In Memory of Luci Shaw (1928-2025)
Remembering a faithful saint and a faithful poet.
“I don’t ever want to stop growing, being creative. Even death, inevitable as it is, will be just one more creative spurt into the future, one more growing edge, one more leap into the light. Remember, we don’t die into death. We die into life!”
– Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones
Luci Shaw has permanently changed addresses, as my grandpa liked to call the experience of death. She died on December 1, 2025, at the age of 96. I grieve her passing, not simply because I will miss her terribly but because she represents yet another elder in the art & faith movement that has dearly departed, along with folks like Andraé Crouch, Frederick Buechner, Phyllis Tickle, Calvin Seerveld, Madeleine L’Engle, and Walter Wangerin Jr.
Death comes for us all, I know, and it is supposed to have lost its sting for those who believe in the resurrected Christ, and, yes, “Death has been utterly extinguished as we enter, and join, the Quickening,” as Luci puts it in one of her last poems in Reversing Entropy, but still. It hurts. It hurts in that hidden place in your heart, where you feel most exposed and things hurt most painfully, to see the people you love leave you so irrevocably.
And yet as we must always remember our own inevitable death (in the practice of memento mori), so we must remember with gratitude the lives of those who have received their eternal reward.
“I have glimpsed [God] in unexpected ways, and I have responded to this life I have been given with some misgivings but also real satisfaction, true hope.”
– Luci Shaw, Adventure of Ascent
I first met the Luci Shaw at a Cèilidh dance thirty years ago this fall.
A first-year graduate student at Regent College, in Vancouver, British Columbia, I’d joined the entire school at a camp just south of the Canadian border. The highpoint of the all-school retreat was a Scottish folk dance that took place on a Saturday night.
Like many of my generation, I had been a fan of Luci’s poetry and fanboyed over her presence. She’d been friends with Madeleine L’Engle, she’d served as a charter member of the Chrysostom Society (which happened to take a retreat at Laity Lodge at the same time I took one with a group of artists from our home church), which included a who’s who of writers of faith, and she’d bungee-jumped in her seventies. What was not to love about this woman?
I plucked up the courage and asked if she’d pair up with me for one of the dances. She said yes. She was always game, it seemed, for an adventure. (The title to her 2005 book, The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure, tells us as much.) We whirled around the room, sweating and laughing, with me desperately not trying to step on her toes. Despite her age (67 years old at the time) and her obvious limp, she danced with a child’s heart.
“Beauty is Love taking form in human lives and the works of their hands.”
– Luci Shaw, Thumbprint in the Clay
Nine years later, in the fall of 2004, as a pastor in Austin, I invited her to fly down from her hometown of Bellingham, Washington, in order to lead a seminar for writers at the annual arts festival that we hosted at our church, Hope Chapel. She also did a public reading of her poetry and she partnered with me on my sermon that Sunday.
A few weeks later, I emailed to ask if she might contribute to a book that I had hoped to edit, featuring the advice of our elder statesmen and women in the art and faith movement. Each person would answer the same question: What wisdom might you offer to the next generation of artists of faith?
My hope with the book was to encourage younger artists who faced their own unique challenges and opportunities in the early twenty-first century. The project sadly never got off the ground but there was one artist who did answer my query: Luci Shaw, who in the spring of 2024, at the tender age of 96, would publish her sixteenth volume of poetry, The Generosity.
Luci’s words of wisdom to younger believer artists were as follows, which I have included in my forthcoming book, To Set the World Aflame:
1. Look to our Creator as the great exemplar of fresh, original, innovative creativity.
2. Study your craft. Polish your work. Avoid any kind of carelessness or sloppiness.
3. Be an artist who happens to be a Christian, not a Christian who tries to do art.
4. Fear not. Don’t let anxiety about your work paralyze you. If God has called you to be an artist, he will enable that, along with your own dedicated cooperation.
