You Don’t Have To Be Good

If there was a poet laureate of the deconstruction community, it would be Mary Oliver.

Born in a small town in Ohio, Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. But her life was anything but easy, it seems true beauty is almost always birthed in pain. Her father was abusive and her mother neglectful, so she found safety and solace in nature. According to Ruth Franklin, “It was in childhood…that Oliver discovered both her belief in God and her skepticism about organized religion.” Nature became her church, and it proved a wonderful substitute for institutional Christianity.

Her poems read like prayers, bursting with wonder and amazement of the God she found in the woods and wild places outside her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her ability to experience the ineffable through the ordinary transformed her naturalistic poems into something transcendent. In her words, she was “a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

To open a collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry is to encounter on every page an invitation to more—more beauty, more amazement, more wonder, more awe, more presence, more humility, more of all these tiny little clumps of moments that make up a life.

I find myself returning to Oliver’s poetry when I too am lonely, resentful, shameful, afraid, or depressed. Maybe that’s why I’ve been reading her so much lately. She knows what it’s like to be on the outside looking in, finding community not with the saints but with God’s creatures big and small.

May her poem Wild Geese awaken your worthiness, your goodness, and your rightful place in the community of the created…

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over again announcing your place

in the family of things.

Amen.

Gary Alan Taylor