“It is Finished!” A Poet’s Epiphany Before a Painting
Plus, the power of names and what it took to confront the president.
Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
“It is Finished!” A Poet’s Epiphany Before a Painting
Ben Palpant interviews Li-Young Lee
Author Ben Palpant has been interviewing well-known poets of faith all year on the Rabbit Room’s poetry Substack. When he scheduled an interview with renowned poet Li-Young Lee, he didn’t know that the conversation would happen just after a significant spiritual moment in Lee’s life.
Days prior, Lee visited the Ontario Museum of Art and had an epiphany while sitting in front of a 17th-century painting called “Saint Paul the Hermit.” He said, “It unseated me… It agitated and troubled me so much that it's all I can think about right now. I'm not even sure I'm capable of conversation; I'm just so distracted.”
Lee continued:
“In [the painting], there's so much darkness descending on Paul. So much darkness, Ben. I mean, his robe is falling away from his frail body. At the top, there's a raven's head with a morsel of bread in its beak, and Paul is straining up to that bread, straining into that darkness. It's a darkness full of news."
"What kind of news?" Ben asked.
"I don't know," he says. "Ultimately, news that's profound and great, news we've forgotten, news we can barely believe. When I saw that painting, I just had to stand beneath it. I thought: it is finished. I don't know why that phrase came to me, but that's all I could think about. It is finished. I felt this ecstatic thing, this realization that it really is finished. I'm just standing in the wake…
Everything has changed for me. You catch me at a moment of crisis, Ben. I don't know that I can write the poems I've been writing all these years. In fact, I know I can't. I've been writing poems as if I was living before ‘it is finished.’ It's hard to catch up, to awaken to the reality that it is finished. I've been lagging behind. What do I write now?"
Read the rest of this remarkable conversation over at
.
Confronting the President
Daniel Silliman on the pastor who called out Richard Nixon
As the fusion of Christianity with partisan politics continues to reach ludicrous new heights in the United States, here is a blast from the past.
The only United States president ever forced to resign is Richard Nixon. To gain an unfair advantage in the 1972 election, Nixon’s administration broke into the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters housed there. It didn’t go as planned.
Before and after the scandal, Nixon was surrounded by religious leaders of all stripes. Each of these leaders walked on tiptoe around Nixon, even Billy Graham. As Daniel Silliman writes,
Nixon organized worship services in the White House instead of going to a church in the nation’s capital like his predecessors. The ministers who came and preached had the opportunity to say something convicting, to speak up. Instead, again and again, they hesitated.
They would show deference, speak in abstractions, and often indulge in a bit of flattery—after all, they felt flattered themselves to be invited to preach in the White House. They would sometimes draft sermons with tough language but then tone it down.
There was one exception. From an early age, John Huffman was a Nixon fanboy. Despite his political ambitions, Huffman eventually took up Christian ministry. His first gig involved manning the high-profile “side door” at an influential American church. This is where Huffman first met Nixon.
When Huffman took up his first pastorate in Florida, Nixon began attending the church on vacation. After Watergate broke out, a banker at Huffman’s church advised the pastor to be quiet in Nixon’s presence regarding the scandal. Huffman didn’t mention Watergate in his sermon, but he did preach from Paul’s words to Agrippa in Acts 26:26: “The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”
To read what happened and to glimpse Huffman’s motivations, read He Told Richard Nixon to Confess over at Christianity Today. For more on Nixon’s religious struggle, check out Daniel Silliman’s new book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon's Search for Salvation.
Naming is an Act of Love
Hadden Turner on calling things by their name
Preaching through Genesis 1 recently, I (Phillip) needed a clear description of what it means for human beings to have dominion (or rule) over creation. With the help of better thinkers, this was the result: Dominion is our human capacity to take hold of the world to form what is formless and fill what is empty, in communion with God and for the good of creation. This is the call given to God’s image bearers in Genesis 1.
In Genesis 2, we find the first example of dominion-in action as Adam forms names for the animals and fills the world with words. In this, Adam is imaging God, who named his first creature day and his second creature night.
Naming is a central human task. As Hadden Turner writes,
Parents name their children, a founder names her company, a craftsman names his product. All have the authority to name, and this authority is an expression of rule. The named doesn’t get to choose its own name. Likewise, Adam had a God-given delegated authority over the rest of creation, and with that authority came the extraordinary privilege to name what came before him – extraordinary in the sense that the Maker delegated his own right to name his creation to humankind. Only one creature was named by God – Adam himself – a mark of his own submission to his Maker.
It isn’t a matter of pure domination. God was giving Adam an opportunity to care for what he had dominion over. To name something is an act of love. Done rightly, naming bestows value, dignity, and an identity on what is named. It is attentive, recognizing the nature of the thing. This is why improper naming is so wrong. Calling a human by a string of numbers or a slur dehumanizes and causes offense. Referring to a species as a pest or a weed will mean it is always viewed as an enemy. Naming creation is therefore a task that involves skill, knowledge, and wisdom – attributes that rely on relationship and careful observation. It is no simple task. It is, instead, a great and profound responsibility.
Unlike Adam, we haven’t been given the responsibility of naming the animals. But if naming is an act of love, we cultivate our own dominion by learning to call creatures by their names. It is a godly—and God-like—task.
Read Naming Creatures over at Plough. For more from
, check out his Substack named .
Well, that was a delightful surprise! Thank you both. Interestingly, I have just given a talk to a group of young adults about what it means to have dominion rightly too (and came to a definition very close to yours Philip).