In Memorium: Johnathan MacGregor

“When well-ordered words do justice to the pain we feel, they whisper to us that it’s possible our chaotic lives might be beautiful and intelligible after all.” -Jonathan MacGregor

Last summer, I did a Reiki session at a yoga retreat twenty miles from Lake Michigan where the woman doing the treatment said you have a real battle between your head and your heart. Afterwards, all I wanted to do was cry, walk in the woods, and stare at Lake Michigan. Reiki felt like an emotional bypass of my brain that went straight to my heart. Poetry, I think, is like that–your heart feels the impact before your brain.  I probably think that because of a writer named Jonathan MacGregor. 

In 2020, Jonathan and I were working on edits for his article “Poetic Theodicies,” to be published in Relief that summer. I didn’t remember these exchanges until I went looking for his article. I’ve been reading his article and my comments over the last week. “Tighten up the Joseph story here,” I say on one page; we cut some adverbs and superfluous phrases on another. The margins are full of a dialogue I didn’t pay attention to at the time, but now feels like a conversation with a ghost. I guess it is.

Jonathan died this past February, just after the start of Lent. He had cancer. In writing this I’ve balked over and over at the presumptuousness of me paying tribute to someone I knew so briefly. But when somebody writes or says something that matters, I think we should say so. 

I remember Jonathan from the Kenyon Review’s 2021 online Spiritual Writing workshop, led by Jamie Quatro. For a week in a weird, half-lockdown July, our little group of eight Christians, Jews, agnostics, lapsed Catholics, and a Sikh met online (in our living rooms, porches, basements, offices) to read our writing prompts to each other, talk about Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and, inevitably, start crying. What I remember about Jonathan is his essay about friendship and identity, but more importantly, his Zoom comments during the workshop, and his Zoom cheerleading during our evening readings (“YASSS KATIE!” in the comments). I had a friend crush on him immediately. 

Several months later,  Jonathan released his first book, A Communion of Radicals, a literary treatment of leftist Christians in the twentieth century. I bought a copy and started reading it on my iPad before bed. A few months after that, Jonathan posted on Twitter that he had cancer. He kept writing and submitting poems. He started treatment, and started creating music and releasing it. Twitter eventually began its long tailspin into CBD gummy ads and conspiracy theories. I looked at my newsfeed less and less.  And then, on February 17, 2024, one of my friends posted about his death on Facebook. 

Jonathan didn’t have cancer when he wrote “Poetic Theodicies,” but cancer was certainly on his mind.  His essay begins with him describing a relative’s cancer diagnosis: a long hollow needle piercing the breastbone.  The essay then travels through waiting rooms (for a baby’s birth, a friend’s recovery treatment, the long waiting rooms of depression and anxiety) and Milton and the dusty canyons of West Texas. When he talks about one of his favorite poets, Christian Wiman, he mostly speaks of Wiman’s poetry after his cancer diagnosis.  In all of these examples, poetry alternately is a needle piercing our defenses when needed but protecting our hearts when life buffets us too hard.

I started reading Christian Wiman’s poetry because of Jonathan’s essay.  Wiman’s “Hammer is the Prayer” is one of the few poems I’ve committed to memory. Prayer, like poetry, is both the hammer I use to batten up the house that always feels like it’s threatening to fall down, and also the tool that knocks down my defenses. The best spiritual poetry, and prayers, are not mental puzzles but incantations into the deepest part of who we are. These practices give, but only what we are ready for. In Jamie’s workshop, we practiced piercing our own defenses without knowing that’s what we were doing. 

I started this essay midway through one of the most chaotic, stressful periods of my professional career; I’m revising it now in a place of stillness but also loss. My Reiki friend told me back in January that my body was like armor; in the process of protecting myself I cultivated defenses that I no longer want to carry. Jonathan already had the words I needed.  At the end of his essay, he writes,  “. . .lyric poems that reckon honestly with suffering and hope can touch me where it hurts, and I don’t flinch . . . They just might do the same for you.”

Poetic Theodicies

Relief published this essay by Jonathan McGregor, a fine writer and literary mind, in 2020. Sadly, Jonathan passed away in early 2024 after fighting cancer for several years. We hope Jonathan’s words here are a comfort to his loved ones, and anyone struggling with their own challenging diagnoses and hardships. 

Just before Thanksgiving 2016, a member of my family was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a slowly progressing and all-but-incurable cancer. The standard procedure for identifying this illness is a bone marrow aspiration and biopsy. To obtain a marrow sample, the doctor inserts a hollow needle into the center of a bone, usually the breastbone. In the weeks after she underwent this procedure, the image of a needle penetrating bone haunted the back reaches of my mind, where it connected with a couple of cast-off words from abortive drafts and cohered into a poem (“Biopsy,” published in Ruminate Magazine, June 2017).

