Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

Ever since I read the remarkable book Dakota. A Spiritual Biography, I've had a lot of time for Kathleen Norris. I spent a lazy couple of days in the sunshine reading The Cloister Walk, beside the barn in Lyme New Hampshire. One of her later books, Amazing Grace, a kind of spiritual lexicon in the form of brief essays accompanied me through a chunk of Lent several years ago. She is a poet whose roots are in South Dakota, and whose more porpular writing today tends to be on spirituality. But given the level of dilution the term 'spirituality' has undergone, more needs to be said about Norris's writing. Indeed it might be truer to say that Norris has made writing itself a process of contemplative and communicative spirituality. I came across her name by accident today when reading an essay by Denise Levertov, another poet in my personal canon. One of Norris's poems features in the lecture, and I was so intrigued and moved by its simplicity of content and form. She simply 'collages essential words and phrases from what Jesus is recorded to have said'. She  has made a poem out of the ipsissima vox* of Jesus, the essential recognisable voice that speaks in the unmistakable cadences of the Kingdom.

Imperatives

Look at the birds
Consider the lillies
Drink ye all of it

Ask
Seek
Knock
Enter by the narrow gate

Do not be anxious
Judge not; do not give dogs what is holy

Go: be it done for you
Do not be afraid
Maiden, arise
Young man, I say, arise

Stretch out your hand
Stand up, be still
Rise, let us be going. . .

Love.
Forgive.
Remember me.

Few poems I've read have the to-the -pointness of this one – I could pray this for weeks, and hear that imperative Voice spring cleaning my motives and adjusting (yet again) my life values.

………………………………………………………………………………

* ipsissima vox was a phrase used by Joachim Jeremias in his Theology of the New Testament volume 1. Sadly he didn't live to complete his project. Dated now, but this volume is still in my view one of the finest expositions of the teaching of Jesus, and one that takes with utter seriousness the inbreaking and transformative power of the Kingdom. This year I am aiming to reread several biblical books that changed the way I read the NT – this is one of them.

Rebecca Elson died in 1999, at the age of 39. She was an astronomer, physicist and poet. I came across her name and her work in Robert Crawford,(ed.), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford: OUP, 2006), a volume of essays and poems with responses from scientists. The book sets up a conversation between two apparently very different disciplines and discourses – with surprising and fruitful results. Elson's research was into dark matter, and the relationship between the quantity of dark matter, the amount of gravity it represents and therefore the rate and nature of the universe's expansion. Here is one of her poems, characterised by a remarkably reflective hopefulness, and a willingness to handle the biggest questions in two interrelated forms of human discourse and knowledge.

Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)

For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:

To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

The essay in which this was quoted, 'Astronomy and Poetry', was written by Jocelyn Bell Purnell who discovered pulsars in 1967. It is the best in the book, at least the one I enjoyed most. But all the essays are attempts to share in a process of mutual appreciation, 'the mystery and challenge of science and the sense of music and ideas in poetry'. My current interest in theology and poetry is taking me into unfamiliar terrain, pushing me out of that comfort zone we call our subject field! The poems of Rebecca Elson represent one of the rewards of taking that risk. Her poetry and extracts from her notebooks are published by Carcanet, A Responsibility to Awe.Could just as easily be the title of a book on worship, don't you think?

Reading an essay on the poetry of George Mackay Brown, the Orkney poet, I came across examples of why his poetry can best be described as musical. 

Whether the words are shaped to symphonic sounds, or set in the informal discipline of a sonata, or showing off like the soloist in a concerto, there are sounds and rhythms in his poetry, and a capacity to evoke both image and emotion, that I’ve always found haunting, in a comforting kind of way.

“I have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed
can never die:  not even the
frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet
stone.  All is gathered into
the web of creation, that is apparently established and yet perhaps only
a dream in the eternal mind.“
from Finished Fragrance, 

We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table-
It is told, the story –
We and earth and sun and corn are one.
from
Christmas Poem, 

See what I mean? I once knew a brave woman whose life had more than its fair share of pain, of hurt, struggle and wrestling with circumstance. She had lived in Orkney and knew George Mackay Brown. She loved his poems, corresponded with him till his death in 1996, and took comfort from his poetry (of which she had several written for herself). I can understand why. Her resilience and lack of bitterness was at least partially due, I reckon, to an instinct for the beauty and healing of words. Does remembering people  before God, with gratitude, constitute praying for the dead? I hope so.