5. Give your imagination lots to feed on. Create a rich, immediate, usable past.
6. Free your envisioning and thinking from cliché. Reflect the surprise of revelation.
What I love about her advice is how holistic it is. She attends not just to the spiritual needs of artists but also to their practical and creative needs. She begins with God and she ends with the world. She assumes the goodness of ambition but not to self-absorbed ends. She argues for virtue, alongside all the great Medieval writers, and, on the testimony of her life and work, she practices what she preaches, including a commitment to community.
“There is nothing in the universe about which art cannot be created.”
― Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones
I love also how she articulates the task of the artist in the opening lines to her poem, “Take These Words”:
To be a poet you must write
more than you know, hoping it to be true,
that the words will have a life beyond the moment,
taking the shape of their meaning, like rain
filling a bowl—drops gathering into a fullness
that is wholly fresh and drinkable.
Art that is wholly fresh and drinkable. That’s what I titled the chapter in my book with Brazos Press that includes these words. It’s such a beautiful image.
“As we meet and enter the dining room of truth and grace, let us join and feed together on holy food, prepared and provided by our welcoming Host.”
―Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems
In the foreword that she wrote to the book that I edited for Baker Books in 2010, For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, Luci says this:
“Beauty is always available. It is there to be attended to, and art is our human response to whatever we see as beautiful. Not the kind of beauty we might call pretty, or decorative—it can be strong, shocking, confusing, boundary-breaking, thrusting forward in experimental ways, but most often reflecting glory, the glory of our God who created us with the capacity for recognizing, responding and receiving beauty through the work of artists.
This role of the arts has not always been received kindly in Christian churches. Often art has been seen as too experimental, too self-indulgent and too disturbing to be recognized as a gift of Grace. Perhaps this was one of the disjunctions David Taylor had in mind when he called together pastors and artists to Austin in the magnificent symposium, Transforming Culture. Face to face, ear to ear, heart to heart, these individuals acknowledged their need for each other and discovered fresh ways to connect and integrate.”
This excerpt captures the unique quality of Luci’s voice, which you can hear all throughout her spiritual writings. You hear it, for example, in Breath for the Bones: Art, imagination, and Spirit, and in Thumbprint in the Clay: Divine Marks of Beauty, Order and Grace. It is a kind, feisty, lyrical, simple voice. She was very much her voice.
Luci was kind. I saw her always be kind and encouraging to the fledgling poets within our community of artists in Austin. (Her advice to young poets, I might add, is advice that all artists would do well to heed: avoid “poetic language” and “dreamy generalizations.”) I observed her unfailing patience with those who felt intimidated by poetry and even more so by poets.
Because Luci was at home in her own skin, she was able to be fully present to others, in their own skin. She never patronized her listeners, never condescended to the ignorant, and never (or most never) wished she were elsewhere when engaged in conversation with amateur artists. Every time that Phaedra and I enjoyed her company, she was fully present. This cannot regrettably be said for all famous or non-famous artists.
Luci was feisty. While she had no patience for the faith-shrinking clichés and sentimentalism that marked much of American evangelicalism, she was never mean-spirited with the members of her ecclesial family. But she was plenty fearless. Betsy Sholl, the Poet Laureate of Maine, describes Luci’s poetry as “holy mischief.” That it was. For Luci, faith was like the wrestling of a trout on the line, the struggle “to land this flailing, feral thing–all thrash and edge.”
“Impatience consumes me,” she confessed in her poem, “New Leaf Restaurant,” and I imagine that her impatience was difficult at times for members of her immediate family. In Adventure of Ascent, she writes: “The trouble with aging is that there’s really no remedy. In the end, no one survives it.” Luci refused to look away from death, or doubt, or depression.
Luci was lyrical. Like her contemporary, Eugene Peterson, who I imagine rejoiced to welcome her into glory this past Monday, Luci’s writing has a musical quality to it that gives evidence of her love for the sonorous textures of language—for rhyme, meter, rhythm, consonance. Luci’s entire life’s work, one might say, represents an exercise in paying attention to the music of God’s creation.
Like Keats and Dickinson before her, Luci was a (sacramental) poet of nature. As evidenced in collections such as Listen to the Green and The Green Earth, she delighted in the details of the physical world: the fossilized coral, the pink-breasted house finch, the humid rot, the slow growth of lichens.
