In the Lord's Prayer, there is the line where you ask for God to forgive your trespasses, and there is this gesture in Waldrep's poem, Grievance, that I consider a loop on that line. Like when I approach that part of the prayer I always feel like I'm recognizing to myself something I’ve done wrong. Likely, I’m guilty. I am an imperfect soul. I often wake in the middle of the night with a handful of especially horrible offenses. I spoke too harshly to ___________ last weekend. I neglected to finish something that needs to be done by next week. I am a container of grievances, the kind I hear the poet in Waldrep’s poem struggling with. And like many with a running list of wrongs, I hope the Lord’s Prayer serves to acknowledge to God that He has ever reason for grievance with me. Perhaps if I observe them God will observe me in the same generalized way.
But it’s a catch-all situation. A faithful man can live with what he tries to do right, and with a songbook full of his wrongs. And while my first instinct is to relate human fallibility to a natural state of grievance God has with people, especially the poet in Waldrep’s poem. The poem itself isn’t clear on who should be lodging grievance at whom. The poet might feel the weigh of God’s grievance.
But what if the “grievance” should be seen as a coin with two sides. In my notes on the poem, I highlight where the poet would like to think he could find some respite. Perhaps he would find it in sleep, where “the sleepers / lowered in heart to the drinking vessel of unknown origin / left by the ancient well.” Should the poet see how others have used sleep to slake their human thirst for God. The poet references a “consolation” felt in the beauty of a sunset. Is this a grievance the poet has with God. That there is no respite in faith. In theory, saying the Lord’s Prayer will offer daily worship to God, but what evidence is there that God has noticed your workshop.
The grievance in this poem is maybe one side of the coin (God → Poet, or Poet → God), maybe both sides. And in this poet’s practice, the paradox of not knowing where the grievance lies only aggravates that grievance further. If the “structures of empathy are bent & / no longer conduct heat, light, or even electricity,” is that a sign the poet is lacking in his faith? Is it a flaw in the divine plan? Is this a sign of the poet growing away from God, even as he fervently seeks God out?
I think often about predestination, how it urges a faithful person to overcompensate. If it feels “natural” to do so much for God, as though you were chosen by Him, then doing more will make the chosenness more “natural.” Faith is indecipherable and indeterminate and incalculable. Except its “incalculability” is both beyond the calculation and unable to settle into a caclulable number. And this is the nature of the “grievance” in Waldrep’s poem. Is there a settled existence to faith? Something the poet here seeks with a variety of evidence. The human touch on an organ case. The cool wood grain of a church pew. An assurance that a good deed, like saving the epileptic woman, will grant some assurance to the poet that he did the right thing.
As someone who lives with his own unsettled faith, I’m aware my wrongs don't depart from me just because I've prayed that whatever the “trespasses” they consist of will be forgiven. And the degree that "grievance" can be registered in this poem, a grievance against God’s precariousness, or faith’s uncertainty, or some underlying flaw in the poet that God might have issue with, his earnest efforts to discover what’s wrong with his place in this world will be consistent. And who to direct that grievance toward? At the very least, this poem is a process of devolution, where each subsequent recognition of holiness, and the sympathetic position the poet takes toward it, is one more piece of evidence showing him his faithful reverence of God doesn't overpower the sinking feeling he'll not rise above that portion of his trespasses he feels God has forgiven him.