      I felt the image captured something essential about poetry—its incisiveness, the way the right arrangement of words can stab through our defenses to the places inside of us that can never be numbed. Poetry is like the word of God in the book of Hebrews, “piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.”

      In my poem’s final stanza, however, the speaker waits for news about a loved one’s biopsy with a phone in one hand and a book of poems in the other. Here poetry is not a needle but a shield, a thin scrim of Good News to hold off the Bad News that’s about to be delivered. At different times, I’ve needed poetry to fulfill both offices: to deliver a stab of insight and to give what Robert Frost called “a stay against confusion.”

      I don’t know what book you would grab to shield you in such a moment, but the volume I had in mind was W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Auden has become for me the poet of the hospital, not because hospitals are his poems’ settings but because my most intense experiences of reading Auden have occurred in them.

      When my wife went into labor with our daughter, the Selected Auden was the only book I allowed myself in our go-bag. During the restless waiting of an extended delivery, lines like these seared into me:

                Life remains a blessing,

                although you cannot bless.

                My dear, we are always in the wrong,

                handling so clumsily our stupid lives,

                suffering too little or too long.

Later, when my wife spiraled deep into postpartum depression and I stormed through fits of anxious rage, I had these little shields ready-to-hand.

      In the spring of 2017, I drove a friend from St. Louis to a residential treatment facility for mood disorders, and I brought the Selected Auden with me into the waiting room. While my friend went through the seemingly endless in-processing, I read these wartime lines:

                The first time that I dreamed, we were in flight,             

                And fagged with running; there was civil war,

                A valley full of thieves and wounded bears.

                Farms blazed behind us; turning to the right,

                We came at once to a tall house, its door

                Wide open, waiting for its long-lost heirs.

                An elderly clerk sat on the bedroom stairs

                Writing; but we had tiptoed past him when

                He raised his head and stuttered—“Go away.”

                We wept and begged to stay . . .

This landscape mapped, for me, the sheer Midwestern distance we’d traveled the day before, waiting for the moment we would part without knowing how the treatment would turn out. 

      At moments like these, both as writers and as readers, we turn to poetry to help us reckon with suffering and evil. Call this the pursuit of poetic theodicy. Theodicy, a term coined by the polymath Gottfried Leibniz in the eighteenth century, generally refers to the philosophical defense of God’s goodness, power, and knowledge in the face of our world’s ghastly evils. The most famous example of a specifically poetic theodicy, anticipating Leibniz’s coinage by decades, is John Milton's attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” in Paradise Lost. But a poem need not assume or assert God’s existence in order to exemplify important characteristics of what I’m calling poetic theodicy. When well-ordered words do justice to the pain we feel, they whisper to us that it’s possible our chaotic lives might be beautiful and intelligible after all.    

Poems that offer this are not merely the products of a bygone age: witness the post-Trump popularity of Maggie Smith’s viral “Good Bones.”  In my pursuit of contemporary poetic theodicy, I’ve found my most abundant and complex consolations in the poems of Christian Wiman.

      While looking over the new books shelf at the library one day during my first semester of graduate school, a slim hardcover volume the color of wrought iron caught my eye. The book’s title, Every Riven Thing, stamped on the jacket in heavy lowercase Gothic script, together with the triple ichthus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,  intrigued me with their vaguely theological aura. I picked the book up and flipped to the first poem, “Dust Devil”:

                Mystical hysterical amalgam of earth and wind

                and mind

 The image could have been lifted from my childhood on the wind-scorched plains of West Texas. Making those heavy five-dollar words—“mystical hysterical amalgam”—dance so lightly was like making the earth itself dance, just the way a dust devil does. The first two lines’ enjambment, sticking “mind” into a natural phenomenon, surprised and delighted me. I was hooked.

      I read on:

                over and of

                the much-loved

                dust you go

                through a field I know

                by broken heart.

 There were much-loved fields I knew by broken heart, too: the cotton fields where the farmhouse in which dad grew up once stood before an almost biblical flood flushed his family out in the late 1970s. Or the barren ranchlands under the lip of the Caprock canyons, cut by sandy washes and seamed with rocky arroyos that flowed once every ten years. I knew unclaimed fields strewn with plants parsimonious with water and shaped like weapons: the low mesquite shrubs bristling with spines as long as epidural needles, spear-leaved soapbrush, and nopales that bloomed prettier and pricklier than any rose.

      Wiman also grew up in West Texas. He works the region’s dialect into his poetry: like my parents, he says “locusts” for cicadas, those racket-making insects who leave their paper-thin brown exuviae clinging to treebark each summer when they mature. “Locusts” are a frequent figure in Wiman’s poetry, and no wonder. Those empty shells are ripe for a poet’s plucking, a metaphor to embody change, evolution, transience, and transcendence, a grotesque cousin to the commonplace metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly.

