Sr. Sharon Hunter tells the story of a family.
In her 2021 poetry collection, To Shatter Glass, Sr. Sharon Hunter explored childhood and memory, an interior pilgrimage toward understanding and forgiveness. Her new collection, Light Before the Sun, continues that pilgrimage, but it goes beyond, toward something that is more like acceptance and resolution.
“Life is a stained-glass window,” she writes, using the metaphor to suggest light, color, and brokenness. She will be looking back before she looks forward, and she will the brokenness and dysfunction of the relationships that shaped a childhood, but she will also see the beauty and the purpose within it.
She writes of fear and sadness. Hunter remembers a blackberry summer, and an incident involving her father, her brother, and her brother’s fiancée. She recalls a wedding, and an involuntary commitment to an institution (“I’m lost in a maze / of small rooms, corridors, and strangers / with empty eyes / and soundless voices”). She plots an escape. She gets a new job, 700 miles away, and she’s trying to find light, so difficult to capture that “I keep it in a glass jar.”
She’s looking for resolution and peace and perhaps something else. About halfway through the collection, Hunter finds it.
So Let It Be
To love more than we’re loved,
to answer the calling to do so,
we must accept that love
isn’t ours to have nor render.
It’s a gift without thought of return:
the essence of One who loves
more than He is loved,
who deserves more than we
who stand perplexed and wait,
pondering the lack of reciprocity.
So why do these hands
ineptly grasp at hollowness?
Why do I ignore the love
that lies bleeding at my feet?
He suffered for the likes of me,
yet I, too stubborn,
self-absorbed, and rigid,
refuse to stoop and touch
fragile holiness
that radiates
redemption.
Sr. Sharon Hunter
Few journeys and pilgrimages are a story of going from point A to Point B. There are byways, backtracks, and setbacks, and the poems reflect all of those. But she finds what she’s seeking, the entire point of the journey, and not at the end, when it would be almost too late. Instead, she understands somewhere around the messy middle, but now there’s a guide, an ordering principle.
Hunter has been a professed religious for 35 years with the Community of Jesus in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Raised in the farming community of western Pennsylvania, she entered a modern convent in her early 30s, following an abusive and childless marriage. According to the biographical note, she discovered that convent life was not an escape from life, as she brought her trauma with her. She previously published two poetry collections: Chance Encounters and To Shatter Glass.
Light Before the Sun uses simple, straightforward language. Sometimes it’s confessional, and sometimes it’s reading a dispassionate, almost journalistic narrative. It’s the poetry of a life, and the poetry of life.
Related:
Sr. Sharon Hunter and To Shatter Glass.
Photo by John Morgan, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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