.A couple of weeks ago we took the Park and Ride bus at the Pear Tree, Oxford. Like the child I’ve never quite not been, I wanted top deck, front seat. And as so often in life, I was disappointed because some other height addicts with a love for seeing ahead before anyone else, had already usurped my rightful seat. So, content with ‘near the front’, I sat on the right side, and amongst the great sights of Oxford, saw again that red brick street of quite modern houses which I always take time to look for on the passing bus, ‘Elizabeth Jennings Way’.

It’s a kind of Baptist pilgrimage thing, allowing a place of significance to remind me of why it’s important not to forget the person whose life made the place significant in the first place! Indeed I’m hoping to visit a number of such significant places later in the year as part of my Sabbatical, of which more in due course.

I’m currently working on a paper for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Conference, which in the plenary sessions, will be on the general theme ‘The Wisdom of This World?’. (August 26-29 at Luther King House, Manchester). My own effort is on the role of the poet in contemporary culture, and on the importance for christian witness of paying attention to ‘the wisdom of this world’ as expressed in the voices of those who are dissident, or dissonant, or interrogative, or disinterested – but never indifferent to life questions and cultural experience. It’s a short paper, 30-35 minutes maximum speaky time with time for conversation and reflection. The poet whose voice I am listening to is Carol Ann Duffy. Don’t know if there will ever be a Carol Ann Duffy Way in Manchester (where she now lives). Whether or no, her poems express Carol Ann Duffy’s way of looking at the world, and seeing the comic and tragic, the trivial and crucial, ranging through wistfulness, realism, cynicism, to their deeper perhaps truer emotions of longing, acceptance and scepticism.

In her collection The World’s Wife she distills much of what makes her an essential voice for those who want help in understanding the strange perspectives, unfamiliar emotions, named and nameless anxieties, and much else that makes up the tangled, fankled mess of human relationships in a post-modern culture. Stuart Blythe uses the word flux as a verb which describes what our culture is doing – it is fluxing. Duffy is an honest commentator and mostly compassionate observer of that fluxing which takes place in the emotional sub-structure of human relationships, and which is externalised in a culture that doesn’t quite know what to want.

To anticipate a paragraph of my paper. Her poem on the myth of Icarus, who manufactured wax wings and was so pleased with his techonological brillince that he flew too high, the sun melted the wax and he fell to his doom, is a scathing comment on the myth of male mastery through technology.
Mrs Icarus witnessed the fall:

Mrs Icarus
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock

Messengers

It suddenly strikes me
with overwhelming force:

It was women
who were first to spread the message of
Easter –
the unheard of!

It was women
who rushed to the disciples
who, breathless and bewildered,
passed on the greatest message of all:

He is alive!

Think if women had kept silence
in the churches!

Marta Wilhelmsson

Gods Mercy

God’s boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, ’tis n’ere
Known, or else seen to be the emptier:
And though it takes all in, ’tis yet no more
Full, and filled full, than when full-filled before.
(Robert Herrick)

Many of the poets of the Seventeenth Century combined theological precision with psychological perception. The best of them weren’t called Metaphysical Poets for nothing; and when they recounted the range of human experiences they called  a spade a spade, a sin a sin, and looked their own unworthiness and deserved judgement head on. But they also revelled in images and words for the extravagant mystery of divine love, the inexhaustible fund of divine mercy, and the inexplicable generosity of a holy God for sinful humanity. The above is one of my favourites from Herrick – I don’t know who reads him much today, and sure some of his verbal gymnastics look like showing off – but here’s another one I like. Not because it is devotionally effective (whatever that might mean!), but because Herrick is enjoying the chance to dig the ribs of over metaphysical theologians:

God’s Presence.

God’s present ev’ry where; but most of all
Present by union hypostaticall;
God, He is there, where’s nothing else, schools say,
And nothing else is there, where he’s away.

Mind you – I wouldn’t mind the odd few lines of metaphysical mind-stretching put up on the power-point as a counter-balance to the limitations of much of contemporary one dimensional praise.

The Resurrection

I was the one who waited in the garden

Doubting the morning and the early light.

I watched the mist lift off its own soft burden,

Permitting not believing my own sight.

.

If there were sudden noises I dismissed

Them as a trick of sound, a sleight of hand.

Not by a natural joy could I be blessed

Or trust a thing I could not understand.

.

