Steve Shoemaker wrote this in response to Wallace Stevens’ poem “What Is Divinity” posted today on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Click HERE for the Wallace Stevens poem and the Stevens’ bio posted today on The Writer’s Almanac.
What Divinity Is
(A response to Wallace Stevens)
…
The Madonna who pulls back just enough
of swaddling cloth to show the Magi what
had bled so recently on our behalf.
The twelve-year-old who finds a place to sit
among the wise (but disobedient
to both his searching, mystified parents.)
The young man with the twelve who heals, confronts
the proud, turns water into wine, asks who
is without sin? The one who shows the way
right here on earth to live in peace with neighbors,
enemies even…a human who
took bread and fish and shared it with the crowd…
the man who died alone crying for God.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 2, 2012
Views from the Edge 
Steve’s poem is beautiful. I might add a quote from Genesis, hoping I don’t mangle it too much. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He them, male and female, created He them. (The first “them” might be “him.”)
And perhaps some experiences such as Wallace Stevens describes go nearly over the border from thanking God, very sincerely, for these things into a glimpse of God’s love in giving us the capacity to find them that beautiful, and therefore into Divinity. For me it is most likely to happen listening to music. I can think of times when it happened to me, and, in fact some particular spots in some works that make it happen almost every time I listen to them.
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CA, Would you like to share more? I mean what pieces of music and what spots? Gabriel Faure’s Reqiem always moves me into a kind of shudder.
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