The night outside Asbury University’s CLC Auditorium was bitterly cold, but inside, the room held a quieter warmth — the kind that comes when words are offered not just to inform, but to mend.
That warmth arrived in the voice of the Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite, a poet-priest who traveled thousands of miles and navigated uncertain travel plans to speak to students and faculty as part of the Honors Program’s speaker series. Sponsored by Asbury’s Honors Program and supported by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the evening was framed around a central question that lingered long after the final poem was read: What does it mean to be human?
Guite, introduced by English professor Dr. Elizabeth Parker, was described as a figure whose presence felt comparable to introducing C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien — a comparison met with laughter, then quiet attentiveness. A priest, poet, singer-songwriter and theologian, Guite lectures internationally on theology and literature and is the author of numerous poetry collections and theological studies. But Parker’s introduction was less about accolades and more about survival.
She spoke of encountering Guite’s poetry during a season of spiritual silence, when prayers seemed unanswered and faith felt fragile. His sonnets, she said, gave voice to both pain and hope, assuring her that “God’s answer to our cries is always himself.” That sense — of being met rather than instructed — would define the rest of the evening.
Guite’s lecture, titled around the themes of image and imagination, unfolded as a meditation on the Christian doctrine of the imago Dei: the belief that every human being bears the image of God. Rooted in Genesis, the idea is ancient, but Guite approached it with urgency, insisting that it speaks directly to modern anxieties about identity, worth and meaning.
“Each of us,” he said, “always, irreducibly and beautifully bears within us the image of God — including the people we disagree with, and even those we are tempted to despise.”
That conviction shaped the heart of his talk. Drawing from theologians, poets and philosophers — from Augustine to Coleridge, Dorothy Sayers to C.S. Lewis — Guite explored creativity not as a luxury reserved for artists, but as a fundamental human capacity. Creativity, he argued, is not limited to poems and paintings; it is present in cooking a meal, raising a child, tending a garden, shaping a life.
“We’re made by a Maker,” Guite said, “and making is part of the image of the Maker in us.”
One of the evening’s central ideas came from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who described imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” Guite lingered here, challenging the modern tendency to dismiss imagination as subjective or frivolous. Perception itself, he argued, requires imagination — the ability to discern meaning, recognize humanity and respond with care.
In a world that increasingly treats reality as mechanical and people as data, Guite offered a different metaphor: What if the world is not a machine, but a poem?
A poem, he explained, exists physically on the page, but it only comes alive when it meets the imagination of the reader. Meaning shimmers into being between creator and receiver. In the same way, Guite suggested, creation itself is sustained by a living, creative God — not distant, not retired, but actively present.
That presence, Guite said, was made visible in Christ — “the poet stepping into the poem.” The incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus were not abstract doctrines, but the ultimate affirmation of human worth. Even in suffering, even in humiliation, the image of God remains.
During the Q&A, Guite addressed how this theology speaks to those who do not share Christian belief. His answer was not defensive, but gentle.
“It’s true of them whether they believe it or not,” he said. “If I want to persuade someone they are made in the image of God, I begin with respect — with seeing something in them they may not yet see in themselves.”
He went on to describe what he sees as one of the great burdens facing younger generations: the pressure of continual self-invention. In a culture that demands constant self-curation — online and off — identity becomes a performance rather than a gift.
“To know that you are already loved,” Guite said, “already envisioned by God, is a liberation. It releases energy. You can forget yourself and turn outward — to joy, to friendship, to beauty.”
Throughout the evening, Guite wove poetry into theology, allowing language to do what argument alone cannot. He read sonnets shaped by Dante, by teaching, by the Trinity itself — poems that did not resolve tension so much as hold it reverently. Teaching, he said, is not the transfer of information, but a shared pilgrimage: teacher and student “both on the move.”
As the event drew to a close, applause filled the auditorium — not raucous, but sustained, grateful. Students lingered. Questions continued. Something had shifted, subtly but unmistakably.
In a time marked by suspicion, fragmentation and exhaustion, Guite offered something countercultural: the claim that meaning is not manufactured, but received; that imagination is not an escape from truth, but a way into it; and that every person, regardless of belief or background, carries a beauty that cannot be erased.
Outside, the cold remained. Inside, many left carrying warmth — the kind that comes from being reminded, however briefly, who we are.