Maybe I was a shadow thrown by some

Who, weeping , came to lift away the stone,

Or was I but the path on which the sun

Too heavy for itself, was loosed and thrown?

.

I heard the voices and the recognition

And love like kisses heard behind the walls.

Were they my tears which fell, a real contrition?

Or simply April with its waterfalls?

.

It was by negatives I learned my place.

The garden went on growing and I sensed

A sudden breeze that blew across my face.

Despair returned but now it danced, it danced.

(Elizabeth Jennings)

Whether intended to or not, Jennings’ poem is an exposition of Luke’s description of disciples who ‘disbelieved for joy’. The triumph of the resurrection came later, on reflection. The more immediate responses were fear, bewilderment, disbelief, panic, the consequent confusion of thought and emotion when confronted with impossibility dawning into a clear perhaps. The mist lifts, and sight is permitted, but faith needs more than sight, and how do you ‘trust a thing you do not understand?’

Today I will celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. And like those first witnesses, there will be the thrill of recognition, that ‘sudden breeze’ of new possibility, of fresh and refreshing movement, and that inner redeeming movement, as despair is reborn in hope, and sorrow is turned to dancing. There will also be, I trust, time for deeper reflection of how a resurrection faith can be practised and lived by the community of Christ who are witnesses to the Easter faith. And in our worship, the affirmation that life overcomes death, darkness gives way to light, and ‘love, like kisses’, is heard behind the walls’, and then lived out in the streets.

A joyful and reflective Easter to all who now and again come by here.

Holy Saturday – the essential hiatus in the story of redemption, when the Son of God entered into the abyss, and when the death throes of death were entered into and endured; Holy Saturday, when the reality of the Son being made sin who knew no sin, fell with tragic force on the heart of God. Some of the most profound theology of the past few decades has tried to take seriously the suffering of the Son who died, and the suffering of the Father bereft of His only begotten Son, and that anguish communicated within the eternal communion of the Triune God through the Spirit.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale is a masterpiece of reflection on the theology of Easter, and the significance of Holy Saturday as the quiet, empty, menacing abyss where death, loss and defeat intimate the triumph of the tragic, the death of God, with a persuasive finality; Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God and his later reflections, explore with theological courage, perhaps even some theological recklessness the meaning of Christ’s death for the inner life of the Triune communion of love that is God; Alan Lewis, whose Between the Cross and the Resurrection was written during the last months of his life when he was dying of cancer, and out of his suffering came a book of immense integrity, of movingly engaged theology, the theological and personal testimony of one who built his own hope on the mystery of life overcoming death, enduring light rescinding final darkness, redeeming love eclipsing the power of sin.

Here is one paragraph from the end of Lewis’s remarkably penetrating and contemplative understanding of the paschal mystery:

For surely it is only in the mode of prayer —in meditation, reflection, and straining of the heart and ear for a word of God beyond human speechlessness, that one could finally do justice to a narrative like ours which at its centre-point has God buried in the grace on Easter Saturday. What is there left to do but pray, if the story of God’s own death and burial be true? (p. 463)

What Lewis is suggesting is not prayer that is fuelled by certainty, but prayer that grows out of the bewilderment and speechlessness that must overcome mind and heart when the implications of Holy Saturday are thought and felt.

All of which reminded me of Denise Levertov’s poem, ‘Oblique Prayer’, a poet’s take on spiritual truth that is too profound for words, too elusive for certainties, and a poet’s honesty about those experiences of God that speak more of absence than presence. The poem is set out in a way that allows the text to convey the fragmented, at times fearful, yet finally hopeful searching of those for whom Holy Saturday speaks of God’s own dark night.

Oblique Prayer

Not the profound dark

night of the soul

.

and not the austere desert

to scorch the heart at noon,

grip the mind

in teeth of ice at evening

.

but gray,

a place

without clear outlines,

.

the air

heavy and thick

.

the soft ground clogging

my feet if I walk,

sucking them downwards

if I stand.

.

have you been there?

Is it

.

a part of human-ness

.

to enter

no man’s land?

.

I can remember

(is it asking you

that

makes me remember?)

even here

.

the blessed light that caressed the world

before I stumbled into

this place of mere

not-darkness.

This Holy Saturday, I am glad to pay tribute to Alan Lewis, an alumnus of New College, Edinburgh, and one whose theology was lived and written in the presence of God. The book cover shows Alan’s memorial window at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. I have bought his book three times – because I have twice given my own copy away as a gift – there aren’t many book you buy three times.