      Though I like to think we share a special regional bond, I am far from alone in my profound admiration for and connection to Wiman’s work. His poetry resonates with so many because of his unflinching accounts of his own pain and suffering, especially the cancer that upended his life and career. Diagnosed with an extremely rare form of blood cancer on the day he turned thirty-nine, Wiman has from that day endured both the hammer of disease and the harrow of treatment. In the years after his diagnosis, he’s written his best poems and essays, become a father, and experienced the awakening of what was a “latent faith” in God. But Wiman is careful to say that you can never return to the faith of your childhood—a stance that recalls for me Auden’s line about the all-important difference between “believing still” and “believing again.”

      Wiman’s recent volume of selected verse, Hammer Is The Prayer (2016), is light on material from his early collections The Long Home (1998) and Hard Night (2005), but it contains almost all of the post-diagnosis collections Every Riven Thing (2010) and Once in the West (2015). These editorial choices imply a narrative of the poet’s career: a story of aesthetic and spiritual growth despite and through physical deterioration. This arc appears in miniature in the epigraph Wiman chose for the volume, the final couplet from “Joseph's Coat”, a sonnet by the seventeenth-century poet and Anglican priest George Herbert:

                I live to show his power, who once did bring

                My joys to weep, and now my griefs to sing.

      The narrative backdrop for this sonnet—the field against which George Herbert makes sense of his suffering—is the Joseph story, which comprises the last section of the book of Genesis. The Joseph narrative is, among other things, a literary theodicy. A preening favorite son betrayed by his brothers, Joseph endures slavery, imprisonment, and defamation only to emerge, by the story’s end, as head of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s famine-relief program, a kind of ancient-near-Eastern New Deal. His brothers come to Egypt looking for food, and, after a protracted series of recognition scenes, Joseph reveals his identity, forgives his brothers, and saves them. “But as for you, ye thought evil against me,” Joseph says to his brothers, “but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” God brings a good end from the suffering of his servant: namely, salvation for his people (and for Egypt, too).

      Wiman’s quotation from Herbert not only activates biblical traditions of theodicy by reference to the Joseph story; it also connects Wiman’s work to the preoccupation with poetic theodicy in seventeenth-century English poetry. If John Milton famously staged theodicy on a cosmic scale, then devotional poetry such as Herbert’s and the “Holy Sonnets'' of John Donne made theodicy personal: “How can You bring good out of my pain?” these poems ask. The “great argument” of Milton’s cosmic epic theodicy tries to make meaning out of evil by rational argument. By contrast, personal lyric theodicies like Herbert’s capture suffering in images—paradoxical images that do justice to the profundity of the poet’s pain while also salving that pain with the suggestion, however tentative, that it conceals a divine purpose. Herbert’s joy weeps, and his grief sings. Such images can encompass and suspend the tensions between suffering and hope, doubt and faith, without resolving them too neatly. 

      “I don’t know that any poet, of any time, is more companionable to me than Herbert,” Wiman writes in his memoir My Bright Abyss (2013). The two poets are companions in the struggle to wrest meaning from suffering by fixing it in paradoxical images. In particular, Wiman favors images of trees. The speaker of Wiman’s tree poems often lies in a hospital bed in a room with a single window through which he glimpses a tree. In the first poem in this vein, for example, poignantly titled “After the Diagnosis,” the speaker contemplates a leaning but living, almost-blasted apple tree through a window:

                . . . all days come down

                to one clear pane

                through which he sees

                among all the other trees

                this leaning, clenched, unyielding one

                that seems cast

                in the form of a blast

                that would have killed it,

                as if something at the heart of things,

                and with the heart of things,

            had willed it.

“Something at the heart of things” willed not so much the blasting of the tree as its endurance—its formation into the shape of a blast and its continued existence, indeed its flourishing, in that disfigured state. If the not-quite-blasted tree here is an analogue for the form of a life marked by suffering, the “one clear pane” of the window, that little opening within a frame that lets the light in to a dark room is a figure for the small, clear vision enabled by a lyric poem.

      Wiman returns to this window-framed tree throughout Hammer Is The Prayer. “From a Window” moves from “grieving” in its first stanza to “joy” in its last line, Wiman’s most explicit callback to his Herbert epigraph. In between, a ghostly tree of birds rises from skeletal limbs like the newly-winged cicada taking off from its husk. Afterwards, in its very emptiness, the tree appears somehow “fuller”; the absence of the birds becomes a sign of the presence of “some excess / of life.” Or at least it seems that way. But sometimes, Wiman suggests, seeming is enough; possibility is its own consolation. (“For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires,” writes Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.”) Here Wiman’s lyric window allows for transcendence. It’s a portal through which you look at the things—birds, in this case—that nevertheless escape your sight, “heavenwards” into the “beyond.” At the same time, the window lets joy, like sunlight, spill into the room from outside. 

