Beau Denton was the planned speaker on January 4, 2026.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

That’s a line from Emily Dickinson that I know some of you have heard me mention before. My little family unit, Lina and Heidi and I, are still getting to know this community, still beginning to discern what our place might be here among you, and one of the curiosities I find myself returning to involves my love for poetry. The ways that the tools of poetry, like imagery and metaphor, help shape how I view the world.

When I think about certain historical Quaker values such as plain, direct speech and a lack of adornment, I sometimes feel a slight disconnect between that and the world of poetry, which is so often circuitous, sometimes quite opaque, and has an odd habit of addressing something by describing something else entirely.

I certainly don’t believe this is an irreconcilable conflict. I know there are many Quakers past and present, including some of you here, for whom reading and writing poetry is a spiritual practice. But there does seem to be a fruitful tension here, a tension that might be worth playing with a little bit.

So here’s the full Emily Dickinson poem:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

I’ve been turning all this over in my mind the last few months, wondering how the poetic impulse to slant the truth might find a home with values like plainness, directness, simplicity. As I pulled these threads, I was reminded of an odd little snippet from the Exodus narrative. Moses asks to see God’s glory, and God hides Moses in the cleft of a rock so he can glimpse the afterglow of the space where God has just been, because a direct encounter would be too much to bear.

I was surprised to be visited by this story after so long, because I’ve never quite known what to do with it. I’ve always found it strange and a little absurd, even decades ago in the fervor of fundamentalist certainty. But still it haunts me. Like any good story, any striking image, if I pretend to ignore it I’m not being honest.

I imagine that between all of us there is a whole range of perspectives about how to read the Bible, if at all, and how to conceptualize the idea of a singular embodied God, if at all, but maybe, since much of the Bible is poetry, it’s enough for us to hold that image, without needing to dissect the larger story. Moses hiding in the cleft of a rock, overwhelmed by the faintest glimpse of glory, because the truth must dazzle gradually.

One of the maxims of poetry is from William Carlos Williams, who had a mantra: no ideas but in things.

Because you learn a whole lot more about beauty by gazing at the moon than you do by talking about beauty. Or we could try rhetorically hacking our way through big, amorphous notions like community or witness, but we’ll cover much more ground if we simply gesture toward those who have been keeping watch at mosques and synagogues, those who sound the alarm when ICE approaches, all of those who stand between their neighbor and anyone who wishes their neighbor harm.

This is how truth reveals itself, one action, one image at a time. I need those concrete examples, those flashes through the cleft of the rock. As an internal person who loves language and over-processes everything, it is far too easy for me to get stuck in my head, to wander mazes in my mind in search of truth. Meanwhile the truth passes by right in front of me, one glimpse after another, if I remember to open my eyes.

Maybe that’s part of why I feel a deep and growing kinship in this space. Because it seems to me that the Quaker testimonies are about concrete actions as much as they’re about ideas. Maybe I don’t always know what I think about God, but I know how to wait in silence. And I might not know what to do with an abstraction like the soul, but the inner light? That’s an image I can wrap my head around. I can feel the warmth of its glow in you, and in me. No ideas but in things.