Biblical Haiku
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: Ecclesiastes 3:1 KJV
A time – How do you read the Bible? Perhaps that question is far too broad. What I want to ask is this: What lens do you use when you’re reading the Bible? Do you read it as historical narrative, as devotional comfort, as practical instruction, as spiritual guidance, as theological proof-texts, as political propaganda, etc., etc. The answer, of course, is “All of the above.” In fact, the Bible is a compilation of many different kinds of literature, and knowing which one you’re reading at any particular moment is enormously important. For example, if you read Psalm 51:5 as a theological text, you’ll end up with a doctrine of original sin, but if you read it as emotional poetry, you’ll identify with the anguish without the doctrine. With this in mind, Frederick Buechner’s comments about the Bible as haiku (or at least some of the Bible seen through this lens) are important.
“The whole genius of haiku is that they don’t mean anything. People who try to figure out what a haiku means are beating up the wrong path. The frog doesn’t stand for anything. The pond doesn’t stand for anything. The splash has no symbolic value or anything like that. All of these things that other literature might be attempting are not attempted by the haiku at all. The haiku settles for doing, as I read it anyway, one very simple but very crucial thing—it tries to put a frame around the moment. It simply frames the moment. Of course, as soon as you put a frame around anything, you set it off, you make it visible, you make it real. Haiku enables us to see, to experience, this moment that is framed.”[1]
“But what the haiku does is simply say, no, no, no, don’t do any of those things, don’t think about it. Don’t name it, just experience it. Hear it, see it, smell it, participate in it. I think that is what all literature, basically, is doing.”[2]
“Literature, before it is saying anything else, is saying, Be mindful. Stop whatever else you’re doing and notice. Allow yourself to be seized by this, whether it’s the frog, or the king, or the black man on the raft.”[3]
“You can escape the little world that’s inside your skin and live inside the world that the writer produces for you.”[4]
“There’s a time for everything,” writes Qohelet. He’s asking you to stop rushing through life and reflect on the moments that matter. He’s writing poetry, not parables. Maybe it’s time to apply a literature paradigm to the text.
Topical Index: Buechner, poetry, haiku, Ecclesiastes 3:1
[1] Frederick Buechner The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Your Life (Zondervan, 2017), p. 21.
[2] Ibid., p. 22.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 23.
I get it and yet
I don’t. Eye Yah yai. Stop! Go!
Ecclesiastes.
Applying literature paradigms to the text is precisely what we are supposed to do when reading the text (with the illumination that God’s Spirit provides). Moreover, this approach includes making the best use of our informed understanding of the specific purpose(s), nature, literary constructs and methods, genre, contexts, etc., etc. that comprise the characteristic messaging intended by the author(s) of the variety found in the media of literature.
Apart from taking that manner of an applied, disciplined approach to the text, we can only find something that approximates “the haiku” as Skip describes it, the kind of results that, incidentally, may also be observed in the Scriptures’, Book of the Judges, (or perhaps it may be more accurately described as the Book of the “Judgements”) wherein it is frequently noted: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
This “haiku” way of approaching the text is (in my opinion) far from “genius”; yet again, it is merely finding one’s self— which is under the sentence of death— as the starting point. Not only is it “not genius”—it’s deceptive. Where’s the truth in that?
Richard, I agree, it’s deceptive. While scholars like Skip may be able to discern the literary style of a text and make distinctions which MAY help better understand the meaning of a text, I am leery of such methodologies, perhaps because I am not as well educated or because I know my weakness and proclivity to err on the side of gullibility. There is an old adage which says “One mans junk is another man’s treasure”, but if
we begin to apply the same liberal exegetical principle to the texts of the Bible then our lives are likely to end up in the junkyard of Sheol which is filled to the brim with disgarded texts, disfigured truth and disabled faith. Furthermore by what authority does anyone possess to definitively declare a text must be read this way or that way. It smacks of the Masoretes of old who forever fixed the way the Hebrew vowels must be read. Yeshua is the only teacher who had that degree of authority ( given to him by his Father). Recall when he delivered the Sermon on the Mount …”the crowds were amazed at the way he taught, for he was not instructing them like their Torah-teachers but as one who had authority himself.”
Matthew 7:28b -29. CJB
If we begin to read any of the Sacred Script as haiku, who is to prevent you from reading it as fiction, fantasy or G*d forbid as comedy? If you do you will most likely begin to slide down that slippery slope into the junkyard of the discarded, disappointed and dead.
I agree with Skip. As a recovering RCC I never “read” the bible until I was antique (past 60) so my answer to “how do you read the bible” is dramatically different now than 20 years ago. I really only began to understand the bible and the OT in particular way too late.
I learned that it was not about doctrine at all but the story of the history of the Israelites journey with their God to freedom in all its glory. And it is ok to agree OR disagree with particulars, semantics, understanding. We are not all the same and that is good.
So much of the NT has been used as the whipping boy for doctrines of many religions that I disagreed with but had nowhere else to go until I met Skip.
Skip, George, Michael… I get that the way Scripture is so often misused— i.e., mis-translated, mis-represented, misunderstood, and mis-applied— is here being contrasted with the haiku… presented here as allowing ourselves to “relax and sink in”… to experience the mystery of spiritual reality the diversity of the literature of Scripture is meant to convey… and, of course, I don’t oppose that manner of realization.
But we must not lose sight that one aspect of the mystery—that of Israel’s testimony of witness concerning their experience of YHVH’s covenant with his (fallen and culturally-conditioned) people—is a collection of preserved literature that also (and most importantly) serves to communicate “God’s side” of the reality (and mystery) of his experience, too.