Luci Shaw's "Judas, Peter"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Luci Shaw was born in 1928 in London, England, and has lived in Canada, Australia and the U.S.A. A graduate of Wheaton College, she became co-founder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers, and since 1988 has been a Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

Shaw has lectured in North America and abroad on topics such as art and spirituality, the Christian imagination, poetry-writing, and journal-writing as an aid to artistic and spiritual growth.

A charter member of the Chrysostom Society of Writers, Shaw is author of fourteen volumes of poetry including Angels Everywhere, The Generosity, Eye of the Beholder, Sea Glass: New & Selected Poems (WordFarm, 2016), Thumbprint in the Clay: Divine Marks of Beauty, Order and Grace (InterVarsity Press, 2016), Polishing the Petoskey Stone (Shaw, 1990), Writing the River (Pinon Press, 1994/Regent Publishing, 1997), The Angles of Light (Waterbrook, 2000), The Green Earth: Poems of Creation (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), has edited three poetry anthologies and a festschrift, The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, (Shaw, 1998). Her most recent books are What the Light Was Like (Word Farm), Accompanied by Angels (Eerdmans), The Genesis of It All (Paraclete), and Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination & Spirit (Nelson). Her poetic work and essays have been widely anthologized. Shaw has authored several non-fiction prose books, including Water My Soul: Cultivating the Interior Life (Zondervan) and The Crime of Living Cautiously(InterVarsity). She has also co-authored three books with Madeleine L’Engle, WinterSong (Regent), Friends for the Journey (Regent), and A Prayer Book for Spiritual Friends (Augsburg/Fortress).

Shaw is poetry editor and a contributing editor of Radix, as quarterly journal published in Berkeley, CA, that celebrates art, literature, music, psychology, science and the media, featuring original poetry, reviews and interviews. She is also poetry and fiction editor of Crux, an academic journal published quarterly by Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

-bio via LuciShaw.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.3	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, November 1st, 2024.
0:09.3	For certain Western Christians, this is the Feast of All Saints, commemorating, well, I suppose the name is pretty self-explanatory.
0:17.5	Our poem today is by Lucy Shaw.
0:40.0	It's called Judas Peter. Shaw has had a long career, publishing her first collection of poetry in 1973 and many more thereafter. She is currently the writer in residence at Regent College in Vancouver and has many other accolades to her name, including founding a publishing house in her basement, along with her husband, Harold Shaw, garnering a wide
0:45.9	array of literary awards, and serving as a charter member of the Chrysostom Society. Shaw tends
0:53.6	to write in free verse and is known for the brevity of her poems,
0:59.0	and today's is no exception, as you'll see.
1:02.2	I'll read the poem once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
1:06.4	This is Judas Peter.
1:11.0	Because we were all betrayers, taking silver and eating body and blood and asking guilty,
1:18.2	is it I and hearing him say yes. It would be simple for us all to rush out and hang ourselves,
1:25.1	but if we find grace to cry and wait after the voice of mourning
1:29.8	has crowed in our ears clearly enough to break our hearts, he will be there to ask us each
1:36.1	again, do you love me? Red front to back, the poem is very brief, and each line is very brief.
1:47.0	Some, only two words, the longest numbering five or six, most only three words long.
1:55.0	And the sparse language leaves a lot of room for our own thoughts.
2:00.0	This is one of those poems that reverberates, or
2:03.1	some of what it says, maybe most of what it says, is in the echo that it creates within us.
2:10.1	The sentiment is very short and to the point, but it's very evocative. She alludes to the passion narrative of Jesus and collapses both the
2:22.2	betrayal of Judas and the faltering zeal of Peter when Jesus announces that one of his disciples
2:31.2	will betray him at the Last Supper. There is great indignation around the table and each asks, is it I?
	...

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