Poetry of the Passion 1: “Teach me how you love and have to die…”

In Elizabeth Jennings' Collected Poems, this "Prayer for Holy Week" comes after a profound reflection on human pain – that is, pain inflicted on humans by humans. It is followed by a poem on the human experience of love's struggle, the sense that love can't last but we trust it can. And in between, this poem "Prayer for Holy Week". Whatever else this week is about, it is about pain and love's struggle – the pain and struggle of God to redeem and reconcile, to heal and renew, to love with a persistence both eternal and infinite. Yet at the same time, indeed at one specific historic point in time, that inexhaustible love surrendered to crucifixion, which far from being love's negation, became love's divine fulfilment.

This prayer is also about the struggle we all have, to love as Christ loves, with Christ's energy, with Christ's vision of a poor world. And perhaps the most we can pray is in that modest but incalulably costly concession -"I'll try to do / What you need".  And the poem ends with Gospel not law – "I trust your energy. / Share it then with me."  Jennings remains in the top several of those poets whose work informs both my understanding of Christian existence, and my awareness of personal limitation as pre-requisite of divine grace.
 
Prayer for Holy Week

Love me in my willingness to suffer
Love me in the gifts I wish to offer
          Teach me how you love and have to die
                    And I will try

Somehow to forget myself and give
Life and joy so dead things start to live.
          Let me show now an untrammelled joy,
                   Gold without alloy.

You know I have no cross but want to learn,
How to change and to the poor world turn.
          I can almost worship stars and moon
                  And the sun at noon

But when I'm low I only beg you to
Ask me anything, I'll try to do
          What you need. I trust your energy.
                  Share it then with me.

Post Script. The Sculpture.

The wonderful sculpture which illustrates this post is by Lyn Constable Maxwell. It was commisioned in 1994 and is titled ‘The Crucified and Risen Christ’. It adorns All Saints Pastoral Centre, London Colney – and it is hard to envisage a more appropriate symbol than that of Christ in suffering and in sustaining and life-giving grace. You can visit Lyn Maxwell's website here. Look at her present commission on the Staions of the Cross. Beautiful.