Lack Of Faith
Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986)
Yes
even when I don’t believe
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief
a patch of wild grace
a stubborn preserve
impenetrable
pain untouched sleeping in the body
music that builds its nest in silence
(2007)
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Psalm 63:6-8 (NIV)
On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.
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Anna Kamieńska is a Polish poet. She lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the subsequent difficult years under Poland’s communist regime. Poet D. S. Martin writes that her poetry doesn’t describe the inhumanity of those times, but concentrates on essential, lasting things. Her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak — died prematurely of cancer in 1967, and left Kamieńska in search of answers. In 1970 she wrote in her notebook, ‘I was looking for the dead, and I found God.’ During the 1970s, the Polish government tried to silence her and suppress her work because they saw her as part of the democratic movement. Even so, she has written twenty books of poetry and many biblical commentaries.
In her poem ‘Lack of Faith’, I was reminded of that sensation that comes with dancing at the razor edge of faith and doubt, one nurtured through the relentlessness of dialogue and questioning. Kamieńska’s poem is sparse, thoughtful, considered, and yet cognisant of what it is to yield to the persistence of that secret place where we are known most intimately by God. Her use of avian imagery draws to mind the process by which faith is nurtured in the shadows of God’s wings. This is the image featured in Psalm 63: the psalmist remembers God while in bed, seeking help, singing praises, upheld by the right hand of God.
How do we experience the dance between faith and doubt? What would it look like for us to return to the ‘patch of wild grace’?
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© 2007 Anna Kamieńska