of music which he calls "structured improvisation”, where he takes often familiar songs and hymns which the poem suggests to him, and plays and improvises on them as I read, structuring his playing to the flow of the text. It is not background music but true accompaniment. We are a duet. It is also more fun than any one poet should be allowed to have on a Saturday night, much less a Sunday morning.

That first poem begat others, and over the years I have written for days on the church calendar that include Advent, All Saints, Lent, Ascension, Trinity Sunday and more. Some of these days and seasons have accumulated more than one poem. One year Bart asked for poems for Good Friday based on the Fourteen Stations of the Cross: fourteen poems. His request coincided with my pursuit of a natural, tree-cross to hang in our church, a pursuit that led me into a derelict orchard, where I found that shape. The poems became a narrative of the tree in the garden becoming the tree of crucifixion and of life. My first true Easter poem arrived only two years ago; a long time coming, because the tightrope between church and world quivers greatest when you walk the subject of resurrection. It wouldn’t take much to fall.

Inevitably, along the way I broke my own rule and wrote poems that only those on the inside of the building, those versed in scripture, could understand or appreciate. Poems so specific to the text that when the poem is published I include a verse reference from scripture under the title. But I have also strayed from scripture and written poems that have to do more with what our congregation is experiencing, or what is happening in the local and wider world around us, though scripture finds a way of weaving through much of what I write, regardless of the subject at hand.

All the poems I write are liturgical, for they are part of the work of the people of our congregation, and I am one of those people. They fit with what we are doing by showing up, by being there rather than in bed reading the New York Times or having brunch with friends, and by believing what we do and continuing to walk and stumble on.

All in all, for a poet, it is a dream come true. I have been able to write poems that are part of the life of a community. I have had a job as a poet, a job as essential and mundane as that of a carpenter or a doctor. Poets do not usually find this kind of hire. They may find hire in teaching poetry, but not writing it. “I hope you know how lucky you are” a fellow poet said to me, when I described what I did. I do.

The work is unpaid, mind you. My reward is in heaven. I am more than half-serious when I say this. From the beginning I understood that poetry had nothing to do with money. It was one of the things that attracted me to it. I was attracted to meaningful activity that was outside the capitalist system. Experience has borne out this intuition I had when I was sixteen. But a poet has to eat. I have been able to survive as the grasshopper in an Aesop fable because I am not alone but belong, first of all, to the community of two that marriage creates, second, to the community of faith that has nurtured what gift I have, and third, to the civic community and setting that has done likewise. I consider these latter two communities as patrons of the arts, of my art, for it is from them that I receive the commissions to do the bread-winning work that is the other half of my life, namely woodworking and carpentry. The distinction between the two communities, between as it were the church and the world, has in the process broken down somewhat. Walking that tightrope has been and is an exercise in faith, on a daily basis, but by grace it has paid off. Soli deo gloria

Would I want to be paid? Would I want my congregation to pay me for writing poetry? Then the singer/songwriters (of which we have a few) should get paid as well, and the others who write liturgy. It could get unwieldy, and I am not sure that any of us actually want that. When the time came that I wished to produce a CD of the various poems Bart and I had done together, we had no problem finding full funding for the project from within our congregation. The same was true when I wanted to publish chapbooks of poetry. And I am fairly certain that if I asked to be paid for the poems I write for Sunday mornings, money would be forthcoming. But it is more important to me that I am able and welcome to contribute in the specific way that I can, by writing poems. This to me seems like an entirely new way to go about the business of church and congregation’s participation, and not one that I grew up with. 

New ways of integrating art and artists of various stripes into congregational life and worship are shooting up everywhere these days. This is simply how it has worked out in my specific case.