Ecclesiastes 3 begins by telling us that “for everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Those of a certain age remember the Byrds’ 1965 masterpiece “Turn! Turn! Turn!” that is a setting of Ecclesiastes 3:1-9, which tells us that there is a time for everything from “A time to be born, a time to die” to “a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together”–as well as the Byrds’ addition: “a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
One season not included, though, is “a time for poetry, a time for plumbing.” That’s the one I’ve been living in recently. I borrow this distinction from a recent episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast where the guest talked about the natural tendency to embrace the visionary big picture (poetry), while ignoring or downplaying the important of the nitty-gritty day-to-day process of getting shit done (plumbing).
Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. This, promises the obscure prophet Joel in the Hebrew Scriptures, will be one of the signs that God has “poured out [his] Spirit upon all flesh.” Exactly what I would expect a prophet to say. Unsaid, however, is that in the meantime “your old women, your young women, and your middle-aged men and women will roll up their sleeves and get shit done.” The tension between visionaries and realists, between poets and plumbers, is a healthy part of the human condition—but only when each side recognizes the equal importance and necessity of the other side.
Some people confuse the poet/plumber difference with the distinction between optimists and pessimists; these two distinctions are not the same. I, as an optimist and a plumber, am a case in point. I find that a closer parallel to the poet/plumber distinction actually can be found by remembering the differences between the three branches of government that we learned about in fifth grade civics lessons (when they still taught youngsters the basic of civics, that is). The energies that drive the visionary or poet differ from those of the plumber in the same was that legislative energies are different from those of the executive. Not particularly being a political animal, I lacked first-hand, lived experience of these crucial differences until core curriculum review began on our campus fifteen years ago.
Although I participated in many focus groups and debated endlessly on line with my colleagues about the true purposes and value of a liberal arts education, I had no desire to part of the Faculty Senate legislative process that hammered out a new core curriculum that was finally approved by the college president. Legislators, in spite of appearances, primarily are dreamers and visionaries—poets, in other words–persons who imagine what a better future might look like and how it might possibly best be organized, then turn the vision over to executive plumbers to transform this vision into “boots on the ground” reality.
I am by nature one of those plumbers–at least when playing the role of administrator–and spent the first four years after the new curriculum was passed directing the attempt to make a reality the central portion of the new core curriculum fashioned by the legislators, a revitalized and freshly imagined version of the large interdisciplinary program that had been the centerpiece of my college’s core curriculum for four decades. This new program was not exactly the one I would have invented had it been up to me (it wasn’t a radical enough change for my tastes), but as a plumber and executive the question is no longer “What program would I (we) have invented had it been entirely up to me (us)?” or even “Do I think this new program is a good idea?” Both of these questions were irrelevant—the horse was now out of the barn. The question now was “How are we going to make this product of poets’ vision happen?”
I recall an interesting conversation a year or so into my leading the interdisciplinary program with a faculty member teaching in the program who also happened to have been his department’s senator during the Faculty Senate’s shaping of the new core. My colleague was not entirely in agreement with some of the new policies being developed as the new program went into real-time reality. “Vance,” he said, “These new policies don’t really reflect the vision of those who were debating the legislation a couple of years ago.” “I don’t care, Jack,” I replied (his name has been changed even though he needs no protection and is anything but innocent). “It’s one thing to plan something—it’s another thing entirely to make it happen.” Yet Jack and I are good friends, just as poets and plubmers should be (hear that, politicians in Washington?).
There is plenty of poetry and plumbing going on in the Christian liturgical year. We are close to the end of Ordinary Time, the longest season of liturgical plumbing between Pentecost and the beginning of the new liturgical year the Sunday after Thanksgiving with Advent. The Incarnation and Easter are pure poetry–so, arguably are Advent and Pentecost. But those who fashioned the liturgical year over the centuries knew that poets and plumbers need each other. Just as the poet needs to get her head out of the clouds occasionally and find something to eat, so the plumber needs to lift his nose from the grindstone often enough to remember that without regular infusions of poetry, getting shit done will be just that.
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