Jurist finds the sacred in daily life

Judge Charles Reynard is a Roman Catholic who finds poetry more serene than the prayers uttered in church. (ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/BOSTON GLOBE)

Two Mondays ago, in the course of a normal workday, Judge Charles Reynard sentenced a first-grade teacher who had molested 10 female students to 60 years in jail. Then, that Thursday, the jurist in Illinois's 11th Judicial Circuit sentenced a 23-year-old man who had committed his fifth burglary to 8 years in prison. The burglar's criminal record, Reynard speculated, was perhaps partly related to his having been sexually abused at age 7.

The following Saturday, Reynard came to Cambridge, where he told an audience at Youville Hospital how he writes poetry to find the sacred in everyday life, even in the defendants before his bench.

To such an intriguing juxtaposition - a poet judge spying the sacred in serial sinners - you can add that Reynard is a Roman Catholic who finds poetry more serene than the prayers uttered in church.

"Some people would probably question how Catholic I really was, because I confess to not getting it most of the time," he said during a break in the retreat he and his wife, poet and journalist Judith Valente, led in Cambridge.

Wherefore, I find it is not your fault, Danny, that you have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and R-O bipolar illness. Or that you are under the influence of Depakote 500 mg, Zoloft 200 mg, and Seroquel 40 mg. But it is your responsibility not to swallow shampoo or thumbtacks, not to run away, steal gas, shoplift matches from Dollar General, not to knife your neighbor or your nurse during the manic phase of your moon, the unspeakable sorrow hidden behind your chaotic chronicle . . . Blessed son, I hold you in my hand, so helpless to help, so blind to watch over you in your garden of griefs.

"Juvenile Day," which Reynard wrote after handling the case of a boy allegedly abused by his mother and her string of boyfriends, tried to convey religion's message "about the oneness of all of us," he said in an interview.

Pray for such insights as he might, he finds them elusive at Mass. "But I do get those aspirations [of prayer] realized when I read a poem that returns me to an intensely focused moment about what really is."

He suggests that poetry helps him focus on the present, rather than the past or future, where, he and Valente contend, we clock most of our mental time in the busy-ness of life.

Reynard and Valente, also Catholic, hold periodic retreats to pass on their belief that poetry illuminates the divine in the shadows of daily existence.

Not everyone who attended the Cambridge event was a poet. Yet, like Reynard and Valente (who told of being laid off from The Wall Street Journal a mere year after she had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist), many said they had struggled to decipher the often sad mysteries in the poetry of their own lives.

Margaret Kornack recalled for the group how depression drove her to quit her job as a fund-raiser, to drink, and to confine herself to bed. The Dover woman displayed her Tibetan prayer beads, explaining that, in addition to her family, attendance at Buddhist meditation services helps lift her and anchors her hope, even as "I have not forgotten my Christian faith."

And what of Reynard? Surely, contemplating men who sexually abuse children challenges his faith in God?

"Only every day," he said during a break in the retreat, which was sponsored by St. Paul Church. "And yet I find myself better able every day to be attentive to the folks who are there, as opposed to deciding who they are before they approach me [and] what the sentence is going to be before I hear any evidence. It enables me to be a better listener and to understand the essential humanity that is presented to me in the courtroom.

"That's a poetic discipline, in my view, where I've slowed down and I've focused and I've listened."

Reynard says he would be a poet even if he were not spiritual. After all, he would still be a judge, watching that tragic human stories that parade through his courtroom and inspire much of his poetry.

He could still have written something like "Family Life in Arraignment Court," as he titled his poem about a bail hearing for a man who had slugged his girlfriend.

He ends it by reflecting on two lost souls, the couple's children, ages 5 and 6, sitting with their mother in court, "left with ragged edges of yearning to fit simply in a world where they feel not so very old."

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