For that I came

                As a guy who writes a lot of poetry, I have to admit I wasn’t always all that into the genre. I think it really started in grade school when I was young and thought it’d be easier (read: quicker) to complete creative writing assignments if I did poems instead of stories or really anything else (Me: “You mean I can write like a quarter of the words and all I have to do is make them rhyme every now and then?” Teacher: “Uhhhh…not quite.” Me: “TOO LATE I’M DONE” *slam dunks wadded up poem into teacher’s coffee*).

Eventually I wrote enough poetry that it developed into a casual interest and halfway through my freshman year of college, I decided to add a creative writing minor to my degree. It still wasn’t much of a serious pursuit at this point, but I knew I was a good writer and it would be helpful to learn a little more about the craft and it would certainly make my degree look nicer.

Then, as anyone who’s heard me talk for more than five minutes knows, I studied abroad in Ghana during my sophomore year. I signed up for an introductory poetry class when I got there, expecting to write every day and give outlet to my nascent philosophical voice. Except when I arrived, it turned out that the class was strictly focused on poetic analysis, which I would have known ahead of time had I read the class description. The master poet hiding inside of me was going to have to wait.

Disappointed as I was (even though nothing was stopping me from writing on my own), it didn’t take long for the course to change the way I saw poetry and how it fit into my life. Our professor, a gray-haired Ghanaian man and one of few self-identifying atheists I ever saw in the country, showed us a deeply spiritual poem one day, called “As kingfishers catch fire”, that left me utterly baffled. Hardly a word of it made any sense to me.

It took plenty of time and effort, but our professor was able to elicit the meaning from each of us without ever explicitly telling us what anything meant (except what a kingfisher is). I learned that day how to love such analysis, the joy of interpreting a text, and I would go on to learn more and more about the way we read.

As an English education major, studying the process of reading was incredibly formative for me in how I have come to see the world. We would go on to learn how experience colors the way we see what we read, and that is how 20 people can read the same text and get 20 different meanings from it—none of them “wrong”. Reading has since become blurred in my mind with living. I can’t really tell the difference anymore.

Each day of our lives, we simply read a new page. Or, some days, a whole chapter. This may help explain some of the ideas I’ve been writing about recently: how we interpret our world differently from one person to the next, the way we never know what’s going to happen. We just keep reading and hope George R.R. Martin isn’t the author.

I believe, however, that there is much more to how we read our lives than experience, which is one of the main instigators I’ve been citing recently. Another, as I learned back in Ghana, is the nature of our spirits.

The poem I read that day was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was a 19^th century poet and priest. His writing was a profoundly religious exercise for him, and within that writing, he almost always found a way to connect God with nature. His writing has always had a great impact on me because of that: like him, I believe God’s presence is most easily felt in nature, furthest away from the influence of man.

The poem in question has since undoubtedly become my favorite of all time. It begins with a series of images from nature and goes on to explain that each mortal thing on Earth is tasked with just one thing: to be itself. We do God’s will, it concludes, by acting according to the spirit He has put in each of us.

“What I do is me: for that I came.”

That line in particular has always stayed with me. We were all brought here to be exactly who we are. I find that thought so comforting and beautiful, and at the same time it makes so much sense. Our world needs people who read our lives in different ways. Otherwise, we’d be living in a textbook.

I can’t describe the nature of anyone else’s spirit, but I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on mine, so I’ll give a brief description. I have been given an expressive (at times overly so) spirit, one that was created to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be agreeable, and to believe that there’s always something better that everyone is capable of and to push for that “better” with positivity. I’m hopeful, but I avoid conflict, I rarely tackle issues head-on, I’m entirely unassertive and, as such, a complete pushover. I almost always try to convince everyone else that everything is fine, no matter what’s going on. And I usually believe it.

My spirit works for me. I realize there are better negotiators, people who will succeed more because they’re more aggressive, people who are better prepared for trouble because they’re more realistic than I am. Luckily, I’ve figured out, to an extent, the way my spirit fits in—and doesn’t—with this world and with other people.

Some, for example, need a little bit of negative reinforcement, and it’s going to take someone besides me to give it to them. You should have seen me as a student teacher. I had no control over the kids in my classes, thinking that if I was just nice enough to them that they’d respect me and do what I wanted. HAHAHA. Nice try, College Evan. Eventually I learned that every once in a while, I would have to yell at kids, give out detentions, and generally be mean. It wasn’t easy for me, and it made me unhappy.

Which leads me to an important point: if we are created to be who we are, then it’s when we reject our spirit that we must be sinning. I’m a person who believes that spirit and body are separate entities, so don’t think that I’m saying that we should just do whatever feels right whenever we want. Sometimes, we can be convinced to do things our spirits find universally detestable. These are mostly the things that a young child would object to: killing, stealing, hating. But once we can determine the difference between what our spirits want and what our brains and experiences tell us we want (admittedly much harder than it sounds), then we must only follow our nature in order to good in our lifetimes.

If you get angry often, you don’t always have to fight your anger. There’s nothing wrong with being mad, especially once you are able to recognize it as part of who you are. At that point, you can step back and consider what the world would be missing if it weren’t for people who got angry at a situation and did something constructive about it. You can see how you could do the same.

Or pick another characteristic. However negative a stigma there may be, whether you’re stoic, sensitive, a “dreamer”…whatever you may be, you are for a reason. There may be situations now and then which call for you to do something outside of your nature, true, but we must not work against that nature in our daily lives.

For not only do people sense when you reject the nature of your spirit, but it brings you down within yourself. I never feel worse than when I know I’ve acted contrary to who I am. No, not for my own sake. I am brought low because I’m a believer that I truly was made a certain way on purpose, and I fall short of God’s intentions for me and for the universe when I am not myself. The world needs a bunch of stupid, blindly-loving , easily taken-advantage-of optimists to counteract the intelligent, discerning realists who get things done in the world. Not that there are only two types of people, but within even this narrow dichotomy, if one of us tries to be the other, a certain balance (not necessarily a 50/50 balance) is thrown off and that’s not good for anyone.

That’s the difference between what I’m saying and the classic “be yourself”. I don’t want you to be comfortable with who you are just so that you’re more happy, less insecure and more confident. It’s not that I don’t want all of that for you; I do. But more so, I want for you to be you because it’s your duty. You make the world make sense, but only when you live in a way that reflects the spirit you were blessed with.

So as you go through your life, reading days a page at a time, interpreting it all based not just on experience but also on your spirit, be who you were created to be. Remember that you were intentional.

What you do is you; for that you came.