Leslie Williams is an award-winning Massachusetts poet whose collections of poems include “Success of seed plants” (Bellday Books Inc., $14) and “Even the Dark” (Southern Illinois University Press, $18).
Her latest work, “Your problem(Slant Books, $17) is “a spiritual exploration of friendship: its forms and obligations, its stresses and blames, and its absolute necessity.”
The title comes from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s 18th century classic “Abandonment to Divine Providence,” and the poem is filled with a search for and yearning for the divine, a yearning for connection, a desire to love and be loved.
The poems are peppered with references to the Gospels and the Psalms – would it be fair to say that your work is based on prayer?
Absolutely. I usually start my day with coffee and my Bible, then I pray and begin to write. The images are so evocative that I often want to dwell on them longer. I hope that the poems blend and intertwine with the deeper images of the Bible: beauty, horror, all the human imperfections, mercy. And angels, demons, grasshoppers, almonds, vineyards, precious perfumes! In prayer, as in poetry, I ask for the channels to be opened and then gratefully receive what the Lord gives.
The landscape and the New England weather also play a large role in your poetry, and while it’s clear that you love where you live, there’s also an air of melancholy about it – a reminder that we’re called to friendship not just with other people, but with time and place, with mistakes and regrets, with limitations and the true failure of love.
This is such a beautiful thing. Ah, making friends with our regrets is, in a way, seeing ourselves the way God sees us. I hope this theme spreads outwards, as you described it. I also rely on a kind of friendship with my readers, because they bring their own experiences to the book. It’s a kind of alchemy that the reader and the writer create together, and it can be very personal. I feel a kinship with the writers that I love and want to spend time with.
You outline many different types and facets of friendships: friends lost in the chaos of life, friends dying, friends estranged simply because of their faith.
Yes, friends hold up a mirror to us, tell us how to love, what to do, what not to do, etc. Your last example is painful. It reminds me of Jesus saying, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And yet it hurts when you find your friend belittling you for “really believing what Jesus taught.”
We’ve all had friends who had little to give back, and we feel like throwing them away.
Another thing that intrigues me about friendships is how flexible they are. My friends have been there for me when I had little to give, and at other times I have worked hard to maintain them.
But it seems to me that Friend is urging us to look at ourselves and realize that our views of ourselves (and others) may not always be accurate. I, too, often fail to listen specifically to Christ. I always want to entrust my problems to him, but am I asking about his problems?
I am thinking of Sadao Watanabe’s beautiful stencil print, “The Last Supper.” There is only one disciple at the table, leaning his head on the Lord’s shoulder. What a wonderful Friend Jesus is to us, as the old hymn says. But when I try to contemplate Jesus’ heart for even a moment, I cannot handle the sadness, all the hurt that he wants to heal. What Jesus says in John 15 is both poignant and difficult: “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (NIV).
Here’s the big question: What has friendship taught you?
I read somewhere that our “friendships” can be expected to change quite a bit roughly every seven years as our interests, jobs, locations, stages of life change, etc. This is both exciting and daunting, and makes long-term friendships all the more meaningful for their durability alone, and the preservation of our shared history.
Though I pride myself on being self-sufficient, my friends have made me realize how much I need others. As an introvert, bookworm, and solitary garden wanderer, sometimes I think my meditation practice alone is enough to nourish me. But friendships are essential to the journey and provide a harbinger of glory. I recently took a certification program in Spiritual Direction and forged deep bonds with my peers. If we started talking politics and hyper-local churches, there would be plenty of disagreements. But because we started as friends in Christ, that foundation (for me) transcends differences because it is premised on love first.
I also have come to see the log in my own eye much better than the speck in theirs. I hope they will forgive me for not loving them well. In the poem “Dust” from this book, the narrator acknowledges the truth about a wayward friend: “She tried so hard. She couldn’t help it.” And St. Francis’ prayer is a great guide: “O holy Lord, grant that I may seek to comfort rather than to be comforted, to understand rather than to be understood, to be loved rather than to be loved.”
