Scott Cairns is a poet and writer who is the Curators Distinguished Professor of English emeritus at the University of Missouri. He is the author of poetry collections such as Slow Pilgrim, and of the spiritual autobiography Short Trip to the Edge, and his forthcoming collection Against Certainty is a remarkable work wrestling with familiar themes of faith, mystery, prayer and justice, but also leaning into mortality. I am grateful to my old friend Scott for a long and spirited conversation about writing, religion, how to read literature and Scripture, and living with hope in hard times. I’ve curated highlights here for BNG readers; the unedited conversation is posted over on my Substack, Good Trouble.
Greg Garrett: You are a person of faith who writes, and you grew up in the Baptist faith, as I did. In the church of our youth, people used to stand up and give their testimony, and we talked often about the walk of faith.
I wonder if you could speak with us a little bit about how you came to be the person of faith you are now and how you see the intersection between your life of faith and your life as a practicing artist.
Scott Cairns: I think my poetry saved me from abandoning my faith. The version of the Christian faith I was introduced to as a kid became untenable even before I left high school. I didn’t become (Greek) Orthodox until many years after that, but it was that sense that the faith was deeper than this sort of cartoon version I had been offered.
Scott Cairns
When you come to a difficult passage in the Scriptures, all sorts of acrobatics are undertaken to get through the text to some hidden thing behind the text.
They treated Scripture as if it were a coded message and you know, doggone it, if I haven’t had a number of teachers over the years who approached poetry as if it were a coded message and the whole point of reading it is to decipher the code, come up with a reasonable paraphrase of what it might be saying, and then you can get rid of the damn poem altogether and just have this paraphrase that’s pocket-sized and you can live with it.
That’s kind of how I ascertained that most Christians in a position to comment on Scripture would greet the Scriptures as if they, too, were some sort of coded messages that needed to be cracked to get a single truth they were hiding from us.
The Jews, however, saved me from that, because I started reading rabbinic literature and fell in love with Midrashim. I came to understand that rabbis approaching the sacred Scriptures weren’t looking at it as a static thing behind which there was a truth hiding, but a living thing; the words themselves are alive and have agency, every letter of every word is a live thing that has agency, power to produce and reproduce. So they would approach a dark saying in the Scriptures (and there’s no shortage of those things) but they would pore over those and then one would offer an interpretation and then an answering midrash would say this, and another interpretation might be that, and we’re off to the races.
It’s not like we’re negating any of these interpretive attempts, but we’re just humbly saying, “Well, that’s possible, another one might be this.” It’s not like the meaning has been made and now we have to archaeologically unearth it from the midst of the mess of the text, but we partake of the text. We ingest the text. We make with it. It makes with us. Meaning is shaped.
“It was my becoming Orthodox that allowed me to remain both a practicing poet and a practicing Christian.”
But I learned from the rabbis that it’s always provisional meaning. We don’t ever exhaust either the text or the one whose name the text is, the God who loves us and is unknowable save that he became incarnate and took on our humanity and we take on his divinity.
It was my becoming Orthodox that allowed me to remain both a practicing poet and a practicing Christian, and the two have become interchangeable. I think prayer is communion with God, and if you have a practice of prayer then you have a practice of being in the presence of God, and what prayer avails mostly is an awareness of his nearness. I think my sense of poetry does that for me too.
GG: Art is a different kind of thing from propaganda, and it opens us up to our full humanity, to the reality of what we’re called to be. And propaganda narrows us down into us and them. It creates boundaries and hatreds. To what degree do you see your art reflecting a political moment? And to what degree is making art resistance?
SC: Well, without question, the current moment, and I guess the past few years, have made me feel more obliged to at least entertain that discourse in my poetry, which I don’t think I ever embraced when things were going well.
I have a poem where I’m pretending I’m translating poems from the Portuguese — Raimundo Luz, he has a thing where he descended briefly into hell, spoke briefly with the president.
I just published on my Substack a poem, my message to the president and it basically was provoked by reading in the Gospels, John 5, I think the paralytic at the pool, and Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be healed?”
My whole poem basically was provoked in my thinking, “Doesn’t he want to be healed?” And so my message to the president is all this stuff and then finally asking him, “Don’t you want to be healed?”
GG: What gets you out of bed in the morning?
SC: Having a rule of prayer means you pray when you don’t feel like it. We all pray when we feel like it. You were asking me what kept me going, and it’s not the daily discipline of the prayer but those moments when I break through or when the prayer breaks through, and I do have a sense of God’s nearness, because it’s like leaning into the presence of God is what prayer is. Those moments when one does notice God’s nearness and God’s name.
So, the prayer, and the time with my family. I love to cook whenever we have a good meal and some of the kids are over, enjoy a meal with friends. Communing with people is like the sweetest thing for the achy parts that we all are experiencing right now.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.