Poetic Pilgrim | Illumination

Poetic Pilgrim. Story by Anita Neal Harrison.

Rabbinic interpretative strategies, on the other hand, see Scripture as "indeterminate, inexhaustible in what it means," Cairns says, adding that he long sought a Christian church that followed a similar tradition. Just over 10 years ago he found what he was looking for in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Its rituals, particularly the Orthodox celebration of communion, impressed him as a powerful representation of both his understanding of divinity and his understanding of poetry.

"The high church and low church have very different ideas about sacrament," he says. "In fact, the low church doesn't call it sacrament. They speak of it as the Lord's Supper, and they think of it as a merely memorial activity. [The meal] represents something historical; it points to something that happened long ago. The sacramental view of that same event would be that, yes, it's a real loaf of bread, and, yes, it's a real cup of wine, and yes, it points to something else in the past, but it also partakes of that something else. It also is that something else made present. And that's the kind of attitude that a poet must have toward words.

"Words don't just point to something else, but partake of that other thing. More than that, they are generative of something new. They also have the ability to change us as we partake of what they partake of. In the diminished model, they may remind us of something, but they don't change us."

Cairns' colleagues see this eagerness to grow and change as yet another key to grasping his poetic sensibilities. "It's true about Scott that he's aware of some kind of expressive possibilities that he doesn't yet know he possesses but he wants to find, and his work is always a search for something he hasn't achieved," Richard Howard says.

"Most of us want to write out of what we know we can do. He wants to write out of what he might be able to do but doesn't know yet, and I think that's why his poems are always surprising. ...There's a quality to his work that is exciting. One feels this is a poet who is continuing to discover himself and his subject, and that's very unusual. Most poets don't operate in that fashion. It's very risky what he does. He takes great leaps into uncertain areas and usually very successfully."

Howard's critique might just as easily describe Cairns' restless exploration of the spiritual.

"The only shot we have for glimpsing something bigger, something truer is if we learn to be on the lookout for and take seriously those things that don't fit our understandings," Cairns says. "Only when our understandings are shown to be insufficient do we have a chance at correcting them."

Published by the Office of Research.