Figuring Among the Instruments

When my dear friend and frequent collaborator Jane Zwart recommends something, I listen. Particularly when it comes to poetry–because, as an accomplished poet herself, she knows whereof she speaks.

We’re teaching together during Calvin’s January term, a class on Faith and Literature to prepare our student for this April’s Festival of Faith and Writing. (By the way, have you registered? It’s going to be amazing–and tickets are going fast!). Jane brought in this poem, along with Herbert’s “The Windows,” on the first day to begin our month-long classroom conversation. We wanted the students to begin the class by thinking about all the ways what John Calvin calls “sparks of glory” reveal themselves into our everyday, to pay attention to delicious moments of revelation.

And by discovering anew a God who uses everything to hand–even us and our quotidian labors–to provide us a feast beyond our imagining.

If God Made Jam
-- Sarah Lindsay
  
 If God made jam the jars wouldn’t necessarily glow 
 like Christmas lights or the new home of seventy fireflies, 
 the berries wouldn’t have to be so divine 
 they dribbled rainbows and healed the sick, 
 each pip released a Gloria when it 
 cracked between your teeth, 
 and God’s jam would never refuse to touch earthly bread— 
  
 Aunt Lydia has worked out this much 
 since Cousin Bobby told her about a comma 
 he skipped long ago while learning his catechism. 
 Now, on a rainy morning, spared the news 
 that lay in her grass and is too wet to read, 
 she’s flexed her stiff hands and found them able 
 to slice the bread baked by a friend 
 and twist the lid from a royal-red jar, 
 and with the first crusty, raspberry bite 
 she’s ready to affirm God does make jam. 
 It still counts if people figure among 
 the instruments that have been put to use, 
 and Bobby catechized wasn’t wrong 
 when he pictured a deity, willing to work in the kitchen, 
 who made preserves and redeemed us. 

“If God Made Jam” from Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower, copyright 2013 by Sarah Lindsay, used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.