The Edgy Poetry of our Newest Church Doctor

Last February, Pope Francis announced he would name Armenian monk St. Gregory of Narek (951-1003) to be the newest Doctor of the Catholic Church. This is important because the title of Doctor has been granted to just thirty-six figures in Church history. St. Gregory of Narek joins a small number of saints who are deemed to have made timeless contributions to the intellectual treasury of the Church. Other Doctors include such venerable names as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, and St. Leo the Great.

St. Gregory was a priest, a monk, a mystic, an intellectual, and a poet. His writings have deep moral overtones, yet they don’t come off as preachy because the experience he relates (one can tell beyond the shadow of doubt) is utterly first-hand and deeply personal. He writes about the human condition in the most essential terms. Most important of all, he writes in such a way as to make self-evident the universal need of transformation in Christ.

In this vein, St. Gregory’s work calls to mind masterpieces like Dante’s Inferno, Pascal’s Pensees, and that most beautiful Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes. This genre of literature strives to show us that we are a mystery to ourselves, and that there is no other plausible explanation for this mystery but the fullness of the Christian faith.

So St. Gregory is an Armenian poet, a great one. It has been said that he is considered the greatest Armenian writer who has ever lived. Now many of us believe a good poet is one who never lulls us to sleep with familiar words, especially cliches. We already spend most of our conscious lives in a somnambular state, a state of being on auto-pilot. What we need are moments when the dream state is disrupted! It is in these moments where we find our true freedom. Poets, novelists and writers of scripture know how to evoke these moments, and are therefore able to instigate the sharpest possible discomfort in us, to startle us and redirect our thoughts.

Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart

In this piece I will be sharing selections from St. Gregory of Narek’s Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart. This is a collection of 95 prayers, which in Prayer 3 he calls a “new book of psalms”:

A new book of psalms sings with urgency through me,
for all thinking people the world over,
expressing all human passions
and serving with its images
as an encyclopedic companion to our human condition

There it is, St. Gregory’s intention to stir us up with imagery about our “human condition.” As I mentioned, this connection to a major theme of Vatican II and to Gaudium et Spes in particular is certainly a theme very dear to the heart of Pope Francis. This could be a hint as to why he might have honored St. Gregory as a Doctor at this particular moment in time.

Prayer 4 illustrates St. Gregory’s trademark of poetic litany:

There is no putting off the day of confrontation:

Not by words of justification,
not by a cloak of protection,
not by a mask of obfuscation,
not by speeches of propitiation,
not by appearances of deception,
not by compositions of prevarication,
not by swift feet of evasion,
not by aversion,
not by the ashen dust of abnegation,
not by fixing one’s mouth to the earth,
not by self-burial in the depths of the earth,
for even the covered and the invisible are
readily seen by you

I don’t know about you but I hear Bob Dylan singing these words in my head. Maybe you have the voice of a more contemporary singer in mind. Regardless, let those words sink in. They are taunting words. They are relentless. They have a pleading quality. There is nowhere to hide, says the Doctor, no matter how clever we are. We “bury ourselves” in “words, cloaks, and masks.” That is to say, in our everyday conversations, in our jobs, in our positions of authority, even by “playing dead,” i.e., pretending not to care about anything. None of these strategies can absolve us from “the day of confrontation,” the day that comes — who knows when, the day in which we give an account of ourselves.

Seriously, I get goosebumps praying this poem.

Prayer 20 is a hard-hitting – no, strike that – a brutal lesson in humility:

I, breathing dust, have grown haughty.
I, talking clay, have become presumptuous.
I, filthy dirt, have grown proud.
I, disgusting ashes, have risen up,
raising my hands with my broken cup, strutting
like a swaggering peacock, but then
curling back into myself, as if rejected,
my speaking slime glowing with anger

You know how you can go through the day feeling pretty full of yourself, feeling cocky, feeling like you’re sharp as a tack, making a great impression with your colleagues, and then you notice you have been walking around all day with the price tag still attached to your new blazer? That’s the feeling he’s depicting. Mr. Big Stuff is a pile of ashes pathetically “strutting and swaggering like a peacock.”

Also, surely you caught the phrase: “my speaking slime.” That’s a bit over the top… or is it? Is it not a sadly apt characterization of what sometimes passes for speech today on television, in our cul de sacs, at the bus stop? People are base and cruel in public speech more than ever before. They say things online or in front of an audience that previous generations would have been ashamed to think about, let alone say.

But then the insight, and the sorrowful recognition of self-deception…

Now, accept me, O Lord, and renew the impression of
your image on my soul, I who am unworthy of life,
a capital felon, evil person,
a fallen being trampled by Satan,
a terminal patient at death’s door,
depraved and unworthy of your calling,
defeated with one blow, wanderer, exile and outlaw,
a doubter, wretch, reject, battered, shattered,
broken, wounded, dejected, embattled soul.

My eyes and ears are drawn to the word “exile.” What a perfect word. In a state of sinfulness, a person is exiled from himself. Alcoholics and drug addicts often relate a description of themselves as not being comfortable in their own skin. They are living outside themselves, as if in a foreign land. When they awaken from intoxication, the first thing they want to know is what they did. They, like everyone else to varying degrees, are “embattled souls” who cannot make it alone.

Prayer 56, another favorite of mine where he assigns at least 100 names to the “agents of death” in the world and in ourselves. The poem begins in the author’s own heart:

my sinister heart,
my gossiping mouth,
my lustful eyes,
my wanton ears,
my murderous hands,
my weak kidneys,
my wayward feet,
my swaggering gait,

So far, this is a worthy examination of conscience, but it is in first-person voice. In a verse or two he widens the net. He lets loose a litany including a tragic figure he names the “drowning pirate.” I picture a swaggering gangster who somehow got himself into a terrible jam. I can’t help but laugh at the phrase and yet it is horrifying.

He calls out the dreaded “deranged sage,” and my favorite, the “herd-mentality blowhard.”

Careful, he’s on to you too, “frenzied atheist,” “faithless worshiper,” “worldly cleric,” and “grotesque rhetorician.”

Those words! It’s as if they were squirming, living things that he hits us with to make us laugh and wince and run for our lives. I love this poet.

I believe Pope Francis made an inspired choice in making St. Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church. There are no doubt other overtones to the appointment, like the Armenian genocide, and I will let others far smarter than I am to draw those out for you. But make no mistake: Pope Francis elevated a poet and a mystic who speaks to a modern world about facts it tries to deny. The facts of evil, self-deception, and sin. But more importantly, as a monk and mystic, St. Gregory offers trustworthy guideposts showing us the way out of our errors, the way to eternal life through the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

My intention here was to make you want to read his poems for yourself, and I hope I have succeeded in that. They are a sheer delight, and this Doctor has been my morning-prayer companion ever since Pope Francis made this inspired choice. You can find the book of prayers online here.