RESPONSE TO THE WORD
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Category Archives: Life
THE COMPASSION QUEST
TRYSTAN OWAIN HUGHES opens chapter 3 of his The Compassion Quest with this exquisite quote from Rilke
Only one space extends
Through all beings: innerworldspace.
Silently, the birds fly within us.
and I, who wants to grow, I look outside,
But find within me grows the tree.Rainer Maria Rilke
Nearly everything calls us to connect
What a joy and a relief to me, and a challenge too, that Trystan Owain Hughes has offered the world what Tony Campolo calls “a book that was waiting to be written”. Some books baptise us with both tears and smiles. And make us stop, look, listen. And make us turn around.
Pope Francis, thank God, calls humanity to “go out into the world”. Yes! Absolutely. But with what?
Rilke, Francis and Trystan Owain Hughes bring something OUT into the world that has grown, and is forever growing, WITHIN them and us.
Interconnectedness. Thank God. There’s God. There’s the future.
NEARNESS
WHEN THE WEATHER’S BETTER …
STARTING HERE
please click image for audio file
STARTING HERE, what do you want to remember? Homily for Wednesday.
Simon Marsh has been keenly ecumenically minded from the age of 8. The preamble to this weekday homily spoke of his regular, interested attendance at a host of Christian churches and chapels in England and Wales other than the gently liberal, “middle of the road” Anglican parish church of his boyhood – and of the preoccupation in many of them, as it seemed to him, not so much with building and recognising the Kingdom of God in this world, as with a distinct and debilitating likelihood of eternal punishment in some other world ahead. But hadn’t the Lord Jesus – and later St Paul – shown a “more excellent way”, hadn’t they spoken of law in the context of faith and hope and love? - Audio file here
William Stafford’s poem You Reading This, Be Ready is here
EVERY KIND OF LOVE
GOD OF LOVE, inventor of every kind of love and magnetism, we give thanks for miracles – William Cleary
FROM GOD-NESS
photo/howardgerrard
For Bramhall, March 2013
A HANDWRITTEN CARD found amongst the papers of the late poet Sally Purcell bears the following anonymous and unsourced quotation:
Y sobre todo tendras / los regalos de mi pecho, / las finezas de mi amor, la verdad de mi deseo …
a translation of which is
And above all you have / gifts from my breast, / the subtleties of my love, the truth of my desire
- the Epigraph in Sally Purcell’s Collected Poems
It’s possible, sometimes, to fall especially for anonymous poetry. The world’s sacred scriptures are full of it. Our ancient forebears believed that poetry (from the Greek for “to make”) carried the Word of the un-nameable maker, the breath, the creativity, the encouragement, the enthusiasm (the from-God-ness), the feeding, the fire, the grace, the glory, the hearing, the hope, the knowing, the order, the passion, the seeing, the voice, the will, the work and the yearning of the divine. So, for me, with this little anonymous Epigraph. And I wonder whether it is the very key to Sally Purcell’s life and poetry. And I wonder, too, whether I’m so attracted to it because it holds a key to what I want to be mine.
Writing for The Times of 19 November 2002, Libby Purves remembered her friend: “like Spender’s archetypal poet she was born of the sun, walked a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with her honour.” Ah! – notwithstanding my many frailties and failures I’d like to think that a beloved friend, some day remembering my life, might be able to say such a thing of mine. The home and the love we all long for will surely be the place where all the vivid air is signed with honour, God’s honour, your honour, and mine.
Here in this exquisite Epigraph is a hint of that Kingdom come, here, today, in us, on earth, in our breasts, in our souls, in our most intimate known and knowing depths – as it is in heaven. It’s an extra-ordinary sort of a love that tells someone that they have “gifts from my breast”. There’s warm and life-sustaining intimacy in the suggestion that another has some understanding of “the subtleties of my love”. An achingly beautiful reaching and being reached in “the truth of my desire”. I can imagine Jesus whispering these words to Mary Magdalene in Easter-morning Resurrection light. (Or perhaps they’d be her words whispered for him) …
And above all you have / gifts from my breast, / the subtleties of my love, the truth of my desire
… Yes, inwardly, perhaps more intimately than outwardly, poetic life creates resurrection-life in the same wonderfully incarnate, intimate and fully in-the-flesh way as did His. And you and I may smile and bask in Easter’s light. Warmed inside. The subtleties of love. The disciple’s delight.
