Power of poetry

Poetry has a bad reputation. If it’s not known for being obscure and difficult to understand, then it’s thought of as silly, sing-songy and trite.

Bad poetry says the things that don’t need saying—which is why so many of us roll our eyes at it. Or even worse, bad poetry says nothing at all. But we should savor good poetry. Good poetry gives words to the unsayable. It expresses our deepest fears, our highest hopes, our shared humanity.

We as Christians should know the power of poetry better than anyone. Every Sunday, we come together to hear and recite it. Those psalms of praise, those prophetic declarations of the Old Testament, even that famous, Genesis 1 retelling of how the world began. Those are poems!

This message is an excerpt from a Women of the ELCA blog by Sarah Carson. Today we remember Johann Konrad Wilhelm Loehe, renewer of the church, who died in 1872.

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