Luci was simple. I say this as a compliment, not as an unfortunate thing. It is easy to be cynical and it takes no effort to be deadly serious. Luci was neither, thank God. The Penn State professor and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf calls Luci the “master of the deceptively simple lyric.” Luci aimed always to write in accessible ways, which is far more difficult than one might imagine. Unlike T. S. Eliot’s dense language or Scott Cairns’ often-polysyllabic, barnacle-like language, Luci’s language is simple and direct.
If I’m honest, it is for this reason, perhaps, that I like but do not love her nonfiction writing. I prefer Kathleen Norris and Frederick Buechner over Luci’s ruminations on the art of faith, and would reach first for a book of her religious poetry (such as Accompanied by Angels) rather than nature poetry.
But that small reservation aside, I loved Luci for so many reasons.
I loved the way that she embraced the role of mother to many younger artists. I loved how she invested in poets and musicians and dancers and plenty more besides. I loved her cheeky ways. I loved the way she laughed at funny things with her whole face. I loved the emails she’d send to her friends around Christmas time with a new poem she’d just written.
I loved that she felt free to ask me to look out for her grand-daughter artist at a conference I was to attend. I loved how sweetly she talked about her husband, John. I loved the way she kept writing poems until the very end, in ways that were often brutally honest, as she does in this poem that she wrote in the aftermath of her brother’s death, “The Sift of Grief”:
How granular are grief and sorrow, arriving
in the particularities of distress, like sharp
pebbles in your show. How cunning and intricate,
as a species of panic ensues, bearing down the hours.
Impossible to ignore.
In the long night, grievances multiply.
Disappointment, doubt, and regret bludgeon the soul.
Your best dreams show up bruised, your hopes ragged.
Yet look—from the skylight the room fills with soft
early sun, its fine motes, welcome, reliable. They sift
across the bed, blessing your dead, peaceful face.
On October 28 of this year, I received an email from her, letting me, along with her village of friends, know that, come November 4, she and John would be moving into an assisted living community. She ended the email by saying: “Once we are settled, we’d love to see you and show you our new living arrangements.”
On November 17, I wrote her back to ask permission to use one of her poems in my book. I told her I was happy-sad to hear the news that they’d have to leave their home in Bellingham. I told her that Phaedra had passed along her warmest greetings. And I told her that I had hope she might be able to endorse one last book of mine, as she had three books previously.
I never heard back from Luci.
Today I grieve her absence in this earthly plane. I try to be happy for her, now that she has seen her Maker face to face, but mostly I’m feeling sorry for myself. I know this isn’t an admirable way to respond but I’d like to believe that Luci is ok with me feeling sorry for myself, because she is feeling none of these things and she might even recall Dumbledore’s words to Harry Potter at the end of The Deathly Hallows: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living.”
Sweet Luci, pity me, and pity us all.
I end here with a prayer that I have written “For Gratitude in the Death of a Beloved One” from my book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage. It expresses how I feel about Luci, whom we will miss awfully much.
O Lord, you who wept over the death of your beloved friend Lazarus, we too weep over the death of our beloved friend Luci Shaw. We weep over all that has been lost: her touch, her voice, her presence, what she would have made of the world that you so love had she lived longer, all that she called out in each of us, and all the beauty that shone through her.
As she is now far from us, be near to us, we pray. Be our comfort in this time of grief, even as we seek to be a comfort one to another, so that we might be those whom you call blessed because they mourn. We pray this in the name of our Bright Morning Star, Jesus himself. Amen.
I’ll let Luci have the last word on this memoriam, from her poem, “God’s Loaf.” It is a good word:
“We are not all called
as prophets, yet at the altar
with our hungry mouths we may
receive him in the form
of yeast-risen bread
reminding us that Jesus rose
to new life from the dead.”
Wonderful reflection. And bittersweet—I was an avid follower of the Chrysostom Society and had met a number of them—but not Luci. It almost feels like that was a golden era of “art and faith.”