The Longing: Poems

By Paul K. Hooker

Beneath the noise and errands of everyday life, there is a longing, a yearning. What precisely we long for is not always clear; indeed, perhaps it is many things. Or perhaps it is finally one thing, the One that is behind and beneath all things. Paul Hooker probes this longing in the poem cycle of this book, exploring poetically the yearning that underlies life, love, work, worship, and faith itself. In the collections "Traditions" and "Transitions," he explores that longing in both biblical and experiential contexts. And in the concluding essay, "Sightings of the Holy," he meditates on four poems and the glimpses they provide of the Holy, a reality accessible only out of the corners of one's eyes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385211807

Paul K. Hooker

Paul K. Hooker is an ordained Presbyterian Minister and currently Executive Presbyter, Presbytery of St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Florida.

Book preview

The Longing

Poems

Paul K. Hooker

The Longing

Poems

Copyright ©

2024

Paul K. Hooker. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 979-8-3852-1178-4

hardcover isbn: 979-8-3852-1179-1

ebook isbn: 979-8-3852-1180-7

02/23/24

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

The Longing

I—The Cave

Beginnings

The Rock in the Darkness

II—Love in the Sand

Couples

Overdose: A Minor Ballad

Waves

III—Library

Leaving

Estimate of Worth

IV—Liturgy

Call to Worship

Gathering Prayer

Confession of Sin

Pardon

The Word: A Prayer for Illumination

Eucharist

Pastoral Prayer

Benediction

V—Last Words

Eye Test

The Teacher’s Last Advice

Seventy

VI—Homo et Deus Imperfectus

Bereshith (In the Beginning)

Tsimtsum (Withdrawal)

Lahat-Haḥereb (The Flaming Sword)

VII—The Canyon

Table

Plaza Blanca

Traditions

Joseph’s Bones

As One Unknown

Joseph Acquiesces to His Fate

Christmas Rose

Madonna Without Child

Matins, Christmas Morning

The Wasp

Jesus’ Dream

Snow, and Aspergillum

We Who Are Alive: Four Eschatological Haiku

Vespers

Transitions

All It Takes

Refuge

The Teacher

Parting: A Villanelle

Parting Words

Blue-eyed Snake

An Arête

Ghosts

Crossroads

Rise

Vocation

After The Storm

For Mary Oliver

Passing Things

When I Die

Disguises

The Tree at the Edge of the World

Sightings of the Holy

I

II

III

IV

"In The Longing, Paul Hooker bids us to follow his journey, a pilgrimage where surprises continue to create tension and discovery that lead to certainty and questioning. His poetry evokes a sense of anticipation, curiosity, and wonder, priming the reader to engage with immediate feelings spurred by irony, nostalgia, certainty, and more in the poetry. Here we discover that it is longing that connects us, and longing is the journey we embark upon as creation and Creator."

—Ashley R. Sanders, pastor, Presbyterian Church on Edisto Island

To borrow Paul Hooker’s verb, the Holy ‘peeks’ through the words, the silences, the lines of both the poems and the prose on these pages. To read this book is to embark on a pilgrimage whose end will return you, dust to dust, to the beginning, as one whose longing has been deepened, enlarged, amazed.

—Cynthia Jarvis, pastor emerita, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

"Paul Hooker’s The Longing offers an arc of meditations on absence that is somehow presence, or its inverse, which in Hooker’s writing blurs into the same thing. Blurred, too, are any lines between divine and earthly, of holy and not. What do you know of these things? Hooker challenges the reader to take what they think they know, and think they don’t, and look again."

—Kimbol Soques, poet and theopoetics scholar

"The poems of The Longing are the work of a mind partly wizened. Withered are certainties and naivetes familiar to people, like Hooker, of Christian faith and church. What endures are erudition, mental alacrity, creativity. Newborn is honest embrace of ambiguity, and suspicion that no signifier is more ambiguous than ‘God.’ The effect is typically unsettling, at times disturbing, but consistently provocative, evocative, and productive."

—William Greenway, professor of philosophical theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus

—Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 117

Preface

A poet has no right to dictate what a poem means. What a reader takes from a poem is a right belonging exclusively to the reader. But perhaps a poet may be permitted to say why a poem distilled itself into language and precipitated on the page.

In the case of the present poems, I can say that they are the result of some years of longing. I haven’t always known I felt a longing. For some time I misread longing as impatience or petulance, irritation, dissatisfaction, even dread. I was aware that, in various corners of my consciousness, there were these ill-named feelings, along with a sense that something was missing that once was there, something I hadn’t known I needed to know. Something for which I had no name.

Then some years ago, I began reading the mystics—theologians and philosophers from the second century CE onward who share in various ways a starting place in neo-Platonism. Their names are well known to historians of spirituality: Proclus, Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, San Juan de la Cruz, Nicholas of Cusa, the Kabbalists Moses ben Cordovero and Isaac Luria, the Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabi. And modern