Poetry and Patience
God as the Poet of the World
'Another image which is also required to understand his consequent nature is that of his infinite patience...He is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness."
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
In speaking of God as the poet of the world. Whitehead links patience and poetry. For my part, I do not meet many people who draw this connection, and among my socially engaged friends—on both the right and the left—very few, if any, lift up patience as one of life’s highest ideals. They are impatient with the very idea of patience. The times, they say, are too fraught with violence, injustice, and hatred for patience to be valorized. There is a franticness and combativeness to their spirits; they lean toward quick fixes and final victories, in life and in politics—not patience. And the Christians among them often do so in God’s name, imagining a God who is as impatient with what they hate as they are themselves.
Whitehead, by contrast, can seem out of date and out of sync with this mindset, for he speaks of God as having an infinite patience of a tender kind. It is in this context that he describes God as the poet of the world, working not by force or combat but through the slow, patient artistry of weaving together the many strands of existence into a living poem that may well have no final end. Is there room for this way of thinking in our time? Is there room for a God of infinite patience whose very spirit is more poetic than combative?
Whitehead, by contrast, can seem out of date and out of sync with this mindset, for he speaks of God as having an infinite patience of a tender kind. It is in this context that he describes God as the poet of the world, working not by force or combat but through the slow, patient artistry of weaving together the many strands of existence into a living poem that may well have no final end. Is there room for this way of thinking in our time? Is there room for a God of infinite patience whose very spirit is more poetic than combative?
Poetry and Patience
Jay McDaniel
Many years ago, as a young professor of religion, I befriended a professor of English literature named Bland Crowder, a scholar of Robert Browning and a gifted teacher of poetry at Hendrix College, where I taught. I was trying to learn how to read poetry, so I asked my friend Bland what the secret was. He told me, “You need to shift into second gear, and sometimes into first gear." He was talking about cars in the days of manual transmissions, when you shifted gears yourself — first, second, or third. Third gear was fast; second gear was slower; and first gear even slower.
His point was that you have to read slowly. Bland helped me, because I realized I didn’t read that way. I was too quick, always after information, without the patience to rest in the words themselves. I was in a hurry to get the meaning. which I assumed could be paraphrased.
That conversation made me wonder whether poets themselves must practice patience, waiting for the right word, the right phrase, the right line. I know that some poets write in third gear, hurriedly, lest they lose the word that immediately comes to mind. But perhaps some write in second gear, listening for the right words, and revising as they go. They are slow poets. They feel the words they write, making friends with them, and do their best to let the words come to them, all the while knowing they may make mistakes and knowing that may take time. They let words be words, with personalities of their own.
And it also made me wonder whether, if God is a poet as Whitehead suggests, part of the divine vocation must be patience — perhaps necessarily so. Perhaps God has no choice but to be patient, because the world has creativity independent of God, and God must work with the world. God must let the world be the world. God cannot be a commander; God can only be a poet.
If this is the case, I’m not sure that we have much patience with God’s patience. We want God to act quickly, to fix what is broken, to intervene with urgency. We want quick fixes and final victories.
But Whitehead suggests that God’s way is different: not coercion, not command, but a tender patience that holds the world in love and waits for beauty to emerge. Perhaps the challenge for us is not only to trust in God’s patience but also to learn patience with it.
- Jay McDaniel
His point was that you have to read slowly. Bland helped me, because I realized I didn’t read that way. I was too quick, always after information, without the patience to rest in the words themselves. I was in a hurry to get the meaning. which I assumed could be paraphrased.
That conversation made me wonder whether poets themselves must practice patience, waiting for the right word, the right phrase, the right line. I know that some poets write in third gear, hurriedly, lest they lose the word that immediately comes to mind. But perhaps some write in second gear, listening for the right words, and revising as they go. They are slow poets. They feel the words they write, making friends with them, and do their best to let the words come to them, all the while knowing they may make mistakes and knowing that may take time. They let words be words, with personalities of their own.