     In My Bright Abyss, Wiman writes of composing this poem “a few months after getting [his] diagnosis”: “I wrote the poem one day out of anguish, emptiness, grief—and it exploded into joy. I sought refuge in the half-conscious play of language and was rescued by a weave of meaning.” That meaning is woven somewhere beyond the poet’s understanding or control, somewhere altogether beyond the human, though it casts its light on human life.

      If “From a Window” escapes the human self, “And I Was Alive” explodes the self in furious, blooming joy:

                And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

                Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

                It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,

                And it was all aimed at me.

This poem transfigures in English one of the last pieces the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote before he was killed by Josef Stalin. Wiman only includes his freest translations, such as this one—he calls them “collisions with” or “visions of” Mandelstam—in Hammer Is The Prayer, so I read it as a Wiman poem, in the context of his own symbolic vocabulary. Here the bird-tree and the tree-tree, the spirit and the flesh, of “From a Window” are made to coincide in the blossoms of a “bird-cherry”—or hackberry—tree. All its “self-shattering power” is nevertheless aimed at a self—at “me,” whose experience of “time” is at once “intensified” and made “intolerable” by the imminent threat of death, whether from a totalitarian regime or from cancer.

      The speaker of “And I Was Alive” selves in the sense Gerard Manley Hopkins coined in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:

                Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

                Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

                Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

                Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Hopkins is another touchstone poet for Wiman and, especially in the poems Hopkins called his “terrible sonnets,” for the tradition of personal lyric theodicy I’m outlining here. The speaker of “And I Was Alive” selves through sensory perception: he touches the fullness of his being by seeing and smelling the blossoms’ stormy “sweetness raveling rot.” I love Wiman’s verb “raveling” here, with its spinning of disparate threads into a single cord. We usually only hear the word in the negative form of unraveling. In the brief window of this poem, for the space of a breath, the overwhelming intensity of sight and smell beats back death, undoes decay, rewinds entropy.

      Wiman’s windows frame moments when transcendent hope breaks into temporal suffering—a paradoxical reality embodied by his images of twisted, skeletal, exploding trees. (Here it’s important to remember that English-language poets since the Anglo-Saxon “Dream of the Rood” have imagined Christ’s cross as a tree.) Taken alongside the poems of Herbert, Donne, and Hopkins, we can see Wiman as the latest in a tradition of personal lyric theodicy. But in Hammer Is The Prayer, a volume summing up Wiman’s life and work to the point of its publication, he also goes beyond offering lyrical moments of hope. In sequence, his tree images sketch a story: a tree blasted but not killed, growing first into paradoxical empty-fullness and finally into furious bloom. That arc echoes the process of spiritual flourishing in and through physical loss to which the book as a whole witnesses. Call this Wiman’s personal narrative theodicy, on the model of the biblical Joseph story—“ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good.”

      Wiman writes both personal lyric theodicy and personal narrative theodicy. But he doesn’t write cosmic epic theodicy on the Milton model. This willingness to hazard personal meaning while maintaining reticence on the cosmic scale is part of what marks Wiman as what he calls a “modern believer.” And I am glad of both his speech and his silence.

      I was diagnosed recently with a form of arthritis—a chronic disease that doesn’t threaten my life, though it promises a fair amount of pain and strong medication for my future. My inflamed left knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I descended every staircase left foot first, leg locked, and I was lucky to make it anywhere on time: my top speed was a galumphing hobble. I got some relief when an orthopedic surgeon plunged a gigantic needle into the joint and drew out a tube full of bloody liquid—a procedure called arthrocentesis, a joint-fluid aspiration and biopsy.

A few weeks later, when I left the doctor’s office with a diagnosis in hand, I felt ashamed of my body’s weakness. To protect myself from the shame, I got angry with myself and my affliction. On the way home, I stopped in at a mostly empty pub—it was early afternoon—to read some Wiman poems and nurse a couple of beers. The first one I read was “After the Diagnosis.” The poem’s needle entered the joint where soul meets body and drained the angry fluid off. By the time I left the pub, I felt as if Wiman had coaxed my raging spirit back into the vessel in which it had been so recently ashamed to reside. The beers probably helped, too.  

Growing up, I had theodicy proof-texts like Romans 8:28 (“God works all things together for good”) and Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future”) drummed into my head. I developed a callus over the part of the brain that receives religious words of comfort. Cosmic theodicies like Milton’s can’t break through to offer any consolation.. But lyric poems that reckon honestly with suffering and hope can touch me where it hurts, and I don’t flinch. 

In “Prayer,” the opening poem from Once in the West, Wiman writes:

. . . my prayer

is that a mind

blurred

by anxiety

or despair

might find

here

a trace

of peace.

Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, Auden, Smith, and especially Wiman have helped me find a trace of peace when I needed it most. They just might do the same for you.