Last Updated on January 24, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Lesbian poet Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, is a mystic of nature who became an LGBTQ saint by popular acclaim. She died on Jan. 17, 2019, at age 83.
Her poetry expresses intimacy with nature and compassion for humanity, using language that became more explicitly Christian over time. Some see subtle references to queer sexuality in her writing. Several members of the LGBTQ Saints group on Facebook named Mary Oliver as their “favorite LGBTQ saint.”
The definitive collection of her work is “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver,” which gathers together Oliver’s own selections of her best work over five decades.
Oliver has been compared Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval saint who also loved women and celebrated nature. “Mary Oliver and Hildegard appear to be Sisters of Astonishment and the sharing of it–praise poets who have drunk deeply of the Via Positiva,” creation-spirituality theologian Matthew Fox wrote in a chapter on Oliver in his book “Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint For Our Times.”
Oliver was born in semi-rural Ohio on Sept. 10, 1935. She lived with her life partner, photographer Mary Malone Cook, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for 40 years until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver was sent to Sunday school as a child and had a lifelong interest in spirituality, but did not join a church in adulthood.
Icon shows Mary Oliver and “Wild Geese”
A contemporary icon of Oliver by artist Kelly Latimore gives visual form to themes in her life and work. She crosses her hands over her heart, like a person presenting themselves for a blessing without receiving the sacrament of communion at a church. Wild geese in the sky are a reference to one of her most popular poems. Latimore posted the poem when he introduced the icon through social media.
Latimore is known for painting innovative icons of unlikely contemporary saints such as Stonewall saint and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson and the migrant family in his best-known work “Refugees: La Sagrada Familia.” He began painting icons in 2011 while he was a member of the Common Friars, an Episcopal monastic community in Athens, Ohio.
The Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Quotes by Mary Oliver
Other quotes by Mary Oliver include:
“Happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.” (from “Poppies”)
“This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
“Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.” (from “Devotions”)
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
(from “The Summer Day”)
Links related to Mary Oliver
On the Overlooked Eroticism of Mary Oliver: Poetry as Affirmation of Queer Desire (Literary Hub)
Why we need Mary Oliver’s poems (Christian Century)
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Top image credit:
“Mary Oliver” by Kelly Latimore. Prints are available at Fine Art America.
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in January 2020 and was most recently updated on Jan. 16, 2024.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
This overview is beautiful.
Excellent post. Thank you, Kitt!