Slowly We Inch Outward—And into the Light

Letter from Co-Editor Caroline Langston

“ . . . For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them,” Jesus Christ promises his followers in Matthew 18:20 (KJV). 

It’s a verse I’ve known all my life, even before I was willing to admit that a verse from the Bible could have all that much to say to me. 

You don’t have to be a Christian to acknowledge the power of connection. After more than a year and a quarter of retreating behind our walls, waving at others hesitantly through windshields, shouting across the street at other neighbors while out walking the dog—is there a better word to think about than “together”?

But I think that the verse also has stuck in my head as much for its sound as for its meaning: that chain of “r”s—where, or, three, together—trailing off the tongue like the sound of dripping water. The sounds are at once discrete, and yet inextricably connected. The words are at once musical, and embodied. 

There’s a lesson for our Vita Poetica community in this. If the Word is what’s present when we’re together, then words can be the nexus of common celebration for us, whatever our faith commitments. And they, too, can be embodied. 

And it’s a great time for embodiment: Depending on where we are, most of us are starting to inch back out into the world now, via the blessings of Providence and science. If we’re not in a place to do so yet, then we’re feeling all the more acutely that passion for connection with the other, at the heart of both literature and prayer. 

Appropriately, this Summer edition of Vita Poetica Journal celebrates the sacramentality of the physical—the “sun-breathed air” in Rachel Grandey’s poem “Morning Anointing” and the “hot swallows of boiling clay” in Lauren Carlson’s “God Not Only Did I Walk.”  

There’s not only the passion for the physical, but the passion for precision, for the words we use to get exactly at what we’re trying to share. Consider the myriad names for water in Jeff Burt’s “Jonah,” and the apocalyptic urgency in Jeannine Marie Pita’s “During the Sixth Extinction.” Read Nicole Roccas’s finely developed essay “A ‘Slackness in the Soul’” to find out the training that the Christian Desert Fathers proffered a remedy for spiritual atonia—themselves steps of rigor, and attention. 

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,”  the philosopher Simone Weil maintained. May we pay attention as we grapple with the wealth of words in this issue—and may we, too, be transformed.

Caroline Langston