May you soon celebrate just such a joy-filled Easter Feast!
TANTUR SUNRISE
IT’S ALWAYS a joy when scanning one’s bookshelves to happen unintentionally upon an old favourite. The late Donald Nicholl was Rector of Tantur, the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies founded by Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that one of the chief motivations behind my spending a mini-sabbatical there in July 2000 was one of his diary entries from 1981:
30th August, 1981. Tantur (Letter to the Tablet)
Yesterday sunrise was more splendid than ever. Usually these days, when the sun rises beyond the mountains of Moab east of us, it instantly appears like a clean disk, clearly outlined over the sharp horizon of the mountains. It can be quite literally breathtaking. You hold your breath as you see the sun slowly rise – first the brilliant tip of light and then the rest of that golden ball. Some days ago, when only half of it was visible, yet all golden, it seemed for a moment as though the very Dome of the Rock had been lifted by the hand of God from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem five miles north of us and gently set down upon that mountain range in Moab, just beyond the Dead Sea. But then the rest of the sun’s globe ascended and you realised that the Dome of the Rock on the mountain was just a mirage. Except that for a moment, yet enduring still in one’s memory, it was not just a mirage. In such moments one begins to understand how in this land people can believe that everything is possible.
Donald Nicholl, Rector
The Testing of Hearts, A Pilgrim’s Journal, page 35
ASHEN FACED
ASHEN FACED to the wilderness then, Abba – woodwork lessons, family tantrums, and the doctors of the law all behind me. Who’d ever have thought life both joy and trauma? How shall I bear it, without her there to guide me? Or gentle father or mother, or sister or brother? In the wilderness.
Ashen faced? Aye, ashen faced. Beaten by “broken middle”.* Happier without your Christos “charism” – ordinary waking and working and sleeping and loving have suited me well – not so keen on desert weather.
Which theological college would be my cup of tea, Father? Which one, do you think, would be really me? Where’s the least traumatic training-ground for Galilee-work – or the dear old CofE? Not too much unpacking preferably. Probably fairly trad? Not too much facing up to the real inner me that thinks I’m barking mad.
Hey-ho, in a few year’s time it’ll be me who’s blowing the trumpet in Zion – and me who’s doing the ash. Dust thou art, I shall tell them, and what are you giving up? – I’ll ask. Then back to the vicarage I shall trot, for coffee and Church Times – bashing women-bishops and bashing gays – and funerial decline.
Ashen faced? You’re not kidding. Day and night out here I think I’m round the bend – and inside calls me deeper in. Where’s the right and where’s the wrong? Did the Temple doctors have the truth all along? But why then the belly-aching, this anger in me, the baulking at their glib exclusion? Why does my body ache for communion? Why this beckoning, this leading into wilderness, and why – O God I miss her – why the torments, isolation, why alone?
Yes, yes I hear her spirit, but soft-spoken, too soft-spoken – there’s a howling in wilderness here. She’s drowned out too often by louder silence – daring, mocking, roaring, scoffing. And I respond with my best essay’s texts – now it’s me who’s brandishing the feather! – and have to shout my defences as opposition turns up fork-tongued volume, shouting me down. Jump, screams the liar, you’ll come to no harm. Speak up, for God’s sake. Speak up, small, beloved voice of calm.
Yes, you heard. It’s a curse, I said, wretched period. Don’t make it worse. What do you mean – “priestly call”. What’s the use? I’m not being obtuse – you just don’t get it, God – womanhood – or me, at all.
O God! You don’t mean me, Lord? – not Michael Andrews – d’you mean me? But I love Richard, God Almighty. You’d better get real, see. Synod would have hysterics. I’m out here in wilderness. You don’t know them, God, or me.
Ashen faced to the wilderness then, Amma. Down from the pinnacle in one quick leap. Here the devil and the Pope and Archbishop spring surprises in the heat. How long, O God-on-high-and-yet-within this aching, hungry, yearning body – how long till I can show my own true face – held, softly sighing, in the embrace of home?
* from Rachel Mann’s “Presiding from the Broken Middle“
POETIC TRANSFIGURATION
POETIC TRANSFIGURATION – “I wonder what sort of a world we’d live in if people more readily stayed with poetry? …” (see Greek ‘poetes’ here)- Audio mp4 here
MELDED
MELDED | art/simonicus
