The Book of Psalms has been called the prayerbook of the church. It’s an apt description of the psalms, ranging so richly in human emotion and experience that we can pray them in times of peace and unrest, in joy and despair, and every once in a while I meet someone who has made a habit of sticking close to Psalms. These people often seem less anxious about the minutiae of life, having a larger vision that extends beyond the moment. Perhaps paradoxically, they also seem more attuned and attentive to the particularities of all created things. So it is with the poet-preachers, Charles L. Bartow and Earnest Winfield Bartow, brothers and writers of the book Witness to Life: Preaching and Poetry as Theology and Art (Resource Publications).
In the pages of this packed book, it’s evident that these brothers bear witness to lives well and faithfully lived, and like those who have spent years with the Book of Psalms have they both a holy detachment and loving attunement to whatever comes their way.
Charles L. Bartow’s sermons fill the first chapter of the book. His sermons offer a reflection on a brief passage of scripture and like a jeweler turning a gemstone this way and that to discern the clarity of the stone, he reads the scripture as a poet, theologian, storyteller, and finally as someone who has lived it. In his sermon, “The Answers to Our Greatest Need,” a reflection on Psalms 42–43, he writes, “No sad psalmist ever was meant to pray alone. Instead, the people of God were given the responsibility to pray with him and to take up his prayer for him if at last his voice gave out.” This idea is key to Witness to Life—a tapestry of lives woven together, intersecting with others (both living and dead), praying and taking up the prayers of the church. Indeed, Witness to Life offers an antidote to going it alone.
Charles L. Bartow’s poetry is similar to his sermons, beautifully expounding on well-trod scripture passages, offering new insights. Here’s an example:
A Question of Beatitude
(Matthew 5:5)
After fire, wild flowers
Everywhere burning bright,
Delicate, slender, strong,
Grace the broad ashen fields,
With purple, pink, and blue,
Bring fragrance to the air,
Herald the cool, moist hope
That stirs beneath the waste,
The charred ruins of lives
Once towering, green, proud.
The conflagration passed,
Nature’s vaunt set at naught,
Humbler forms of beauty
Inspire a sudden awe:
Shall the meek inherit
The earth, as has been said?
Are the mighty cast down,
And the lowly raised up
At last? And by what flame?
The line “humbler forms of beauty” is another recurring theme throughout the book, not so different than a musical variation on theme. Like music, the theme turns up again in a series of poems titled “Lives Gone by and Going By.” Here Charles L. Bartow recalls the lives of others; of Doris with “her crown all white, announcing she was sage,” and dandelion lady who wore a garb “shapeless, ankle length and black, / and stopped, alert she searched the wild grass field.” The writer’s musing prompts the reader to attend more closely to those in their own life whose names are “ever kept” in the book of life.
The strength of this book is in the unconventional way the two brothers work out their witness across genres: essays, poems, sermons, and an opera, as each writer brings their distinct voice to the witness of Christ and to “humbler forms of beauty.”
Witness to Life: Preaching and Poetry as Theology and Art by Charles. L. Bartow was published by Resource Publications. 2024
Jessica Walters has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Mockingbird, Foreshadow, Ormsby Review, Still, Scintilla, Solum, and her short story “Glass Jars” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. Jessica is also the Fiction Editor for Radix Magazine.