Sacrifice of praise 1. Yet Listen Now

During Holy Week I’ll post a poem and some brief thoughts and reflections. Doing this gives focus to my own devotional response to this Holy Season, and I hope offers food for thought and thought for prayer, to those who visit here. 

180pxamy_carmichael One of the underrated figures in Evangelical spirituality is Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. Long before Mother Teresa, Amy Carmichael was developing fellowships and communities of compassion for the disinherited, the vulnerable, and especially the children of South India. Her poetry is  unabashedly devotional, but it is devotion unspoilt by superficial emotionalism, or cheaply purchased sentiment. Carmichael’s spirituality drew on powerful undercurrents of Keswick holiness teaching, channelled through a determined and passionate personality, worked out in the pragmatic hard-headed labour of making homes for the homeless and feeding the hungry; all this then expressed in some of the most effective poetry in the last hundred years of Evangelical writing.

Olive_13_2 Her vision penetrated to those inner recesses of theological reflection where the eternal and mysterious purposes of God, though still unexplained, are yet contemplated and if not understood, then at least appropriated as foundational trust. "Yet Listen Now", is one of those poems that makes Easter more than a focal liturgical annual event, but a way of looking at the world day after day. Olive trees (favourite subject of Van Gogh), are called as witnesses of the redemption and healing of that human brokenness and fractured creation which is experienced in the reality and mystery of suffering.

Yet Listen Now

Yet listen now,

Oh, listen with the wondering olive trees,

And the white moon that looked between the leaves,

And gentle earth that shuddered as she felt

Great drops of blood. All torturing questions find

Answer beneath those old grey olive trees.

There, only there, we can take heart to hope

For all lost lambs – Aye, even for ravening wolves.

Oh, there are things done in the world today

Would root up faith, but for Gethsemane,

For Calvary interprets human life;

No path of pain but there we meet our Lord;

And all the strain, the terror and the strife

Die down like waves before his peaceful word,

And nowhere but beside the awful Cross,

And where the olives grow along the hill,

Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,

The crushing agony – and hold us still.

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