Reexamine Everything
Certainty makes for a brittle soul.
This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
— Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass is my favorite book,1 and Walt Whitman is my favorite author. The guy lived and wrote during some rigid years. The first shots of the Civil War would not crowd the air for another six years, but the country was already experiencing its foreshocks. On July 4 of 1855, Walt Whitman would publish his first edition of Leaves of Grass with this quote in its preface.
Mid-nineteenth century poetry was also rigid. Open any book of poetry—say by Emerson, Longfellow, or Dickinson—and you will find short and tight lines, ink crowding the left side of every page and hardly a drop reaching a page’s mid-point. Each line rhymed with another.
Then came Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass rejected all of those norms. Almost every line of Whitman’s poems bumped up against the right margin and spilled onto the line below it. There were no rhyming lines. Some critics called his work “reckless and indecent.” Other criticisms of Leaves of Grass were much worse. One wonders if any of his critics read Whitman’s preface.
These words from the preface of Leaves of Grass are 170 years old and they still speak as loudly to me as they did when I first heard them read to me by my poetry professor. I was a senior in college. I had ears eager to hear something as authentic and divergent as Walt Whitman’s poetry. In the summer between my junior and senior year I traveled to a Central American country, and I wasn’t equipped for what I saw. I could not make sense of the poverty and sickness. I had an even harder time imagining how an impoverished and suffering people could also be happy, gracious, and so full of thanksgiving as the people I met along the way. This was a wholly other experience. I didn’t have a category or a vocabulary for it.
After returning home and then to campus, I was in a unique place to hear these words from Walt Whitman and receive them like a hungry person receives bread.
…re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…
After that I left behind the faith I knew—not God or the church, you understand; I left behind the way I saw God. I had imagined God inside of the kind of faith that’s filled with proud assertions and confident convictions—the kind of faith made perfect by certainty.
Without knowing what I was trading it in for, I searched for a better way—some kind of faith that was more authentic and immediate, something down to earth and tougher. I needed a faith that could survive what I wasn’t used to, a faith with room for questions and wonder and growth. I was in search of a faith with enough room in it for God. A faith that gives God a chance to surprise and delight me, and in the next minute challenge and confront me. This is a faith where trust, rather than certainty, is the measure of faithfulness, and where reexamination and curiosity are not only welcome, but may just be God’s most valuable spiritual gifts.
Other than the Bible. Pastors are contractually obligated to say their favorite book is the Bible.