And it also made me wonder whether, if God is a poet as Whitehead suggests, part of the divine vocation must be patience — perhaps necessarily so. Perhaps God has no choice but to be patient, because the world has creativity independent of God, and God must work with the world. God must let the world be the world. God cannot be a commander; God can only be a poet.
If this is the case, I’m not sure that we have much patience with God’s patience. We want God to act quickly, to fix what is broken, to intervene with urgency. We want quick fixes and final victories.
But Whitehead suggests that God’s way is different: not coercion, not command, but a tender patience that holds the world in love and waits for beauty to emerge. Perhaps the challenge for us is not only to trust in God’s patience but also to learn patience with it.
- Jay McDaniel
Reflections on the
Power of the Future
Jay McDaniel
The Future as Part of the Present
Anyone who thinks the future is irrelevant to human life is misguided. Even those who emphasize living in the present moment inevitably anticipate a next moment. Our subjective aims, says Whitehead, include a desire for intensity in the present moment and the relevant future:
"The subjective aim...is at intensity of feeling (a) in the immediate subject, and (b) in the relevant future." (Process and Reality, 27).
Indeed, adds Whitehead, this relevant future is not simply an object beyond us, it is also an element in our present experience:
Indeed, adds Whitehead, this relevant future is not simply an object beyond us, it is also an element in our present experience:
"For the determination of the relevant future, and the anticipatory feeling respecting provision for its grade of intensity, are elements affecting the immediate complex of feeling." (Process and Reality, 27)
This means that the present moment includes the relevant future. We live with the relevant future every day. It pulls on us through hopes and fears, anxieties and expectations. The relevant future is part of our existential makeup.
This means that the present moment includes the relevant future. We live with the relevant future every day. It pulls on us through hopes and fears, anxieties and expectations. The relevant future is part of our existential makeup.
The Future as Not-Yet-Decided
Many people imagine the future as something already settled in the mind of God, fully known before it happens. From this perspective, what is undecided for us is already decided for God.
Process theologians influenced by Whitehead propose a different view. They suggest that the future is open, not yet decided even for God, and that its unfolding depends partly on the decisions of finite creatures. God may know what is possible in the future and even probable, but God, like the rest of us, must wait and see what actually happens.
Process theologians influenced by Whitehead propose a different view. They suggest that the future is open, not yet decided even for God, and that its unfolding depends partly on the decisions of finite creatures. God may know what is possible in the future and even probable, but God, like the rest of us, must wait and see what actually happens.
The Future as Real Potentiality
This does not mean the future is nothing at all. For Whitehead, the future is real, though not actual. The future is not predetermined, but it does have a certain kind of objective reality. While not an already-existent actuality, it is an object of experience with the status of real potentiality.
In this sense, it differs markedly from eternal objects. Eternal objects are pure potentialities, entirely outside time, which may or may not be actualized in the unfolding of the universe. By contrast, the future will definitely be actualized in one way or another. We may be able to escape timeless possibilities, but we cannot escape the future. In this sense, the future is indeterminate yet inevitable.
We experience this indeterminate inevitability—this real potentiality—subjectively, through what Whitehead calls anticipatory feelings and through emotions or “subjective forms.” In Whitehead's philosophy, every feeling has a subjective form, an emotional tone that qualifies it—and so it is with feelings of the future. They range from anxiety to hope, from fear to boredom. Through such feelings, the future begins to take on a life of its own. It can haunt us, inspire us, frighten us, or discourage us. This does not mean that the future is an actual agent, but it does mean that, as anticipated, it has evocative power.
In this sense, it differs markedly from eternal objects. Eternal objects are pure potentialities, entirely outside time, which may or may not be actualized in the unfolding of the universe. By contrast, the future will definitely be actualized in one way or another. We may be able to escape timeless possibilities, but we cannot escape the future. In this sense, the future is indeterminate yet inevitable.
We experience this indeterminate inevitability—this real potentiality—subjectively, through what Whitehead calls anticipatory feelings and through emotions or “subjective forms.” In Whitehead's philosophy, every feeling has a subjective form, an emotional tone that qualifies it—and so it is with feelings of the future. They range from anxiety to hope, from fear to boredom. Through such feelings, the future begins to take on a life of its own. It can haunt us, inspire us, frighten us, or discourage us. This does not mean that the future is an actual agent, but it does mean that, as anticipated, it has evocative power.
