A person has a imaginative and prescient. He’s strolling on a street. He’s going to convey the followers of Jesus to Jerusalem. He’ll persecute them. However one thing occurs. He’s struck on a street simply outdoors Damascus, and his life is readjusted. He then is the recipient of hardship: the Lord will present him the nice issues he should endure for his identify’s sake (Acts 9:16). The e-book by which Saul turns into Paul is named Acts. The vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island, provides this identical title to his latest e-book of poems.
Like Paul, Spencer Reece has journeyed to see what he would endure as a servant of Christ—for we should by way of a lot tribulation enter into the dominion of God (Acts 14:22). Reece writes of his residencies in Madrid, Honduras, and the East Coast of the USA as Paul tells us of his journeys to Lystra, Derbe, and Lycaonia—their foldout beds with a mattress coil that pokes their spine.
It’s struggling sufficient in itself, this Christ servitude: “I write this amongst naked partitions, mildew stains, / and nail holes. I develop out of date among the many blue tiles.” There are pipes that don’t work. Stairs that creak. The discomfort of not having a spot of 1’s personal. However in weariness—within the backwater locations with orphans and people left beside the street within the fast-moving visitors of this world—Reece envisions one other actuality, not of this world however of 1 to come back. “Acts is the biography of the Holy Spirit, / monitoring the story of how the religion unfold / with bread and spit and letters.”
Reece is a grasp painter of element. A librarian smells like mothballs. The air has the stench of a commode. Shirts are stained with sweat. Fridge vehicles fill with the lifeless through the pandemic. “O, buckling blue esotery falling aside! / My anonymity will increase with every entrance. / Will our hope be transfigured by this mud?” Reece doesn’t ignore the laborious components of the Christian journey.
He experiences religion in the true world. He sheds mild on the generally doggedness of pastoral work. It’s virtually as if the ministry had been a trial by which the Lord asks, Are you prepared to comply with me even by way of this? “I’m what I’m and haven’t been referred to as in useless,” each the vicar and the apostle insist. They’ll convey others with them. Their letters and phrases will assist when the trail is rugged.
“Those that have by no means been informed of him shall see, and those that have by no means heard of him shall perceive,” writes Paul (Rom. 15:21), and Reece retains this mission in thoughts. His descriptions are palpable. The reader feels current with the poet as he writes, “Upstairs the chandelier sparkles on the ground / and the directions for warmth are painted over— / they seem like Braille.” These poems have the identical high quality because the impressionistic watercolor work in his 2021 e-book All of the Magnificence Nonetheless Left.
For the Christian reader, Reece’s poems path with verses from the epistles, comparable to Hebrews 11:37–38: “They had been stoned to loss of life; they had been sawn in two; they had been killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was unfit.” As an entire, the gathering affords a street map by way of religion and a well-rounded portrait of Christianity. Goya’s portray Christ Crucified on the duvet provides hope in addition to function to these grittier components.
Ultimately, Reece writes, “I’m headed residence, wherever that could be,” and “poetry is what we do whereas we wait / to come back into the dominion.” Studying these poems, one acknowledges what it takes to matter in God’s kingdom—even when God asks of us struggling.
