But, if I back up far enough, I see that the two share a mode. “Christianity doesn’t exist without devotion to Christ,” Smith said. Though poetry and Christianity do not share the same terms, Smith said, the two share a commonality that allows exploration of the world and oneself. The language of poetry makes you more attentive of the world beyond you, even as it serves to enlarge your vocabulary for the world within you.”

They impart to the reader a new kind of awareness, a new kind of sensitivity. “And like the parable, poems offer tools that foster an ongoing and repeatable state of wonder. “Like the language of spiritual awakening, poems seek to be living words - vehicles for transmitting a sense of the strange and the powerful from speaker to reader,” she said. Smith said she prefers to focus on accounts of Christianity that relate to “the experience of wonder rather than demystifying or domesticating its source.” “And so the most fruitful attempts at bearing witness are necessarily expansive, drawing upon disparate and sometimes desperate resources.”

“This may be the history of all religions, all the various vocabularies devised to transmit what is fundamentally beyond us,” she said. The layered perspectives, imaginations, sensibilities and vocabularies of the Gospels reveal a singular, universal truth, Smith said. That these different writings of experience work together toward creating a unified and dynamic whole, despite the gaps and variations distinguishing them from one another, strikes me as, well, poetic.” “In their accounts of Christ’s time on earth, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John create together a single story, complete with perspectival shifts, lapses and any contradictions as corroborations. “The Gospels offer language-based proof that there is no such thing as seeing eye to eye, no such thing as having the exact same experience as anyone else,” she said. Smith said the use of metaphor is especially prevalent in the New Testament of the Bible and provides Christ and the disciples with a way to transmit not only information, but also awe. Smith, the Poet Laureate of the U.S., delivers the Christian Culture lecture at Saint Mary’s on Wednesday night.

Tracy k smith poems life on mars