Poems for a difficult life of faith

A man has a vision. He is walking on a road. He is going to bring the followers of Jesus to Jerusalem. He will persecute them. But something happens. He is struck on a road just outside Damascus, and his life is readjusted. He then is the recipient of hardship: the Lord will show him the great things he must suffer for his name’s sake (Acts 9:16). The book in which Saul becomes Paul is called Acts. The vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island, gives this same title to his newest book of poems.

Like Paul, Spencer Reece has journeyed to see what he would suffer as a servant of Christ—for we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). Reece writes of his residencies in Madrid, Honduras, and the East Coast of the United States as Paul tells us of his journeys to Lystra, Derbe, and Lycaonia—their foldout beds with a mattress coil that pokes their backbone.

It’s suffering enough in itself, this Christ servitude: “I write this among bare walls, mildew stains, / and nail holes. I grow obsolete among the blue tiles.” There are pipes that don’t work. Stairs that creak. The discomfort of not having a place of one’s own. But in weariness—in the backwater places with orphans and those left beside the road in the fast-moving traffic of this world—Reece envisions another reality, not of this world but of one to come. “Acts is the biography of the Holy Spirit, / tracking the story of how the faith spread / with bread and spit and letters.”