Random Poetry

I'd be the first to admit how much I hate e-mail spam. In spite of trying to keep my "filters" set fairly high, I seem to get more than my fair share of the stuff, and I grumble about life being too short as I clean it out every day.

However, lately I've been getting a kick out of the randomly generated subject lines on some of the spam in my inbox. You know the ones I mean, the subject lines that string together three or four words that appear to have been randomly generated and have no apparent connection to each other in any way (all in an attempt to get their noxious virus-y advertisements through to my mailbox). Most of the time I don't give these a second glance as I send them to the trash bin for emptying, but once in a while a combination of words will jump out at me and...well...
almost look like poetry (she says sheepishly). Sometimes they remind me of those poetry magnets people put on their refrigerator!

This morning there was an interesting one. The subject line read "sing as reflex." I almost took a double-take when I saw that, because I had just read the following in a meditation by Amy Carmichael:

"His anxious thoughts said: 'Terrific powers are set in array against me!' ... His Father said: 'And you are as a little child, who knows not how to meet them. But with you, there is one stronger than they. Do not forget to sing!'"

Do not forget to sing! When trouble comes, when you seem surrounded by terrible pressures, fears and troubles, look up, realize who is on your side, and sing! Sing praises! Sing thanks! And, as the wise and witty spam-poetry in my inbox put it, "sing as reflex"! I love that idea -- that I could so train my responses to life's problems, that my trust in God's loving power and goodness could be so strong, that even in the darkest and most anxious moments of the day, my first instinct would be to sing. It would be like a reflex action, something I would do almost without thinking.
I'm going to try to remember this insight: do not forget to sing/sing as reflex. And I'm going to see if I can't keep my eyes open for more instances of unexpected poetry, poems that ambush me from ordinary places. What Annie Dillard calls "found poetry."