Philip Kolin’s Meekness: How Will the Meek Inherit the Earth?

Did Jesus begin his Sermon on the Mount with a poem? If so, why? And what does it tell us about poetry in the life of the Church? In Christianity and Poetry, Dana Gioia observes “the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse.”[1] Included in this count are not only the Book of Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations, but also many of the prophetic books, the Wisdom books, and the individual canticles recorded in the Old and New Testaments.

Gioia does not hesitate to call the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12) a poem: “What are the Beatitudes but a poem shaped by the traditions of prophetic verse? . . . The Beatitudes are a poem about the merciful Kingdom of God in contrast to the selfish world of mankind.”[2] The repeated words “Blessed are . . .” and the succession of paradoxes defining the blessed mark the poetic quality of the Beatitudes. Biblical scholars agree, noting that the Beatitudes have been influenced especially by Psalm 37, an acrostic poem whose successive sections begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That psalm, like the Beatitudes, looks to a reversal of present sorrow and promises a happy future for the just.

But why does Jesus, at the start of his sermon, speak these momentous words of joyful blessing in poetry instead of prose? Poetry communicates beauty and mystery by its very form of expression; “the medium” is at least part of “the message.”[3] Jesus, speaking in the tradition of the inspired biblical prophets and poets, composed his poem, the Beatitudes, because he understood (as Gioia puts it) “that some truths require the utmost power of language to carry the full weight of their meaning.”[4] The Kingdom of Heaven must be announced as something truly beautiful, wonderful, arresting.

Despite the importance of poetry in biblical revelation and Christian tradition, Christian poetry continues to need apologists. The faithful may notice its value in worship, Gioia argues, but few would consider poetry to be “an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice.”[5] A utilitarian prejudice definitely favors the prosaic, supporting the widespread opinion that whatever is said in poetry would be understood more easily and better communicated in prose. Given the moral demands of Christian living today and the rational challenges to belief, is not plain talk better? Given the sheer pace of modern life, is not poetic reading and writing a dispensable luxury? Is poetry not an unnecessary decoration of word and thought?

Gioia and others argue to the contrary that the Christian proclamation of good news cannot be reduced to the articulation of Christian ideas, abstracted from their incarnation in lived experience, without losing its flesh-and-blood vitality. The apostles proclaimed their sensory encounters with Jesus: “That which . . . we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). “The problem is that [Christianity today] has lost its senses, all five of them,” writes Gioia, who identifies the revival of Christian poetry as an urgent imperative for the life of the Church, which needs “to recover the language of the senses and to recapture faith’s natural relationship with beauty.”[6]

This recovery, Gioia urges, must involve more than a purely philosophical and theological esteem for beauty, such as Jacques Maritain and Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, have articulated. True as their approach certainly is, “their relation to beauty is passive rather than creative.”[7] Poets help the faithful to bridge the gap between what they know and believe and what they feel: “We are grateful for an explanation, but we crave inspiration, communion, rapture, epiphany.”[8]

Held in low esteem today, poetry may find its true value revealed in the Beatitudes, where the poor, the mourners, the hungry for justice, the pure in heart, the persecuted, the meek are extolled and exalted. Jesus himself is “the blessed man” (Psalm 1:1), the descendant “according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3) of King David, famous for his songs, harp-playing, and dancing before the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:14). When Jesus as a poet upholds the lowly in the Beatitudes, does he not implicitly attribute a blessedness, a happiness, to poets themselves when they share in Christ’s vision of the beauty of the earth and its creatures?

Among the sayings of Jesus, we hear: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5:5). Biblical scholars find a source for this Beatitude in Psalm 37:11: “But the meek shall possess the land and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.” Jesus, however, suggests an inheritance of the earth that is more than a merely material possession of it. An inheritance crowns a natural bond.

But how are the meek—the downtrodden, the uncomplaining, the submissive—going to inherit the earth? Skeptics may say that they will inherit it only as all mortals do, when dust returns to dust. Linguists note, however, that the Hebrew word translated as “meek” means “slow to anger,” “gentle with others,” and connotes “a form of charity.”[9] The meek, therefore, are God’s children, resembling the God who is love (1 John 4:8). The inheritance promised to the children of God is ultimately “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), a world that has been transformed, that appears in its true beauty.

Does it not belong to poets already now to sense the beauty, the richness, of earthly things as heralds of the Kingdom still to come, a gateway into its glory? Do not poets find a special place among the meek because they “inherit the earth” as a realm of natural beauty, attending to its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch as vehicles for metaphoric expression and embodiment?

A well-published Roman Catholic poet, Philip C. Kolin has written extensively on Church liturgy, history, and the saints. His poem “Meekness” (published here in Church Life Journal for the first time, with a commentary by the poet himself) interprets that very Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek” (Matt 5:5), extending its poetry into Kolin’s own.[10]

Meekness, By Philip C. Kolin

It’s praying for seeds to grow into
broom trees in the darkness, seeing
a blade of grass painted with the sun’s
palette, stars smiling in the faces of flowers.

It’s a clump of sea oats anchoring
a wide stretch of beach, bees humming in a hive,
preparing a sanctuary of candles to be set aglow,
whirling spheres traced inside a clam, and flights

of sparrows merging into wings of fire.
Those long reeds of lilies morph into exclamation
points in the pond’s quiet mystery. And that
with the first ripples of dawn day will begin.

It’s the belief that this plot of earth
We inherit becomes the gateway
to the stronghold of the clouds.

Commentary by Kolin

This poem urges readers to practice the third Beatitude (Matt 5.5) by taking a lesson from the natural world. The narrative of images (almost pericopes) symbolizes the various manifestations of meekness. Through prayer a tiny seed produces a fifteen-foot-tall tree; sea oats turn away the wrath of the ocean; bees help to create sanctified light; a faint ripple of light brings hope of the dawn; and the humility of a sparrow evolves into angel wings. The last stanza follows Christ’s words to “Learn from me; I am meek and humble of heart” (Matt 11:29). Leading a meek life, we can call on him to protect and preserve us on this earth and receive his promise thereafter of “a new heaven, a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). Meekness dwells in self-control, mercy, and trusting steadfastly; and believing, like St. Therese of Lisieux, that small things have powerful consequences. No wonder that St. John Chrysostom hailed meekness as the mother of all other virtues.[11]

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