The Sin of Certainty

Embracing Curiosity as a Way to Find Each Other Again

Welcome to all the new subscribers to my Substack. I’m so glad you’re in the flock!

I just returned from a weekend of study and reflection with the Irish poet, Padraig O’Tauma. I was challenged. I was inspired. I’ve read through my notes several times now to glean the gold of what I was given on those days together. I’m really glad I went!

In short, I got some education. I learned much and I was inspired deeply by him and the poems we shared together.

It was the ideal balance of space, time, study and encouragement. I took 16 pages of notes and wrote several poems when Padraig offered us “prompts.” I felt like I sat at the feet of brilliance and relaxed in his ability to hold a room spell bound for three days.

All he spoke of was poetry… what it really is and how one can learn to become curious to write—if one really aspires to exchange certainty for curiosity.

In one exercise, we read the poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. In this exercise, we followed Stevens curiosity of looking at a blackbird—then putting the observations into a poem. Then, Padraig instructed us to write a poem called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Elections.”

We all audibly groaned. After the sighing, came 30 minutes of silence to work on the poem. It was brilliance to see what happened in that room on such an explosive subject. us.

Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash

I’m not going to share my poem here but I will share the poem that I worked on throughout the weekend. It’s titled, “The Sin of Certainty.” It was birthed by the many and assorted hard and difficult conversations I’ve had and observed in trying to talk about politics and current affairs with family and friends. These conversations are not just recent ones…they are stored in my hearts as laments of what happened in the midst of that particular conversation. Not all have gone well.

To be honest, there are rifts and distance—because of what even talking about January 6 or the election or race or COVID or practically any subject at all has done to us—has done in us. I wonder if any of us have come through this well? The many long, difficult seasons of red and blue hurricane force winds changing the landscape of our families and friendships may have changed us forever. Who knows? For many of us, the nuclear family has blown up to smithereens by all this tension and strife, it seems. Brothers are not talking to brothers. Daughters dismissing their fathers as idiots and fractures in churches, small groups and friendships are too numerous to count. We just feel the split and distance—don’t we?

When we find ourselves trying to have time with each other after these rifts, someone will inevitably say, “Let’s not talk politics, OK?” and somehow a boundary is established showing the cliff that we may all tumble off if we even mention Trump or Biden.

My poem, “The Sin of Certainty” laments this gap—this loss of civility—this space that we once seemed to share. Not only is my poem a lament but I wanted to call this ‘sin of certainty’ that I so often feel and see if there was a way to find one another again.

In the first stanza, I try to show how I feel when I am with someone who talks and talks and never ask me a single question. What I feel most frustrated by is the feeling of not being able to catch my breath by the rapid, Gatling gun approach of hearing facts and facts like shooting bullets. It all leaves me feeling dead—certainly more dead than alive.

In stanza two, I offer the hope that curiosity offers. I use the metaphor of music and dance—something we have forgotten how to do in our erosion of civility with one another. The platform of being curious together offers us a pathway through this mess. It was Rilke who told us to learn to “live the questions.” How did we lose our way in living the questions when we now, tell each other our strong and passionate opinions?

The poetry workshop offered a room of 100 people, a way of being silent together and looking at the blackbird of this election, to just sit with it and see what gets stirred up. As person after person read their poem in the workshop, every single poem read and shared was a poem of lament and sadness. It was stunning to hear all the laments in the poems being read in this room. There was no noise of the rapid fact quoting or preaching in the vain of the sin of certainty. Silence humbled us…quieted us and invited us into a deeper conversation about how we had been feeling.

The last three stanzas offer a metaphor of a river of love as an antidote to our anger and hurt. It’s here, that I too may have committed the sin of certainty. See what you think?

My line, “I have missed us” is how I so often feel in the reality of broken or fractured relationships. When I pause and realize, “We’re just not the same since all this mess erupted. Will we ever by able to find each other again? It’s a heartfelt question.

I miss us. Can you think of someone that comes to your mind when you integrate wha I’m trying to say here and the reality of family gulfs and church splits and political division that has changed the landscape of our lives?

My poem, “The Sin of Certainty” is really an invitation to get in the river and leave all our facts on the shore line of the jagged rocks of disputed facts. The river is bigger and stronger than facts. And here I close smiling at myself knowing that as I type this to you, I am confessing my own certainty about love and humbled by my inability to be loving but my deep desire to be a loving human being.

I suppose Substack is my invitation for you to continue to “see me” beyond my own attempts and failures in learning this lesson. My Substack is where I am posting my poems—my attempt to say more in fewer words. One of the things I learned in the poetry workshop is that humans, in every single culture, have tried to do what I am trying to do now—say more in less words. Poetry is, after all, a way to not just read a few words—it’s a way to be read by the poet. A poem that works is just that— it is a feeling you get that says, “Goodness… they said what I feel—what I wanted to say.” “The poet put into words my own thoughts that were too deep for my own words—but this poem has said it for me.”

To read my poems, for all of those of you are new, you need to become a “paid subscriber.” You get all the poems and other resources (podcasts and articles) for the price of a cup of coffee once a month. And I offer it free to anyone how emails me and says, “Please add me—I don’t have the money for that coffee of your poems.” Email me at info@pottersinn.com and I will add you. No questions asked.