Walking in Harmony

Acrostic Poems from the Synod of Bishops, 2023

by Charles J. Scicluna

published by Kite

In its statement of April 16, 2023, the Vatican News website announced that the 2023 synod would now continue in October 2024 with a pair of sessions. The statement went on to say that the two sessions, spread out over a year, would therefore form a “journey within the journey” with the goal of fostering a more mature reflection.

This statement found fertile ground with the Archbishop of Malta, Mgr Charles Scicluna, who attended this synod. His very mature reflections during the daily proceedings led to him creating his own “journey within the journey”, through the penning of a collection of acrostic poetry inspired by what he was experiencing and feeling during the discussions.

The book cover

His poetic journey is in fact all about the trip itself, since it has no destination as such. It starts with Home, meanders through a myriad of human experiences, emotions and evocations, using bite-sized morsels of wisdom, garnished with an underlying layer of spiritual relish.

Words are the ingredients, placed next to each other like the circles in a Venn diagram, generating new places as the journey unfolds. Then it ends with the return to Home.

The language is purely poetic in the sense that Merriam-Webster defines it as, namely “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm”.

The poet has shown no adherence to the standard rules of grammar and writing conventions, like punctuation or sentence structure, precisely because poetry, by its very nature does not.

The art lies in the many literary forms employed to expand the meanings of the title word into the reverse of an acronym that acrostic poetry ultimately is.

These random, yet organised, musings in poetic form will definitely spark off reactions each time they are read, reactions of varying nature and profundity

The oxymoronic line from Love and Justice, “Utter coldness becomes fired”, or “A silent breeze of meekness, Upon the mount of glory” in Authority will pluck at different chords in the minds of readers, because they will evoke memories and stir passions, which can only be formed in a lifetime of individual experiences, no one of which is like another.

Therefore, there is no message that can be identified as being the one that the poet wanted to impart. Like Barthes’ author, this poet has died with the birth of his verse. The simple placing, in a harmonious juxtaposition, of the concepts he touched upon, will make them adopt a new life of their own in every reading they will experience. Each word is a key to the reader’s innermost spaces opening them up to the “more mature reflection” advocated in the synod.

Bishops attend a holy mass for the closing of the 16th general assembly of the Synod of Bishops, in St Peter’s Basilica on October 29, in The Vatican. Photo: Tiziana Fabi/AFP

At first glance, the book passes itself off as a pretty simple read – 25 short poems, each of the total 214 lines representing the letters of their 25 titles. However, just like the onion, each reading is a peeling off of layer after layer, with the reader initially hoping to find a central meaning, but then finding that the centre is not there at all, as the meaning is uniformly spread out among the core-less levels of meaning.

As the name of the collection proudly asserts, the journey that Scicluna would have us travel with him is not a long and arduous one, but simply, ‘Walking in Harmony’.

These random, yet organised, musings in poetic form will definitely spark off reactions each time they are read, reactions of varying nature and profundity. The mix of the scientific, the philosophical and the spiritual threads bind the ideas together in an ether, seemingly tangled, yet ordered, a mix of the earthly and the celestial well represented by Daniel Cilia’s cover photo.

In the apparent madness, yet there is method. It just needs to be discovered. I am sure that all the copies of this collection taken to homes will find pride of place on bedside furniture or living-room tables, dog-eared after countless reading and rereading. Once is definitely not enough.