Tag Archives: poetry

FROM GOD-NESS

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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!

PAPA

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Eighty-five years and resigned to
Breathe my last in harness
For six centuries there’s
Never been another way to
Launch a Conclave -
Papa’s last breath
Silver hammer to Seal and Ring a
Funeral rite to sing
Only One Way to go We know

But our vineyard compels in this
Heart and mind and soul and frame
Acknowledgment of origins – the
Dust from whence I came and any
Son of Adam’s pilgrim destiny
Pontiff and Barque now ache for renewal
For Son of Man’s own strength and prayer
Serenely then to pray for both
I am We are newly resigned

28 February 2013

SOON ENOUGH

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Stay awhile. Let it be
Breathe with the oak tree
See the changing
Season come and
Go with the flow and
You shall know the
Reason soon enough

28 February 2013

DAZZLING DARKNESS

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DazzlingDarkness

ANDREW SHANKS writes of Rachel Mann, in his Foreword to her Dazzling Darkness, that she represents

“a whole other species of religious faith … something like an option for all-transformative ultimate acceptance”

- and of a person whose faith is

“nothing other than a principled recognition of the very clearest-eyed honesty – precisely, as a sacred ideal”.

This sounded, at the genesis as it were, like a description of God’s Christ to me. By the end of the book I was indeed dazzled, convinced that Shanks described both Rachel Mann and Jesus of Nazareth with equal clarity. Within days I’d distributed a dozen copies to some of the people I care about most, and I’ve brought this book into countless conversations. Here is courage and honesty for which I’ve shed tears of gratitude – whilst heart and soul and mind and body somersaulted over every beautifully written page.

Honesty for Jesus of Nazareth involved Gethsemane – I’m still haunted by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus: “take this cup away from me for I don’t want to taste its poison”.* And I’m haunted because I know I owe a response to that Christ – for his grace and passion. Rachel Mann’s journeying towards truth has agonised in just such a garden, truly a “real presence”, this woman, of the vulnerable, open, incarnate body of Christ now on earth. And I’m positively haunted because I know I owe Rachel Mann for her grace, too. Haunted by Grace, by pure, unexpected, earthy gift. Touched and inspired by Anointed-ness, by Christ-likeness-in-brokenness, in Rachel Mann, and if in Rachel then also in every other child, woman and man trying to come to terms with being breathed into life – upon earth or in heaven.

And this Christ is com-passion, truly, with-suffering, a pain-bearing-alongside - an Anointed-one arrived in this world not so much to be a religious enterprise as a fully human Jesus-shaped one – one unafraid, like Rachel Mann, to “play wild language games” with God, too; one unafraid to live in and to get alongside real, frequently silenced “grubby bodies” in the poignantly agonising whilst yet laughter-filled Word-game of life. Truly Jesus knew what it was to be betwixt and between, caught up between one place – one “self” and another. Entre-nous.

The broken middle

This is the “broken middle” in which Rachel Mann has lived much of her life – and to which I believe the twenty-first century Church is struggling to hear herself being called. No longer convinced Evangelical nor convinced Catholic, hardly daring to be partisan at all, but – nearer the Word of Truth, I suspect – being willing to live in the broken middle – somewhere, and in some size and shape, that’s a bit different for all of us, depending on where we began, and upon where thus far along our way we’ve ended up. Betwixt and between. Becoming, yes, becoming. Works in progress – in the theatre of life in which, painstakingly and daily, in the midst of both laughter and tears, “each loosened bolt and nut is a making vulnerable, a loosening of false layers of identity, and a making space for God, the one who is easily silenced, to speak”.

Rachel Mann knows what it is to feel isolated and broken. And also – her Twitter-feed celebrates – what it is to delight in a platter of fish, chips and peas. That’s why she’s good news in today’s Church. Her sheer goodness and dogged perseverance is an epiphany of the kind I deeply need to sustain my hope for the future, to give me hope for a world, for a Church, for myriad different religious traditions, that are teeming with the lives of “The Other”. Rachel’s humanity could not be other than a positive encouragement to many readers and to many who meet her in person. I’m sure she’ll always be catalyst for many a real metanoia, many a real “turning around and thinking again”. And God knows, now as always, that the Church needs, that I need, to come to a truer repentance. I’m still profoundly shocked as I recall the opening service of the Lambeth Conference in 2008. Bishops gathered from all over the world cheerily booming out the hymn “All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place” even as security guards were on hand to deny entrance to “the otherness” (God help us, the Christ-likeness) in Bishop Gene Robinson.

