Stevie Smith and Christianity

Discovering the essence of Christianity is too varied and diverse a topic for anyone to pin to solely one definition. How one approaches the topic of Christianity is often in accordance to their personal foundations of religious belief. Sometimes these beliefs are deeply seeded during childhood so, as children mature into adults, they seldom doubt that which has been taught to them for so many years. English poet, Florence Margaret Smith, was not one of these individuals. Smith, more popularly known by her nickname “Stevie”, was raised in and around the Catholic religion and Christian tradition for many years but still grappled with many issues surrounding the Christian church and the heralded deity they called Lord. Stevie Smith wrote theologically inspired poetry because she was an existentialist who was attempting to understand the Christian environment while Christianity had shifted from the existentialist’s point of view.

To be an ontological existentialist, one must “participate in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence”, according to Paul Tillich, German philosopher, theologian, and author of Courage to Be (124). Operating within this definition, Smith would be obligated t

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Smith was aware of the presence of the Christian tradition and even the existence of a holy omnipotent somewhere beyond where mortal eyes can see. Smith had made a distinction between a God who had created the Earth and the God that was worshipped in the church buildings on Sunday mornings by flocks of Christians.

In the same way Stevie Smith took some time to get to know herself and have the courage to be herself, it is similarly that way with those who are coming to the Lord. Plato stated, “Man is separated from what he essentially is in the conceptual world” (Tillich 127).

Stevie Smith appears to have attempted to separate but became ensnared in a web of faith, God, and Christianity. Smith did not desire to analyze whether or not God existed, rather why He did what He chose to do and why we as His people seem to be losing what our purpose is here on Earth. “In all existential knowledge, both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing” (124).

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Barbera, Jack and William McBrien. For Jesus to have come down to Earth and behaved as though He were mortal, Smith would argue He needed to not be informed who is Father was. Stevie Smith was simply trying to make sense of a world slowly becoming devoid of church and God in the only way she knew how. She focused many of her poetic topics towards the acceptance of Death toward her position in life. In the existentialist’s point of view, with regards to the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament, man had fallen out of favor with God and had therefore becoming something other that what he had been created as.

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