A Poet Finds His Words to Inspire Others

Malcolm Guite reads his poem O Sapientia:

“I cannot think unless I have been thought, 
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken. 
I cannot teach except as I am taught,    
Or break the bread except as I am broken. 
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek, 
O Light within the light by which I see, 
O Word beneath the words with which I speak, 
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me.”

“My name is Malcolm Guite. I'm a priest. I'm also a musician and a scholar. And rather to my surprise I’ve become quite widely known as a poet. But what I’m sharing now is something a little more intimate about my own personal story, and the way God intervened in my life and helped to turn me around.” 

Malcolm says, “I was born in Nigeria. My dad was very active in the Methodist Church there. He was a local preacher, quite radical Christian in many ways. One of the things my father said to me very early in my life was that there was no distinction between the sacred and the secular. God isn't just in the box labeled Church. God is everywhere, and you can do everything to the glory of God. So I think I had a quite strong sense of God as invisibly everywhere. It was a natural part of my upbringing and I didn't really see any cause to question it.”

“When I was a teenager, I spent those years at a boarding school in England.”

Malcolm recalls, “That was really traumatic in many respects. I was very, very homesick. And also, I was suddenly exposed to every counter view you could think of. I was reading more and more of the kind of stuff that made my faith look ridiculous or outdated. It was the first time I'd been in an atmosphere where mocking contempt for religious people in general was just part of the tone. So there's quite a lot of bullying or other kinds of coercive behavior.”

Malcolm remembers, “I was also occasionally suffering from quite severe bouts of depression cuz I felt so lonely and persecuted. And at one point I actually climbed onto a school roof with the thought of throwing myself off it. One of the things that was driving me to that was a sense of guilt, a sense of being unworthy, which was just internalizing the voices of my persecutors. Then I had this moment of complete clarity, it seemed to me. I suddenly thought, ‘What if God isn't there at all? What if everything is, as so many of these other writings seem to say, everything is there for the human making?’ So I decided that God wasn't there and climbed down off the roof.”

Malcolm recalls, “Later in my teens, my parents weren't able to bring me home for every school holiday. I was sort of farmed out to relatives. And one of these relatives took me to see the famous poet John Keats’ house in London. They had up on the wall, the words of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale poem. The opening words are, ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past.’ So I am reading this and I’m going, ‘I don't know what it is. But there is a spiritual non-material transcendent something happening here.’ This was a purely literary experience. So I told myself, but of course what was coming through it was something more than literary, but it was, you know, I had this experience. So I suddenly realized, I love this, I could do it.”

“In 1977, I won a scholarship to study English at Pembroke College in Cambridge.”

Malcolm says, “One of our professors insisted that you should read the Bible and the book of Common Prayer. So I set about reading the Psalms just to make myself familiar with them really.”

“It was while reading Psalm a hundred and forty-five in a room on my own that I suddenly became absolutely aware of the presence of God.”

Malcolm reads his poem on Psalm 145.

“A poetic response to Psalm a hundred and forty-five. 
I turn my inmost being back to you.
To magnify and praise you from my heart, 
Whose heart is loving and whose word is true,
Delighting in this Psalm, which played a part. 
In my conversion, forty years ago. 
An unbeliever then, I thought I’d start 
To read the Bible as a poet, so I started with the Psalms. And I recall 
The single verse that changed me and would show 
Me hope at last: The Lord upholdeth all, 
All such as fall, also he lifteth up 
All those that are down … the eyes of all 
Wait upon thee. And then a sudden hope 
Sprang up in me, that somewhere in that all 
I might be found. I knelt down, and looked up!”

Malcolm says, “One minute I was in an empty room, in an empty house, and in some respects, in an empty universe. And the next minute I was in a - I was in a presence which was so utterly present. And I had the sensation of being right out on a kind of far edge. And as it were, dangling from a thread, my own existence, is this tiny thing on a thread compared with this immense living holy presence. And feeling like if He looks away, I disappear, but I can't look at Him cuz it's too bright to bear. It's, you know, I don't belong. I-I had quite a strong sense of my unholiness, of my contingency, you know, my fall. And I sort of hoped it would go away, you know, like I would go to sleep and wake up the next morning and go, ‘Well that was weird.’ You know, and just get on with life. But it was just carried on.”

“A few months later, a Franciscan friar who was visiting Cambridge preached a sermon that brought me even closer to an understanding of who God is.”

Malcom recalls, “I listened to him, and he suddenly reached for this metaphor. He said, ‘I want you to think about the utter dependency of the babe in the womb.’ And I thought he was gonna say, ‘This is the way we are with God.’ And I was like, ready for that. And I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, this is how I feel.’ But he said, ‘It's not the whole truth. That God who creates everything and on whom we are utterly dependent, loves us so much He comes down into the womb of Mary. He becomes the little baby dangling from the thread. He comes utterly defenseless. The One on whom we depend, comes utterly dependent to us.’”

Malcolm says, “Somehow in the middle of all of that, the penny dropped. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, my God, whom I now know to be this completely holy presence also knows what it's like to be one of His own creatures, to be - to be fully human.’ And I went back to the chaplain, and I said, ‘I think I can say the Gloria now, you know?’ And so I did. I certainly felt as though something that had been severely dislocated in me was falling back into place. So I felt a greater integration.”

“Eventually, I began to realize that God was calling me not simply to be a Christian, but within that, to take on the ministry of priesthood.”

Malcolm says, “So I was ordained in the Anglican Church. The first few years of ministry were, you know, very fruitful, but very demanding. And I didn't do poetry. I had two parishes. I was the chair of 16 different committees. I was supposed to be organizing all kinds of projects, all of which I was bad at, and feeling stressed because like, I was not made to do that.” 

Malcolm says, “Meanwhile, I went on a retreat. The thing this retreat was meant to do was to try to distill down into a single sentence what you thought your particular mission from God was. So my sentence was, ‘To use my love of language and my facility for it to kindle my own and other people's imaginations for Christ.’ So I thought, okay, I need to reshape this. I need to say this is what I'm doing.”

People clap for Malcolm at a poetry even. He interjects, “Thank you very much.”

“I’m spending more and more of my time and energy as a poet.”

Malcolm recites a poem, “Set on the soul’s acropolis the reason stands.” 

“And I see that now, my vocation as a poet and my vocation as a priest were really two sides of the same coin.”

Malcolm says, “I hope my poetry jostles the soil of the imagination so that when the real sower and the re-real seed come, they fall in good ground and can take root.”

Malcolm finishes reading his poem O Sapientia: 

“O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me, 
O Memory of time, reminding me, 
My Ground of Being, always grounding me, 
My Maker’s bounding line, defining me: 
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring, 
Come to me now, disguised as everything.”

*Filming Locations: Marion E. Wade Center (Wheaton, IL) and Trinity Episcopal Church (Wheaton, IL).