The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations by Elizabeth Pinborough
Reviewed by Megan McDermott
BCC Press, 2022
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In her introduction, Elizabeth Pinborough sets out a hope that her collection, The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations, will be “a faithful companion for anyone in extremity,” referencing both her own experience with traumatic brain injury and a variety of other forms of suffering. This book lives up to her hope, particularly by including poems that question the possibility of holiness showing up in pain and poems that are assertive about the presence of the sacred.
In light of the circumstances of the book’s writing, the former category – the category of questions, which we might consider adjacent to the category of lament and wails – might seem like the more obvious or relatable direction to explore. Though it’s not the only territory she covers, Pinborough does cover this territory thoroughly. From the book’s very first poem, she succinctly names frustrations, such as:
I do not
want to look with
alien
mind, no longer
perceive what
I once could…
Elsewhere, she names a date – presumably of her brain injury – as “the day of my first death” and claims, “My funerary hymn is no / melody, but howl.” Pinborough sets up a context of pain and alienation that gives rise to the spiritual questions in the rest of the text.
One of my favorite poems in the book is “Perhaps lament,” which has the gripping opening line: “When you’re called to be sick and not well…” This idea of illness as a calling is striking, and perhaps difficult to swallow for many of us. As someone who serves as a pastor, it’s a concept that I’d be very reluctant to introduce either in a sermon or one-on-one conversation with a parishioner. As an external idea or answer being pushed upon someone sick or suffering, it could be experienced as dismissive or diminishing, or as contributing to a cruel vision of God. However, the way this consciousness emerges in this particular poem feels distinct to me from a troubling minimization of suffering, since it appears to come from the one who suffers and is also framed, by the title and poem’s conclusion, in the language of “Perhaps.” I read this as a poem focused on possibility – including the possibility that
perhaps [angels] draw maps in the stars
and desperately beckon:
look, here’s where you are. Here’s God’s throne.
It’s not that far.
Even though the opening line’s language is phrased definitively, I read it in keeping with this spirit of wondering and hoping. In putting forward these possibilities (the possibility of angels saying God isn’t so far after all; the possibility of sickness as a calling), the speaker comes across, at least to me, as empowered and hopeful rather than diminished by an external theology or pressure.
Reflecting on this poem reminded me of a prayer in my denomination’s prayer book, which says: “If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.” A part of me always bristles at this prayer – perhaps because it’s so much about acceptance when I so often default to wanting emotion and desire to run loose in prayer – but another part of me sees a dignity to it. The prayer responds to the reality that the one praying may only be able to sit still, lie low, do nothing, etc., and that the only control they might have is their attitude towards that reality. Meanwhile, Pinborough’s poem is grounded in a speaker’s seemingly choiceless reality also, where “the ache of days / fades to the ache of night.”
From my reading, then, of “Perhaps lament,” a question emerges that any spiritual thinker might ask themselves: how can we, or how should we, think about suffering as a holy calling or a site for the sacred? I took that question with me as I revisited other poems in The Brain’s Lectionary, like “Metamorphosis” just few pages later. The poem includes these lines:
…the tearing is (not?)
unbearable–(being ripped
by fingers into halves
feels like being born)
The use of parentheticals and question marks creates ambiguity. Is being torn apart unbearable or not? Is there birth or beginning in tearing or not? Once again, The Brain’s Lectionary brings us to the question of whether there’s something like holiness in suffering.
Variations on these questions continue throughout the book. One poem questions: “what happens / when there’s room / for you, again?” and imagines a continuation of grief even in the experience of healing. Another, “Welcome to the hinterlands,” presents the question: “When self capsizes, dear swimmer, / is north still North?”, which might feel relatable to anyone whose experience of suffering or pain has seemed to sever them from their identity.
In “Dorcus Resurrexit,” inspired by the story of Dorcas from Acts 9, a question is voiced through Dorcas’s perspective that might have broader implications: “My body lies crumpled, a fleshly piece of cloth. To step in again, to take up this robe again–do I dare?” For a person reading this in a state of recovery, or hoping for recovery – whether from bodily trauma or something like heartbreak – this may be a relatable question: are the risks of living and the hard work of healing worth it? Ultimately Dorcas seems to choose life, or life chooses her: “My eyes crack like searing coals. Violets twinge my tongue.” By bringing us into this particular story from Scripture, The Brain’s Lectionary invites the concepts of death and resurrection into its questions about suffering and the sacred.
Although I am interested in The Brain’s Lectionary’s questions, both stated and implied, I also think it is a stronger book for its inclusion of more than just questions – of poems that also assert and declare. The book’s titular poem, for instance, ends with the repetition of “I will be // found. I will be found. I will be found”– an insistence the poem makes about what will ultimately happen even if healing never comes.
A later poem titled “Photo 51,” which references the discovery of DNA’s structure, includes the closing lines: “Come to this, the altar, the anchor. This, the Golden Braid. Come, / let us speak of Resurrection morning.” Earlier in the poem, the strands of DNA are referred to as “the constitutive stars, the building stones of nations within one soul.” The poem lifting up DNA as having some inherent resurrection force or capability feels like a statement of belief (at least a belief of the poem, if not the poet’s personal belief) about a certain sacred makeup dwelling within each of us.
Another favorite poem in the collection, “Of course,” opens with the speaker describing holding their head in their hands. Despite the “uncertainties of healing,” the poem moves into this hopeful conclusion:
Within
that rock
a fabulous
flint
of mind
still worked,
singing
the hymn,
of course
God
speaks through
stones
The use of the phrase “of course” could be read in a number of ways. One interpretation might be surprise, and then amusement at one’s self for being surprised; the speaker perhaps didn’t expect to keep on experiencing the sacred in such a tough circumstance, even though God still speaking in hard times might align with everything they have been told about God’s character. At the very least, it aligns with the verse that I believe is being alluded to: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40 NRSV).
Another pivotal poem, “Threshing with God: A Psalm of Brain Injury,” includes powerful questions in relation to a dream of the speaker’s: “What was the hope? What was the way? Where was the path through the forest day after unfathomable day? // Who threshed the path…? …Who placed the star?….Who found me?” Ultimately, however, the poem moves beyond questions into a declarative conclusion: “The mind is our joy and our prison, our raft and our sea. But One undergirds it all. // Our captain, our friend. He.” Here, the questions give way once more to a particular vision of something or Someone that grounds us in the midst of every circumstance.
Overall, I recommend Elizabeth Pinborough’s The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations for anyone who might feel like saying, “Hello, God, small and obscure,” as Pinborough does, or who is coming to grips with a “God of bright and bent” rather than a God of only one quality or the other. Pinborough’s book dances between question and proclamation related to this sometimes obscure God, particularly as that God relates to the experience of suffering. I believe it is richer for that tension. Wherever your own personal spirituality of suffering might fall, however articulated or not it might be, Pinborough will provide phrases to treasure: perhaps declarations to get you through, or perhaps the question you might want to ask yourself next.
Sources
1979 Book of Common Prayer, “Prayers for the Use of a Sick Person,” 461.
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Megan McDermott is a poet and Episcopal priest living in Western Massachusetts. She is the author of full-length collection Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems (Fernwood Press) and two chapbooks, Woman as Communion (Game Over Books) and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating (Ethel). Connect with her more at meganmcdermottpoet.com or on Twitter @megmcdermott92.
Image description: Cover of The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations by Elizabeth Pinborough.
Psaltery & Lyre 