The Poetics of Patience
A unique feature of Whitehead's philosophy is that the future is also part of God’s everlasting now - not unlike the way it is a part of our immediate present moment, God participates in, but does not exhaust, the reality of the future. Its potentialities will be actualized by finite creatures, who make their own decisions, and God cannot control them.
Moreover, God, too, has subjective forms. We might well wonder how God feels the future. One way must be through desire: that is, a desire that certain potentialities be actualized and others avoided. If God desires love over hatred, or creativity over stagnation, then God's own feelings would include hope and frustration. Still another, as Whitehead suggests, is patience:
Moreover, God, too, has subjective forms. We might well wonder how God feels the future. One way must be through desire: that is, a desire that certain potentialities be actualized and others avoided. If God desires love over hatred, or creativity over stagnation, then God's own feelings would include hope and frustration. Still another, as Whitehead suggests, is patience:
“Another image which is also required to understand his consequent nature is that of his infinite patience...The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this is the energy of physical production. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”
Interpretation
ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
The materials — words, images, rhythms — these materials are the self-creative decisions of creatures on Earth and in other planes of existence. We human beings, and all else besides, are what the poem is made of.
Vision — truth, beauty, goodness — gives poem its coherence and lure. This is God’s primordial nature, the source of ideals that shape the poem’s direction. They guide the weaving of the poem.
Weaving of given words into a larger whole is the act of divine artistry, divine composition. This is God’s consequent nature, the reception and transformation of the world’s actualities.
The Poem is God's own life: God’s consequent nature is an everlasting reception of the world, God’s own life written in and through the world’s words. The words - that is, the creatures and their decisions - are the objective content of the divine life.
A Poem-in-the-Making. Because God’s consequent nature is composed out of the world, God’s own life is not yet complete. The divine poem is still being written, shaped by what the world becomes.
Meaning and Value. The meaning of life lies in its place in the poem. Each moment, each decision, each joy and sorrow becomes a word or image in God’s everlasting composition. Our significance is found not in isolation but in how we contribute to the larger divine artistry.
Infinite patience. God is not in a hurry. An insistence on quick fixes and final victories misses the point of the poem.
Vision — truth, beauty, goodness — gives poem its coherence and lure. This is God’s primordial nature, the source of ideals that shape the poem’s direction. They guide the weaving of the poem.
Weaving of given words into a larger whole is the act of divine artistry, divine composition. This is God’s consequent nature, the reception and transformation of the world’s actualities.
The Poem is God's own life: God’s consequent nature is an everlasting reception of the world, God’s own life written in and through the world’s words. The words - that is, the creatures and their decisions - are the objective content of the divine life.
A Poem-in-the-Making. Because God’s consequent nature is composed out of the world, God’s own life is not yet complete. The divine poem is still being written, shaped by what the world becomes.
Meaning and Value. The meaning of life lies in its place in the poem. Each moment, each decision, each joy and sorrow becomes a word or image in God’s everlasting composition. Our significance is found not in isolation but in how we contribute to the larger divine artistry.
Infinite patience. God is not in a hurry. An insistence on quick fixes and final victories misses the point of the poem.
Perspective for a Hurried,
Frantic and Violent World
ChatGPT with help from Jay McDaniel
- Slowing Down. The divine poet works with infinite patience. We need not live at the frantic pace demanded by the world, but can rest in the slower rhythm of becoming.
- Reclaiming Tenderness. God receives all things tenderly. This empowers us to embody gentleness in a violent world.
- Finding Meaning Amid Chaos. Even what is tragic or broken is woven into God’s poem. Nothing is wasted.
- Co-Creating with God. Our lives matter because they are co-written into the poem. Each act of kindness and courage adds a word toward truth, beauty, and goodness.
- Hope Without Illusion. There are no quick fixes or final victories. But there is an everlasting assurance: all things find meaning in the divine artistry.