Matthew E. Henry
The Third Renunciation
New York Quarterly Books
Reviewer: Rebecca Patrascu
Dr. Matthew E. Henry is a busy man. A high school teacher with a MFA in poetry, a MA in theology, and a PhD in Education, he is on the editorial staff of two journals and is the author of several books of poetry, including three titles published in as many years. Henry’s latest full-length volume, The Third Renunciation, is a collection of theological sonnets that challenge traditional beliefs through rhetorical proposals. In poem after poem, Henry takes foundational components of Christianity, such as God, Christology, faith, grace, prayer, eschatology, and theodicy, and upends them, inviting us to discover how – or whether – they will right themselves within the space of fourteen lines.
Most of the poems in his new book are untitled and begin with a suggestive “Say” followed by attention-grabbing suppositions: “Say faith can become like lackluster sex,” “Say agape is a suicide vest,” “Say Grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach.” In addition to these philosophical explorations, several persona poems, with boldface first lines and an opening “maybe,” present vignettes of individuals, each of whom is second-guessing something Jesus did or thought. The names of the questioners all begin with the letter M, and their ponderings are often slightly wry, resulting in lines like “maybe Jesus didn’t eat His spinach” (Michael), “maybe Jesus needed better PR” (Marla), or “maybe Jesus was having an off day” (Morgan).
Henry catches our attention through frequent direct address and he keeps it with his musicality, vivid imagery, and the range and brashness of his suggestions, as in this excerpt from the first section:
Say most honest prayers begin with “fuck it,”
rejecting or accepting the fist clenched
around our hearts, the sword of Damocles
suspended above our secrets and sins.
it’s being leash-led to an opaque cell,
seeing the frail vial in Schrödinger’s hands,
meowing one last manic hail mary.
it’s hoping grace descends before the heft
of the falling sky—orange and crimson.
The Third Renunciation is a skillful blend of order and upheaval. While Henry’s proposals are dynamic and often open-ended, the sonnet provides a small, sturdy container for the pressure of the heady and heavy content. The form is finite even if the ideas are not. A tension exists at the level of the line as well: the poet adheres to a ten-syllable length, but the opening “Say” or “maybe” immediately disrupts the traditional iambic foot with an initial stress.
Henry has been a teacher for many years and is evidently practiced at engaging students through provocation as well as passion. In an interview in The Sundress Blog, he explained that his lived experiences, especially with regards to racism, have resulted in a desire to subvert expectations and hold people accountable for their biased assumptions. He also strives to create catalysts in his teaching and his poetry: “to light a fire, add an irritant, move things around, shake things up.”
There is no shying away from difficult subjects in The Third Renunciation. Although rage and despair are alleviated by moments of humor and the gentler tone of some of the persona poems, the harm that we bring upon ourselves and one another is under scrutiny here, and many poems use understatement and irony to take human beings or God to task for a multitude of atrocities and injustices, including genocide, slavery, cancer, and the sudden death of a child. Some of Henry’s disquisitions and analogies may be especially challenging for orthodox readers or those who eschew theological deconstruction. God described as “music we strain to hear” above lamentations or endrosis sarcitrella—“a common moth drawn to our every flame” is one thing, but it is something else to call God a bookie with hired muscle, “a fair pimp,” “the tough in the prison yard / you’ve decided to take out,” or “your neighborhood pusher.”
The title The Third Renunciation comes from the writing of Cassian of Imola, who was stabbed to death by styli-brandishing students in the 4th century and is considered the patron saint of teachers. Cassian’s roadmap for salvation directs believers to renounce their former way of life, renounce their mindless thoughts, and then renounce their self-made image of God. Mary Margaret Funk, quoted in the collection’s opening epigraph, suggests that this last step requires relinquishing every notion of who and how God is; and while Henry does not eliminate all ideas of the divine (and there would be no book if he did), his creative reimaginings serve to trigger a reset of our preconceptions.
His approach also generates more questions than answers. Rather than acting as hinges between premise and response, voltas turn inward and lead further down spiral staircases of dismantling. “Say ‘what if’ is more dangerous than ‘why?’” Henry suggests at the beginning of the book, implying that trying to address divine causality is less challenging to one’s faith than entertaining the possibility that no such causality exists. “Say all this pain is meaningless,” he posits, asking thirteen lines later, “what reason do we have to sing?” Repeatedly, the poems interrogate belief and let us draw our own conclusions.
Henry spends a lot of time in The Third Renunciation on prayer. He describes it as an emergency alarm system or rubbing God’s back like a lucky rabbit foot or genie lamp, or as a carefully aligned dreamcatcher “or some other means of snapping fingers / in front of God’s face.” One of his more sensuous sonnets opens, “Say prayer is sex with God” and continues, “knees bent, eyes closed, fingers entwined or clasped— / often without saying, needing a word.” He imagines:
… a little
death sought in the asking, receiving what
the Holy Spirit craves without ceasing—
the soul-shaking, toe-curling pleasure. night,
noon, and morning, our flesh is willing. This
blessed communion which leaves us gasping
Amen again and again and again.
One could argue that The Third Renunciation itself is a sort of prayer being offered up by the poet: a crying out, a sustained seeking that leans boldly and unapologetically into the intersection of grime, grit, and mystery.
