As we enter the season of Advent, anticipating the celebration of Christ’s Incarnation, it strikes me that poetry bears some taste of that miracle. Like Christ himself, and to a lesser extent the Bible, poetry is both divine and human, breathed from above and at the same time molded of flesh. And both elements are necessary.
But I should start with the Christian teaching. The miracle of Incarnation (the en-fleshment of God) is most integral to our understanding of Christ. We teach that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than God, wholly divine, and yet was at the same time truly and wholly human. This is logical nonsense, of course, which is entirely the point. Humanity’s case has always been far too desperate for us to be rescued from ourselves by means of logic. This Incarnation business does, of course, make the practical business of following Christ complex, requiring constant attention, for as Christ is divine, then he is and should be a model for us all to emulate, but as he was human he is not. Thus his teachings, his attitude toward women, outcasts, lepers, poor people, and religious hypocrites should be normative to us, his maleness, singleness, Jewishness seem to me to be part of the accident of being human in a specific form and context. Just because he was male, for instance, does not mean every follower of Christ must also be male. Thus we have to decide at every point whether this or that feature of Christ is a reflection of his divinity or his humanity.
The same sort of thing is true of the inspired scriptures, though to a very different degree. Although some of my Christian brothers and sisters seem to treat it so, the Bible is not as thoroughly infused with divinity as is the Incarnate Christ. The divine inspiration of scripture breaks forth in flashes, through cracks in the human and culturally conditioned stories, poems, and laws that comprise the book. It thus becomes all the more important to us to be able to discern whether we are reading one of those eternal flashes of divinity or a reflection of human context of the Bible’s composition. When the Book of Exodus presents God in the burning bush as “I am who I am,” instead of a namable God that can be distinguished clearly from the other named gods, we sense something divine breaking through the Bible’s cultural milieu. On the other hand, when the Book of Joshua presents Israel’s failure to destroy utterly all Canaanite men, women, and children as a grievous sin deserving of judgment, we sense that here we may be dealing with a cultural mindset rather than the mind of God.
But in both cases – the Incarnate Word and the inspired word – it is essential that divinity be clothed in clay. Yes, it makes it more difficult for us to decide which features or passages we are to adopt as building blocks of our own faith and which ones we should set aside as background, but as soon as you take away the physical, temporal, sensual, corruptible, tangible, and occasionally smelly traces of humanity, you have ruined everything. The effort to etherealize faith, to remove the taint of human frailty from it, inevitably turns it into an elitist philosophy for self-consciously clever people who know themselves to be more spiritually attuned than the Great Unwashed Mass of Humanity. True faith is breathed by God above, but it must be breathed into the seeps and swamps of our own malodorous clay, or it’s pointless.
Kind of like poetry. No literary genre is as frequently referred to as “inspired” as is poetry. No other is so often thought of as ethereal, spiritual, even divine. Only poetry has a tradition of calling on the muses at the beginning of the work, drawing attention to its otherworldly source and prophetic nature. And no artistic genre is more often used by pretentious aesthetes as proof of their more “spiritual” sensibilities as is poetry. And yet this is only true of poetry aficionados (defined here as the sort of poetry reading snot who uses the word aficionado instead of “fan”). Poets themselves are obsessed with the sensual image, with capturing the sounds and smells and physical reality of their subjects. Poets, as far as I can tell, never try to rise above sordid physical humanity. The sensual image is the building block of the poem, not the feeling or the concept or the spiritual essence. Without the clay of physical reality, poets have nothing but breath, and for a poem, breath without a body is as dead as a body without breath.
So I come back to Christianity’s steadfast, even stubborn, adherence to the physical. The Incarnation of Christ – the enfolding of divinity in the mudbrick matter of humanity – is non-negotiable, as is the wound-bearing, fish-eating, fire-making, tangible physical reality of Christ’s Resurrection.
Christians sometimes forget this. But poets get it.
DEMIURGEby D. H. Lawrence             
They say that reality exists only in the spiritthat corporal existence is a kind of deaththat pure being is bodilessthat the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.
But what nonsense it is!as if any Mind could have imagined a lobsterdozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!
Even the mind of God can only imaginethose things that have become themselves:bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in   creation even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.
Religion knows better than philosophy.Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesustill he was born from a womb, and ate soup and breadand grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.

                        ON BELIEF IN THE PHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF JESUS                                                                        by Denise Levertov
It is for all            ‘literalists of the imagination,’                        poets or not,that miracle            is possible,                        possible and essential.Are some intricate minds                        nourished                                    on concept,as epiphytes flourish                        high in the canopy?                                                Can theysubsist on the light,                        on the half                                    of metaphor that’s notgrounded in dust, grit,                                    heavy                                                carnal clay?Do signs contain and utter,                                                for them                                                            all the realitythat they need? Resurrection, for them,                                    an internal power, but not                                                a matter of flesh?For the others,                        of whom I am one,                                                miracles (ultimate need, breadof life) are miracles just because                                    people so tuned                                                to the humdrum laws:gravity, mortality –                                    can’t open                                                to symbol’s powerunless convinced of its ground,                                                its roots                                                            in bone and blood.We must feel                        the pulse in the wound                                                            to believethat ‘with God                        all things                                    are possible,’taste            bread at Emmaus                                    that warm handsbroke and blessed.