Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect

Poet Mary Karr once rejected prayer along with "any god who'd want people kneeling and snivelling." A friend interrupted: "You don't do it for God, you a------" (Karr 78).

Karr discovered that prayer, even the kneeling part, changes the pray-er. "Like poetry," she writes,"prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: 'true' and 'beautiful'" (74). (Mary Karr. "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer." Essay in Sinners Welcome. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.)

Forming a prayer that comes close to being a poem is something that my adult class at St. James Episcopal Church does each week. We follow the curriculum "Education for Ministry" (EfM) devised by the School of Theology at the University of the South, Sewanee. Each week we apply our readings from Scripture, history, and theology to a story or artifact brought to us by someone in the class. We end by collaborating on a collect, intended to "collect" all our thoughts into one unified prayer, often one sentence. We wrestle with the problem of finding the words that are both true to what has emerged from our discussions, and beautiful.

Here's a collect that we composed when our student Erica brought us Mary Karr's poem "Etchings in a Time of Plague," which could've been our time, early in America's COVID-19 emergency. But Karr published the poem in 1993, the height of the AIDS epidemic. The title refers to a Medieval etching of a cart carrying plague victims, one white hand sticking out of the carnage like a flower. In the poem, a subway rider lifts her eyes "from the valley" of the art book in her lap to see a "frail" young man. In her mind, he becomes "everyone you've ever loved" and, at their stop, she thinks, "Offer him your hand. Help him climb the stair." After our discussion, we wrote this:

Collect for a Call to Action
Eternal God, when Your hand set Ezekiel in a desolate valley to proclaim hope, dry bones rose to new life: may we, like Ezekiel, look up from our personal valleys to act as Your hand and voice to those who need comfort. Amen.

For tying together all the strands of an occasion, this collect might deserve a prize. The "valley" line of the poem brought to mind Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones, fresh from Sunday's scripture reading. Before we'd read the poem, we'd discussed an essay about "vocation," God's "call" to us to act. Valley, plague, a skeletal body, a hand, and a call to action: we packed it all in one sentence.

Derek Olsen outlines the form of the collect in his guide to the Book of Common Prayer Inwardly Digest. A collect begins with an invocation calling God by a trait appropriate to the occasion. (For ours, perhaps "Life-giving God" would be more fitting.) Olsen calls the next part "the relative clause / acknowledgement," a reminder of a characteristic or action of God that fits the occasion. Here, it's Ezekiel's famous prophecy. Then there's "the petition," a request of God, followed by the "statement of purpose / result." At the end is a "doxology," here shortened to "amen."

More than the form, which can vary, it's unity that distinguishes a collect.  For contrast, Olsen cites the prayer attributed to St. Francis, Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon.... Karr calls it both prayer and poem, for her a gateway into faith.  Yet Francis's prayer, being a list of several balanced petitions, lacks the concentrated focus of a collect.

During our first Zoom meeting in March - we called it ZfM - we had brought EfM's process of theological reflection to bear on our own COVID-19 experiences. The cruise ship Diamond Princess emerged as a metaphor to explain how we'd taken so many small routine pleasures for granted and had allowed minor annoyances to consume us while we'd blithely missed signs of the pandemic to come. Looking for an analog in our tradition, we remembered the once-proud city of Nineveh in the book of Jonah. Here's what we wrote:

Collect for a Time of Upheaval
Almighty and merciful God, when You through Jonah warned Nineveh that the great city would fall to nothing in just forty days, the citizens repented, fasted, and averted catastrophe: May we, shocked by sudden awareness of our precarious condition, see with new clarity the beauty and value in routines we have taken for granted, and abjure the fruitless anxieties that have distracted us from You. Amen

For me, being an English teacher, part of the fun is to pack all of the discussion into a single forward-moving sentence. The collect marches smoothly in iambic steps through the story of Nineveh until the accents reverse after the dash "may WE -- SHOCKED by SUDden a-WAREness," appropriately stopping us in our tracks. The rhythm is one reason why Olsen advises that a single trained reader deliver the collects. They are written to sound beautiful, "charming the ear by putting similar sounds close to one another" and flowing in "rhythms and cadences" that crowds' voices would muddy (131).

One collect was all mine, as our discussion ran long. There's only so much Zoom my eyes can take! Our student Pete had shared a photo of "Holy Water" in a cheap plastic bottle with a stamp attesting to its coming from a spring in Conyers, GA, blessed by Jesus Christ "personally" in 1969. We scoffed at the very idea of holy water as a mass-produced commodity, but then remembered that we kneel reverently to sip Mass-produced consecrated wine: to people outside our tradition, what's the difference? For them, our own rites -- hand-waving, water-sprinkling, bowing, petitions -- are ridiculous.

I'm personally invested in this one. A glance at my Episcopal page reveals that the point where magic meets mystery, where fantasy meets myth, has always been the fulcrum of my faith -- my whole inner life. The form of the collect helped me to bring all of our discussion together to make a statement that, for me, resolves the issues:

Collect for Consecration
Almighty Father and Creator, by the power of Your Holy Spirit, You exalted humble Mary to be vessel of Your birth, You make Yourself present in the ordinary bread at Your altar, and You promise that a spring of living water wells up in each of us to eternal life: now consecrate our senses that we may perceive in our neighbors, our selves, and in all Your creation, Your power to make instruments of Your grace. Amen.

Examples of God's working through scoffed-at vessels pile up against that colon like a stream behind a dam; after the colon we get a release of energy at the recognition of God's power to consecrate us.

Discussing a story of a guest who chooses not to question signs of criminality that he finds in his host's library, we collected examples of how Jesus does ask crucial questions, respecting the unique concerns of each individual he questions. At least for those who know the gospel stories, this collect is a compact manual for how to have difficult discussions:

Collect for Empathy
Lord, creator and sustainer: you asked questions that probed the hearts of the people you met, Will you sell your possessions and follow me? Can you surrender your authority to be newborn? Do you wish to be healed? Train our imaginations so to empathize with those we meet, that we, too, may ask the questions that lead to safety, growth, and health. Amen.

Olsen makes the poetry connection explicit. "A good collect should be like a haiku," he writes...

...in that it gives a unified experience, communicating a single, self-contained thought. Furthermore, this thought may be allusive, using loaded language to point outside of itself to references that a culturally literate interpreter should pick up. Finally, a good collect should leave us with a feeling, an intention, or a resolve to enact that for which we have just prayed (138).

From experience, I'd only add that the feeling you get from reading a good collect is heightened when you've struggled with friends to write one. As Mary Karr's friend might say, you're not writing to change God's mind; you're writing to change your own.

Blogposts of related interest:
• See our EfM class blog.
• About Derek Olsen's book, see more at my blogpost "The Power of Liturgy: I've Heard it All Before" (01/2017)
• "Mary Karr's Sinners Welcome: Discomfort and Joy" (06/2020).