Poets on Prayer: Mary Karr and Christian Wiman

Thirst is the truest knowledge of water.
  - Mary Karr, "Philemon: Notes from the Underground"

Mary Karr writes that in a poem about needing to pray. By serendipity, I opened to that poem on the morning after our EfM (Education for Ministry) class had discussed how spirituality is a thirst for relationship with the transcendent, and prayer is where God meets us in our need. It's doubly serendipitous that the class also discussed a whimsical poem by Christian Wiman that spoke to us about another aspect of prayer.

We had read an essay by Urban T. Holmes from "The Spiritual Person" in Spirituality for Ministry, The Library of Episcopalian Classics (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2002). We all appreciated Holmes's idea about prayer as a space where "our freedom meets God's vision," though we haven't lost our childhood notions of prayer as a wish list for our Santa in heaven. Holmes rates that kind of "petitionary prayer" at the lower end of a continuum. The upper end of Holmes's continuum is wordless communion with God. As a word guy who savors the lines in our Book of Common Prayer, I'd had trouble imagining that until Holmes likened that sort of prayer to the silence between a loving couple.

I got help with that idea of a wordless prayer when, procrastinating, I re-opened Mary Karr's collection Tropic of Squalor. I'd read all the poems except a few at the end of a series she calls "The Less Holy Bible," so I turned to those. One tells of mailing an ex-lover's belongings. "Leaving the post office," she writes, "I enter / the sidewalk's gauntlet of elbows" and she prays to "Christ, my Lord, my savior, / and my good brother," something like the "Jesus Prayer" that our class had discussed. Her foul mood shifts as she prays for everyone she sees. A toddler with a green apple "can become baby Jesus," and an ugly street incident is redeemed ("Petering: Recuperation from a Sunk Love..." 69-70).

Karr's line about "thirst" caps a poem in which the poet describes a dreary subway car. "And in the evil of my pride," she tells God, "I get / to forget I am You-formed" though she sits "among other similarly shaved animals." When she puts her hands together, she sees her fingers as "unlit tapers" that "burn" for God. She calls this one "Philemon: Notes from the Underground" (71), relating the epistle in which Paul asserts the brotherhood of a Christian slave and his owner Philemon to Dostoevsky's novel about a snob resentful of everyone around him. In this context, the poet's thirst for transcendence is itself an entry into knowledge of God.

After our discussion of prayer in EfM, we subjected a poem by Christian Wiman to a process of "theological reflection," a creative search for ways that our religious traditions relate to life experiences, including literature and movies. I brought Wiman's "I Don't Want to be a Spice Store," which begins with a snarky description of pretentious merchandise in an exclusive store in a town where shops don't open before noon and "even the bookstore is brined in charm." The poet writes that he wants to be open and available all the time (we thought of Buc-ee's and 7-11) and carry just the necessities:

Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet.
I want to hold within myself the possibility
of plugging one’s ears and easing one’s eyes;
superglue for ruptures that are,
one would have thought, irreparable,
a whole bevy of nontoxic solutions
for everyday disasters.
  - Wiman, "I Don't Want to be a Spice Store"
  from Survival is a Style (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

The poem ends with the store empty but "humming" at 4 a.m., door unlocked, waiting patiently. Several of us highlighted different parts of the poem before one man observed that, in this way of looking at a convenience store, Wiman had given us a memorable image for what prayer can be. From the list of necessities, to the intercessions for the mending of others' brokenness, to the patience that waits for God to enter in, it touches on all the points we made during our discussion of the essay.

It's a model of prayer in one other way: It doesn't have to say all that to say all that.

Blogposts of Related Interest Mary Karr writes that poetry is prayer in an essay that concludes her 2006 collection Sinners Welcome. She collects poems about how her son brought her out of her self, poems about the Incarnation of God that make familiar Bible stories uncomfortably physical, poems that express gratitude, and some that don't. See Discomfort and Joy (06/2020). Her afterword and a 1993 poem "Etchings in a Time of Plague" figure prominently in a piece I wrote about a form of prayer that comes close to being a form of poetry. See Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect (05/2020).

Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss (08/2013) concerns a book of essays by Christian Wiman, once fundamentalist, then atheist, now a kind of believer again. There's also my review (06/2013) of the poet's collection Every Riven Thing.