Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.

Review

Books

Culture

Joy

Poetry

22 March 2024

5 min read

Theresa Lola's poetical hope

The death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A poet stands and speaks, raising an arm.

Theresa Lola performs at Kings Place.

Cosmic Shambles Network.

There are poems such as T.S. Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi’ and U.A. Fanthorpe's ‘BC – AD’ which have become staples of Christmas Carol services. Last Christmas, for the first time, I used Theresa Lola's ‘Look at the Revival’ as the poem in our Carol Service that explored the experience of the Magi in seeking and finding Jesus.

‘Look at the Revival’ was commissioned by National Gallery in 2020 in response to ‘The Adoration of Kings’ painting by Jan Gossaert. The poem is written in the voice of Balthazar, the Black King in the painting, and explores the painting’s themes of rupture, transformation and renewal. It ends with this reflection:

My job often feels like a hefty stone

But today I am powered by a fierce awe.

I say to the stunned people let us look deeply

to know this hope deeply.

British Nigerian poet and former Young People’s Laureate for London, Lola is the British equivalent of Amanda Gorman, whose poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ made such an impact at US President Joe Biden's inauguration. Lola said after that event that “To have poetry make national headlines … was just so exciting” and to have Gorman’s poem articulate everyone’s feelings “was just the perfect example of what poetry can do”.

There is a real art to writing poetry for public occasions where depth and immediacy need to intertwine. It is an art that Lola herself has mastered, as was demonstrated when she was commissioned by the Mayor of London’s Office to write and read a poem - ‘For Those Who Listen When Courage Calls’ - at the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s statue in Parliament Square.

Lola was joint-winner in 2018 of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was featured in the 2019 ‘Forces for Change’ issue of British Vogue as a next generation talent. Other commissions for her work, which explores themes of self-discovery, transformation, cultural heritage, and belonging, have included Selfridges, Rimowa, Royal Festival Hall, and Audible. She is currently leading the Volunteer Interpreter Programme at Dulwich Picture Gallery where, in a programme inspired by their Soulscapes exhibition, she is exploring how poetry can be used to interpret their collection.

“This poet speaks boldly of prayer as a call to arms for family, for love, for a survival, which as she concludes in the final poem, ‘Psalm 151’, ‘I prayed my fists into’”

S. Niroshini

Her debut poetry collection ‘In Search of Equilibrium’, which was hailed as “powerful and rigorous”, is an extraordinary, and exacting study of death and grieving. The reviews of this collection have much to say about the well springs of her work.

In this collection, as S. Niroshini writes, she “deftly deploys form, texture, and shape to interrogate the meaning of death and the suffering of family” with poems “variously presented as computer coding, live reportage, prayers, algorithms, Wikipedia entries and hip-hop lyrics”. While its subject matter is, as Carmina Masoliver notes, “essentially natural – life and death”, the poems themselves are often experimental and “bring in cultural elements … as well as religious allusions”. Charlie Hill explains that “This superb debut collection revolves around the death of the poet’s grandfather, whose Alzheimer’s resulted in a ‘four-year funeral’”. Laurie Smith suggests “It is rare for a debut collection by a young poet to be so death-haunted, but it is death-haunted in the same sense as [Sylvia] Plath’s ‘Ariel’ and [Anne] Sexton’s ‘To Bedlam and Part Way Back’.” He writes that “The comparison isn’t fanciful” as “Lola’s writing has a similar vividness and strength”.

Masoliver notes that “The collection is book-ended with Lola’s own prayer and psalm”. “From the first,” she suggests, “there is an expression of doubt about the poet’s faith, though holding onto it ‘even when I fear God might be a thin shadow’”. Yet, “By the time we get to the final poem, there is a loss of innocence to the reality of the world around us, but a certain strength that comes with ‘fighting darkness’”. Niroshini states that “This poet speaks boldly of prayer as a call to arms for family, for love, for a survival, which as she concludes in the final poem, ‘Psalm 151’, ‘I prayed my fists into’”.

Lola has said that “The writing of the collection was emotionally challenging as the poems touch on sensitive topics about death, faith, family and mental health.” For her, “writing poetry has been a ‘therapeutic tool’, a ‘healthy listening ear’ and a way to express her struggles, be they anxiety or … grief”. Nevertheless, she also says: “My poems always suggest and show hope no matter how gritty the subject is! I do write poems that are centred around my faith, and that hope in my faith is Jesus”.

Many reviewers note Lola’s ability to write lines, such as ‘sweeping me off my bones’, “that stop you dead”. Hannah Williams was particularly moved by lines from ‘Blessed Are the Mothers of a Dead Child’:

Blessed are the mothers of a dead child

for they manage to recover

after eating the fruit that grows

from planting your child’s casket in the ground.

Hill cites the final lines of the same poem:

My grandmother tries to celebrate the brief beauty of his breath.

She says what use is sweeping grief under the carpet

when you can blend it to find the drop of sanity that will flow from it.

to suggest that it is here that the equilibrium sought in the collection’s title is to be found.

The Sunday Times Style Magazine has described Lola as being among “the ranks of an exciting new wave of young female bards who are widening the appeal of poetry for a new generation”. As a result, the imminent prospect of a second collection from her is a particularly exciting prospect. Look out later in the year, then, for ‘Ceremony for the Nameless’ which is described as exploring the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. In lyrical, joyful and moving poems, Lola will explore the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began.

This returns us to Balthazar and his journey of discovery. So, as he states: “let us look deeply / to know this hope deeply.”