Poetry as Spiritual Practice

Assignment # 1
Introduction to Lectio Divina | Poems of Longing and Searching

The Amen Stone

Yehuda Amichai lifts the curtain on a story that is familiar to most who try to keep
up with the struggle of human life. He opens up the poem with a big sense of
recollection. Like he was deep in thought holding a million memories. Sorting out a
haunting experience that seems to never stop being on a playback loop in his mind. He
starts withOn my desk there is a stone with the word, Amen on it.where he
brings the reality of this memory he wishes to come to terms with. It is a strong
statement coming from a soldier who fought in four armies and who perhaps have
witnessed too many deaths and longs to understand what it means to stay alive after it all.
The number of years this stone has lasted has been many generations ago from
a Jewish graveyard destroyed insists that the poets memory is greatly significant and
must be known to all. It feels like a raised banner marking a territory of a sacred place
saying: all who enter must kneel with respect for this place is sacred ground. Perhaps at
that time the poet thought there was too little recognition of the real destructiveness of
war and how lives are affected in the end when all is left are torn down war-ruins and
blood stained sidewalks. He tells of how there are many more stones like this that have
been scattered helter-skelter and how these stones now sound like theyre not just
mere concrete but they are a million more memories of lives ruined because of the insane
decisions that have been made to initiate a call to war. It feels like a silent scream
resounding over the noise of conflict created by the tumultuous clashing of human beliefs
because of a lacking desire to understand and to make peace.
Yet this becomes the most painful call to realization from a poet to a reader as he
points out saying and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all. There is a
point the poet wants to emphasize: war does not give us the answers that we need. Then
he moves on and surveys the reasons why. He enumerates what becomes lost when we
go into war and tells of the endless search for answers that begins the haunting of
memories that knows no end.
first name in search of family name, date of death seeks
dead mans birthplace, sons name wishes to locate
name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul
that wishes to rest in peace.
He draws us into the irony of how the anger that propels one to come to war with
another only leaves oneself destroyed and lost. An indignant cry that proclaims,
and until they have found one another, they will not find perfect rest.

I say indignant because it feels the poet speaks from a voice of regret and an
aching for resolution. He served in the war for a reason he no longer believes to be true
today as he sits on his desk gazing at the stone with the word Amen on it. So he, as
haunted as he is, wants to come to terms with why the war has happened in the first place,
why this memory does not bring him peace and why this particular stone that sits on his
desk has the word Amen written on it.
Who could have written the word Amen? Was it passed down from a
generation to another generation written by a blood-stained soldiers hand realizing his
fellow platoon mate had just saved his life after the grenade blasted his head away? Was
it his hand that wrote the word Amen? Did he write it a while back? Did he write it
just now? These questions are significant and bring the reader into a reflection of how
strong the memory of the poet is. It shows the intensity of these emotions contained on
that one word engraved in a stone fragment of a Jewish graveyard destroyed.
Nothing can be as intense as the word Amen when we try to affirm and confirm
what we comprehend from a seemingly senseless situation like the damage of war. Only
the word Amen describes an understanding that knows no limit. Only the word Amen
can be uttered or written when this understanding has been moved by the peace that
surpasses and goes beyond the natural world we see and touches the space of the Unseen.
Id like to think that the word Amen was written just a few days before the poet sat
down on his table and chose to make the decision to come to terms with the haunting of
memories. And through his writing births this poem that has become the instrument he
used to find the answers he has been looking for.
But now the fragments are gathered up in lovingkindness
By a sad good man. He cleanses them of every blemish,
Photographs them one by one, arranges them on the floor
In the great hall, makes each gravestone whole again,
One again: fragment to fragment,
Like the resurrection of the dead.
Id like to think that the sad good man the poet refers to in the stanza above is
God. For only God can gather broken pieces of lives tattered by the decisions made in a
world of seemingly unending conflict and look at these lives with loving-kindness and
still have the genuine desire to move His hand and cleanse them of every blemish.
Only God can restore what seems to never be restorable.
Experiencing the poem of Yehuda Amichai for me brings me to resonate with the
strength of how he as a poet unearthed and mustered the choice to make a decision and
search for the answers that will quiet his unrest. For him it was a war he battled against
countries. For me it is a war I battle within myself. The battle I waged with my world
that threatened to define who I was, how I should be and how should I survive. And I
engaged in this battle by fighting back the way I was expected to. Arming myself with
weapons that taught me how to think and fight and exist in defined reality that is not my

own. Journals and lose leaves of paper have been kept in boxes and on my shelves came
to replace books that taught me the language of profit and money and business empires.
And now I look at the remains of how this struggle kept on clashing two parts of my life.
And I feel that great yearning and longing without end.
As I journeyed with this poem through lectio divina I have come to a realization
and a remembering that the reality of life in this world does exist with conflict but it does
not have to be overcome by it. That the more conflict one experiences, the more the sad
good man is moved with loving-kindness and keeps on moving his hand over the
stones of broken and fragmented dreams and cleanses them from blemish. The more
questions raised in endless searching, the more the sad good man comes to answer and
moves the stones in graceful patterns to complete the mosaic he photographs to
perfection. The more we feel like entering another death of a dream or a forsaken
longing or another lost gravestone, the more the sad good man finds reason to gather
the stones and arrange them on the great hall to make each gravestone whole again,
one again. And so it is that our lives become an endless resurrection and an endless
revival under the hands of the sad good man.
The poet reminds me that there is a face of God existing very close and very near
especially in times of great conflict. He is the sad good man that walks tenderly over
our brokenness and longing. His tenderness feels like an emotion felt by an old
grandfather and a young innocent child at the same time. The hands that gather the
stones and arrange them in the great hall are hands of a skilled Maker who knows
what he is doing. The hands that patiently work through fragment to fragment of the
jigsaw puzzle and smiles at the mosaic become the wonder of a child at play. It is this
paradox of feeling that makes conflict easier to deal with once we know how to sit with
it.
Once we know, then it becomes easier to surrender so that the peace that
surpasses all understanding is allowed to rest on our longings, and finally hold with a
strength that trusts and believes in the loving-kindness of the sad good man, our
fragmented stone and a pen that can write on it the word Amen.