By Nathan Sytsma

Staff Writer

Poet Scott Cairns will visit Calvin this month for the Festival of Faith and Writing. ``Another Christian writer. How nice,'' we might blithely be tempted to think. Cairns' most recent volume of poetry, ``Recovered Body,'' will shock those seeking superficial reassurance, however. An Orthodox Christian, Cairns struggles like the combatant Jacob with the stories of Scripture. He takes poetry to be a questioning, learning process, not the communication of already understood truths. Extending such probing to biblical texts as to other literature, he revisits Old Testament scenes with an unblinking eye for the participants' humanity and Yahweh's puzzling idiosyncrasies, and in so doing, offers a refreshing approach to reading the Bible.

To give a sense of Cairns' work, his piece ``The Sacrifice of Isaac'' does not have an angel halt Abraham's knife as in the ``gentled features of a great many fables'' that came after. No, ``the knife did find its cramping sheath there in the boy's bared breast.'' Only afterwards did the Lord retract time out of pity and replay the scene, leaving the earlier Abraham just ``outside time's arch embarrassment,'' fallen on Isaac, ``with nothing but his extreme, his absolute, his dire obedience'' (Recovered 43).

This piece is part of ``The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,'' the commentaries of a fictional rabbi whose voice of accusation, compassion and glee Cairns adopts in order to take a fresh look at biblical scenes. Such re-imaging falls squarely within the Hebrew tradition of midrash. As the Hebrews understood words to be living, powerful, and generative in themselves - not just in the ideas to which they refer - the writers of midrash ``attended to existing texts precisely as if they held the germ of further exposition, and these writers were in that way freed into making something new of them'' (Shaping 80). That is, the rabbis participated in the living text by creating a re-imaging of that text.

By entering into the tradition of midrash, Cairns points to a new way of reading the Bible as living text and as literature. ``Wait a minute,'' we might say, ``how did we get from writing poems to reading the Bible?'' Cairns distinctively refuses to separate reading and writing. In some ways he reads biblical scenes just as he reads the Church Fathers or more modern poets like W.H. Auden - as voices whose messages should be honored and critiqued through our creative response.

Cairns even claims that many Christians are not actually ``reading - which is at heart a collaborative, creative activity'' (Event 8). True reading is conversation with the text, listening to it and allowing it to speak back in our own imagination, such speech taking the form of writing for him. The trick, of course, is to converse without simply letting the text parrot back our own voice, a skill that requires listening for the mystery of the text. What separates easy, merely provocative re-imagings from the truly beneficial? Only, as far as I can tell, a desire for complex insight persisting through a patient process that flies in the face of our consumerist culture. We can read the narrative as literature, as conversation, allowing it to lead us meditatively into mystery and response.

To say that we must read the Bible as literature makes a number of Christians nervous. Another Festival author, Leland Ryken, reports that skeptics are wary of putting the Bible on a level with unchristian writers and of treating the Bible as ``only'' literature, ignoring its religious content. But ``literary'' reading of the Bible ``in no way detracts from its truth content'' (Ryken 175). Rather, a literary approach to the Bible pays attention to the presence of genres, helping readers to probe into a passage's message, appreciate its artistic beauty, and find renewed delight in reading Scripture. The literary approach that Scott Cairns takes - respecting ambiguous characters and paradoxical themes in the Bible - may be needed to shock Christians into recovering the child's sense of wonder, imagination, and sensitivity required for honest reading of Scripture. Why stand up for Lot's wife, as Cairns does, or locate original sin in Adam's refusal to hold Eve's hand?

First, such an approach requires seeing biblical texts freshly. After a time, pat Sunday school responses to the Bible become little better than literary recycling: move an image around, paste in a ``Christianese'' term. The midrashim, by contrast, help me to recover a childlike wonder about the biblical scenes. These are living texts with which two-way conversation is possible; imagination allows me to hear them freshly and speak back in poetry, song, conversation with friends, or even prayer. Cairns writes that poets in particular are learning ``to trust their developing facilities with language to lead them into speaking discovered matter, rather than spouting familiar, safe, and therefore reductive, soul-crippling clichés'' (Image 2). Tired, untested responses no longer make the cut.

At the same time, a literary approach to Scripture requires us to take the texts seriously. Because of its close attention to genre and the multi-dimensional characters involved, such response actually helps to prevent sweeping revisionism. Focusing on texts as powerful narratives, lyric poems, and satires, for instance, helps to counteract - without denying entirely - concerns with textual fragments, sources, redactors and historical context (Ryken 182). Responses like Cairns' require us to take the original text seriously, to weigh the issues with our whole being rather than passing over them in our tired trek through familiar passages. A literary approach thus encourages ``criticism'' in the best sense of the word: a careful response to the book that should shape our lives.

Moreover, as another upcoming Festival author, Ralph Wood, writes, a responsible approach to Scripture allows for real, healthy Christian disbelief. Some of Cairns' midrashim imply at least a little discontent with God, but no more, I suspect, than do the original passages.

We have simply trained ourselves to sidestep the difficult reality of biblical writers standing to accuse God. ``Look, O LORD, and consider: Whom have you ever treated like this?'' cries the author of Lamentations. ``You have slain [your people] in the day of your anger; you have slaughtered them without pity'' (Lam. 2:20,21). Psalms of lament and imprecation, says Wood, remind us that ``wickedness cannot be conquered by sheer niceness'' (Disbelief 4). He puts forward author Flannery O'Connor's contention that ``[t]o believe in God...is not to avoid such doubts and difficulties but to undergo a lifelong combat with them'' (Disbelief 1). Tritely sentimental readings of Scripture are lethal to the honest Christian's faith. A literary, responsive way of reading the Bible can turn from self-indulgent sentimentality to see God's people in all their beauty and pain, to seek God in all his delightful and terrible mystery.

So what does it mean to recover conversation? I confess that, as usual, I can write about the theory and still not truly understand the practice. For me, a new way of reading the Bible means recognizing there is more to Scripture than extracting theological propositions from the text; God can also transform us as we consider Scripture in literary ways. The more time we spend soaking in the text, the more the characters become real, surprising humans and the passages reveal real, frightening tensions. Responding to such flaws and questions to seek discovery rather than reassurance, we may learn the unexpected. After all, writes Cairns, the Hebraic living word, davar, ``invites indeterminate, obscure enormity//to gather at the glib horizon's edge'' and God to thunder over our parched readings (Recovered 71).