For me, Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure, a profound man, yes, but a man. I do not believe that Jesus, as a boy, knew the direction his life would take. I can imagine him a mature child, but precocious, not prescient. And by the time he appears with a whip in the temple in Jerusalem, driving out the money changers, he had to know the elders weren’t going to crown him with the congeniality award. However, I knew that many readers/believers would be willing to countenance such a scenario starring Jesus as a divine child with foreknowledge of his “mission” and his crucifixion. I could easily imagine, though, that Jesus, as a boy, helped his father Joseph, a carpenter. I envisioned him as slightly older than the boy pictured in the painting by Sir John Everett Millais titled “Christ in the House of His Parents” (“The Carpenter’s Shop”).
www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-christ-in-the-house-…
The fact is that this short poem came to me as a young man after several days of trying to write a poem “about” self-discipline. A weak approach, of course. When I gave up on the abstract thought and moved to a concrete image, I was finally able to address the concept of self-discipline. That’s a topic for us all: and, as my poem states outright, Jesus had to teach himself not to shudder. (I write my Bible; you write yours.) In order to discover and say some comment I wanted to discover and say about self-discipline, I had to assume, for the space of this poem, a well-known and remarkable child who knew where he was headed.
This poem first appeared in a literary magazine titled “Bits,” a publication from Case Western Reserve University.
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Posted by Doyle Wesley Walls on 2023-04-09 10:27:58
Tagged: , lagniappe , 0080 , poem , poetry , Joseph , carpenter , cross , Christianity , Jesus as a boy , Jesus in his father’s shop , Doyle Wesley Walls