Dazzling Darkness isn’t just a sensitive, lived work about the extraordinary complexities of long-term illness, human sexuality, bewilderment, spiritual darkness, desolation, isolation and alienation – though it is all of these: this is ultimately a book about being an expression of the Anointed, the Christ, for our life and times. A book about being planted firmly in the midst of family and memory; about instinct’s perpetual yearning for the peace it intuits will be found in one’s own distinctive space, and place; and unpredictable, sometimes unexpected human love, acceptance and recognition – within and without presently known institutions, church or marriage. This is a book about faith and hope and love prevailing despite what seem impossible odds. This is philosophical and theological reflection of the highest order. This is truly birthing poetry and prose about co-creativity with God. A book about what it means to live caught between darkness and light, joy and pain, sickness and gladness, holiness in wholeness. About Adam and Eve. About mankind, in-between-kind, and womankind. About you and me. About incarnation. About being in the flesh. About personal integrity and authenticity. About being real in the public square. About the call of God’s Spirit constantly to re-examine and re-interpret Law and Prophets. About imagination. About journey. About redemption – being shown the way home to ourselves.

Dazzling Darkness is the most important book I’ve read in thirty years as a priest, and though I’ll limp toward the finishing line in “the race that is set before us”, the Christ-likeness I see in Rachel Mann spurs me onwards. I will keep trying.

* Gethsemane, from Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber

SOUL STIRRING POETRY

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POETRY IS SOUL STIRRING. That’s its job. Stirring souls. From the Greek poiein – to make or compose – poetry is an exercise in listening, in making things new, in vivifying, bringing life and maintaining and sustaining it. Poetry opens windows onto the depths of our souls, and the depth always surprises us, opens us, stretches us, appeals to a deeper generosity of spirit, a wider inclusivity. We will never cultivate a love for poetry if we’re inclined to maintain fixed positions – on any subject or object under the sun.

On the move …

Poetry is on the move, dynamic (explosive), changing, creating, morphing. Poetry is beyond the control - of any one human person – even beyond that of the poet. “The Spirit listeth where it wills”. Poetry bears the very Word of Life to hungry hearts, souls, minds and bodies. Poetry is a wide open door and every man, woman and child is invited to enter or depart her portals entirely at will. Poetry – this particular kind of creativity – invites us to celebrate being free to be.

God is the Great Poet. Word has been breathed into the Universe – and thereafter, through the divers gifts of Spirit, trusted to do Word-stuff – something different, even when similar, in every hearer, indeed in every element and atom of Creation. My prophet doesn’t look, sound or make exactly the same sense to me as yours does to you. Your “Christ” and mine might be similar whilst also being different. God – and Life itself – are seen through different lenses. And God is apparently OK with that. We can no more say that another’s faith “is not true” than we could say the same of a poem. Truth is a matter of perspective and a matter of the Word heard; what, where, when and by whom.

Sacred writings

That’s why the world’s sacred writings – the Bible amongst these – are full to bursting with glorious poetry. That’s why, in the Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer is granted a place of high honour. That’s why the late twentieth century Church of England’s Common Worship points to Divine activity with supremely beautiful phraseology such as “the silent music of your praise”. Poetry itself might be bound between two covers, poetry binds up, gathers, collects – in the sense of drawing together, but poetry never seeks to imprison. Poetry recognises that the real grace of words is their function as vehicles for every person’s imaginative creativity and expression. Christian truth, as one example amongst the world’s faith traditions, is intended to hold and to celebrate the glorious fact of diversity.

I think that’s why poetry enters most every conversation I ever have with a would-be priest. Conversation with four ordinands today, two within our parish and two without, led naturally and fluidly into the sharing of poetry. That’s always rewarding and hopeful in my book. I’m assured thereby of a willing and loving open-mindedness and generosity of spirit.

All of one race – the human one

Further reflection upon the gifts of Pentecost at the Eucharistic celebration here this morning brought us again to that glorious affirmation in the King James Version of the Bible (Acts 2) – “we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God”. Different words and different languages for different people, but all of one race – the human one.

The sharing of three poems – each written by people of different religious traditions – was well received by one person after another at the fiftieth birthday celebration of our Associated Church Fellowships group here in the late afternoon. And – gloriously – in the relatively few words of the poetry a large assembly multiplied the power of the words by a factor of 50 or more persons present. Each of us hears a different measure of truth from exactly the same set of words – and are, at one and the same time, bound by a common, shared experience.

