When Poetry Prays: A Review of Mysteries and Stations by Pavel Chichikov

Sounding the Depths and the Demands

She wrote:

The occupation in which the spirit interiorly assimilates the content of faith is meditation. Here the imagination presents itself with images of events in salvation history, seeks to plumb their depths with all the senses, weighs with the intellect their general meaning and the demands they place on one. In this way the will is inspired to love and to resolve to form a lifestyle in the spirit of faith.

The aptness of that account was borne home to me recently as I read Mysteries and Stations, a new book of verse by Pavel Chichikov (Kaufmann Publishing, $10.95). These are poems of high literary merit, to be sure, but they are also meditations that can lead the reader to prayer.

First You Must Compose

The rules of disclosure require me at this point to note that Pavel Chichikov is a friend of mine. No matter. Friend or not, Chichikov is a talented writer. As an instance, consider the evocative opening lines of “The Annunciation” in which the angel's coming is gracefully suggested:

There is the sound of breezes or a voice,

A gust of roses or of perfumed wings,

A web of light and shadow or a choice,

Birdsong or a messenger who sings….

The poems in this handsome little book are meditations on the mysteries of the rosary (one for each) and the Stations of the Cross. An explanatory subtitle, In the Manner of Ignatius, suggests the roots of the approach. The reference is to the meditation technique often called “composition of place,” which St. Ignatius of Loyola describes in his classic Spiritual Exercises:

When the contemplation or meditation is on something visible, for example, when we contemplate Christ our Lord, the representation will consist in seeing in imagination the material place where the object is that we wish to contemplate…the temple, or the mountain where Jesus or his Mother is, according to the subject of the contemplation.

In a case where the subject matter is not visible, as here in a meditation on sin, the representation will be to see in imagination my soul as a prisoner in this corruptible body, and to consider my whole composite being as an exile here on earth….

Composition, Ignatius sternly insists, “must always be made before all contemplations and meditations.”

The Blessing of Compelling Poetry

Seeking the literary antecedents of Chichikov's work, one thinks of George Herbert, the 17th-century Anglican poet whose limpid religious verse is deceptively simple and at the same time profound. In a statement which I happily supplied to its publisher, I spoke of Mysteries and Stations as “a luminous iconography of redemption” — and if it's doubtful what that somewhat precious language signifies, the meaning becomes clear in a poem like “Jesus Falls the First Time”:

I hope I never see the like again

For as the lashes fell I felt the wounds

As now I do as if they'd never mend

Though they were His. And now I hear the sound

Of strokes descending on my Lord and friend.

But more than that, the Master in me lives —

The wounds are mine, and mine through Him are His.

The theological intensity of St. Paul is not often transformed into compelling poetry like this, but what a blessing when it is.

Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.