My Light and My Salvation
View My Light and My Salvation PrefaceView excerpt from My Light and My Salvation: Lost in the Terror of the Night
My Light and My Salvation
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Rev. Kurt E. Reinhardt
Made available by Redeemer Press
Forward
A brief narrative recounted by Bede the Venerable reminds me of some words I read once somewhere in Karl Barth. In chapter xxiv of his Ecclesiastical History, Bede tells of one Caedmon, a seventh-century Northumbrian who in later life entered the monastery presided over by Abbess Hilda in Whitby. Caedmon's gift, for whose exercise he received no formal training, was composing verse, and he became one of the first poets writing in Old English. What he learned from Scripture, homily, and liturgy he transposed into poetic form, thereby enriching both the English language and the treasury of the Church's worship. When Karl Barth spoke somewhere or other of how one of the theologian's most pressing tasks is to "say the same thing in different words" (dasselbe mit anderen Worten sagen), he put in a nutshell the vocation of Caedmon in particular and of all Christian poets in general. The same truth that enjoys a limited impact when expressed in a volume of exegesis or dogmatics or even from the pulpit is, when deftly distilled into verse, apt to take deeper root and to exert greater force in the memory, the understanding, and the will.
As an Ottawa-born Canadian who has served in his country's Naval Reserve and graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Pr. Reinhardt has a much different background from and greatly more formal training than Caedmon. Moreover, he also differs from the old lay Northumbrian monk in being one placed to shepherd Christ's sheep by tending them with His gifts, which he has now been doing for almost a decade in the rural location of Kurtzville, Ontario.
When he began his studies at the St. Catharines seminary almost thirteen years ago, Pr. Reinhardt made his first acquaintance with a major technical term of Lutheran theology: monergism of grace. He has since gone on to become an eloquent expositor of the monergism of grace in homily and catechesis, in personal pastoral care, and—not least—in an already impressive quantity of poetry. Informed readers of Pr. Reinhardt's verse will agree with me that almost every line is powerfully charged with this core Lutheran motif. It suffuses everything he writes on Christ the Bridegroom and His Bride the Church, on Baptism, Absolution, the venerable Sacrament of the Altar, and the Christian life as it lives out the mystical union on its pilgrimage towards the heavenly Jerusalem.
I am honoured to commend to English-speaking Christendom, and to the reading public that consumes poetry, this collection of the verse to date of Kurt Reinhardt. Kurt is my close friend and dear brother in the Lord. He is also my brother in the presbyteral office that Our Lord founded. I am confident that Pr. Reinhardt's compositions will be richly used by the Holy Spirit for the catechesis, consolation, and upbuilding of Christ's harassed flock as it endures the foe's attacks, suffers from the lure of the world, and is weighed down by the lethargy of its own flesh in the intensifying woes of these last times. And, bearing in mind St. Augustine's dictum, expressed in his 336th sermon, that "Whoever sings once, prays twice," I much hope and firmly expect that some of the poems found in the following pages will ere long find their way into the perennially increasing stock of the Church's hymnody.
John R. Stephenson
St Catharines, Ontario
Nativity of St John the Baptist, 24 June 2008