A Vision …

And then there was the sharing of Psalm 122. “O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.” Jerusalem is the big word here so we unpacked it. Jerusalem may be translated “City, or Vision, of Peace”. (Oh, can you feel the irony?). Let’s pray the psalm poetically – “O pray for the peace of the Vision of Peace”. Ah! There’s OUR point and purpose. Whether we’re praying for or about the representatives of the three Abrahamic faiths that look to Jerusalem, or for or about any other form of reaching out (or in) to the Divine, what is of fundamental importance is that we pray, with all our hearts and souls and minds and bodies, with our very lives, for the peace of the Vision of Peace. How are we to set about this in practice? By cultivating a love for the poetic, by being open-hearted, by being willing to recognise that the Divine Source of all our lives is “making all things new” and “turning the world upside down”.

Ria Gandhi, a writer friend who lives in Mumbai shares my affection for the works of Rabindranath Tagore. I love the 78th Song Offering in Gitanjali – with which I ought to draw this post to a close … (for the wholly pedestrian reason that I’m due at my aqua-fit class in half an hour!)

When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang ‘Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!’

But one cried of a sudden – ‘It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.’

The golden string of the harp snapped, their song stopped, and they cried in dismay – ‘Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory of all heavens!’

From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!

Only in the deepest silence of the night the stars smile and whisper among themselves – ‘Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over all!’

TEXTURES AND CONTOURS

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Collection of the Whangarei Art Museum. Acrylic on canvas

WRITING in her new Making Sense of the Bible about the works of the New Zealand artist Philippa Blair, Helen-Ann Hartley says:

no two displays of her work will ever look the same. In order to view her work, therefore, one has to study the textures and contours and observe the ways in which the colours reflect off one another in that particular context: the art is not flat, nor is our viewing of it!

Absolutely. That’s why we need art and poetry in our lives. And that’s why we need books like this one. For exactly the same words might be said of the Holy Spirit, and that, in turn, is exactly why I find it exciting and inspiring to be a priest in the Church of God today; exactly why biblical exegesis and the wider theological enterprise holds my daily attention. No two displays of Holy Spirit’s work will ever look the same. Her art is not flat, and will and must be viewed from innumerable angles and approaches.

Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, recently preached a sermon about leadership – another human “art” that is not flat, nor is our viewing of it! –  at the end of which she quoted the murdered Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero:

“It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.

Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that can be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that will one day grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there’s a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not the Master Builder; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

LIFE INFLUENCES …

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a youthful me: 3rd crucifer on the right, 1974

A LOVELY EVENING AND SUPPER tonight with parishioners who are the parents of a soon-to-be-married bridegroom. Thank you to my kind hosts :) As so often beside the significant milestones in family lives we got to chatting about the influences having been “raised” in the worshipping life of the Church – all 3 of us in different parts of the country, from young childhood upwards – had had upon our lives … art, community, confidence, faith, “family”, literature, love, music, poetry, prayer, relationships, spirituality, stability … the list, like ticker tape, is still clicking away in my mind and I’m grateful for the recollections thereby engendered. And wondering how my own life might have turned out without lifelong relationship with the Source of that life, and with the Church of England …

YOUR WORD

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BEING LOST FOR WORDS is an experience common to all humanity. We all find it well nigh impossible to articulate the depths of ourselves from time to time. Poetry, hymnody and psalmody become more than usually appreciated at such times. Poetry literally “makes” something deep inside us. But so does prayer. Because prayer is the work of the Spirit, the Word, who dwells in the depths of us. And prayer, as for poetry, and even for proper understanding of hymnody and psalmody, requires a quietening of our spirits from time to time. Being “lost for words” may, then, be thought of as a prompt, a nudge, a reminder, to turn to prayerful stillness, there to discover our own word. And be able to say “Amen”. Let it be so …

THE WELLSPRING

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OH, THE LANGUAGE in the King James Version today perfectly paints the unlikely scene before surprised eyes and raised eyebrows. One of those wonderfully unexpected conversations that’s like an entire anthology of exquisite poetry, a whole deep well to be plumbed, in just a few lines.

Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. - John 4.13-15

Never the twain were supposed to meet, let alone find themselves discussing the slaking of the deepest human thirst. But what human persons suppose should happen and what – by God’s grace – actually happens are often two quite different things. A man and a woman, sitting on a wall, engaged in conversation about the deepest human need of all.

The depth of this poetry calls us to look – to draw water – inside, not “come hither to draw” – here, in public view, outside. And there, inside, Love’s living water is to be found “springing up”. Man or woman, Samaritan or Jew, me or you, quenched thirst requires a drawing on inner life first.

The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. – John 4.23-24

The breath of God, together with “living water springing up”, made of you and me, and she and he, “living temples to God’s glory”. And that’s an even song to bring a smile to your countenance. No wonder the richly blessed (yes, Samaritan) woman hot-footed it home from the well crying “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?”. Even in Lent it’s enough to make you rejoin with an Alleluia!

See also David Herbert, Understanding Samaritans