Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

Good Friday is a day of heaviness. The weight of a world’s pain borne in the heart of God in Christ crucified, the very nature of crucifixion compelling the body to feel its own weight in proportion to the physical anguish of wounded limbs supporting a broken frame. It is inevitable that the passion of Christ should reverberate within the penitent devotion  of hearts bewildered by the agony of love.

Saint Exupery writes that ‘sorrows are the vibrations of the soul that remind us we are alive’. And early in devotional verse Jesus was called the Man of Sorrows, absorbing into the infinite spaciousness of divine love the malignant consequences of a world’s sin; and in his case those sorrows were linked at one and the same time to his death, and the gift of life it released. Elizabeth Jennings’ poem while acknowledging the anguish of Christ crucified, faces up to the reality of sin as more than radical evil; sin is also the accumulation of small acts of selfishness, cruelty, indifference, neglect; it is the diligently learned skill of witholding acts and words that bless and care for and heal those who are carrying the heavy end of the cross in their lives. The weight of sin is made up not only of those occasional vast blocks of granite, but also of mountains of sand, that inumerable and unimaginable number of microscopic rocks that defies our best calculus. A bag of sand is as heavy as a lump of granite – but easier accumulated, perhaps representing the sheer quantity of our lost opportunities to bear the weight of someone else’s struggle – and when that happens, says Jennings, Jesus is crucified again.

The Eternal Cross

He’ll blossom on the cross in three weeks now,

The saviour of the world will die again.

He is the flower upon a hurting bough,

The crown of thorns and nails will give him pain.

But the worst one is how

.

We go on daily wounding him and he,

Although he’s out of time, still feels the great

Dark of betrayal. He’s nailed on a tree

Each time we fail him. Suffering won’t abate

Until the liberty

.

This God-Man gave us is used only for

Kindness and gentleness. Our world is full

Of dying Christs – the starved, the sick, the poor.

God sleeps in cardboard boxes, has no meal.

We are his torturer

.

Each time we fail in generosity,

Abuse a child or will not give our love.

Christ lets us use our fatal liberty

Against himself. But now and then one move

Of selfless love sets free

.

The whole of mankind whom he saw at play

And work as he lay dying, when his side

Was pierced. That spear was how we fail to say

We love someone, but each time tears are dried

It’s Resurrection Day.

(Elizabeth Jennings, from An Easter Sequence)

Now those of you who know my theological preferences are well aware of my enthusiasm for P T Forsyth. No mean theologian, a precursor of Barth some fellow enthusiasts claim, and certainly someone whose theological legacy perdures like a rich quarry of high quality Aberdeen granite that carries long term promise of productivity. So it’s a comment on the theological perception and intellectual sure-footedness of Dora Greenwell that she and Forsyth collaborated on a book on prayer entitled, The Power of Prayer. Now don’t let the Victorian portrait fool you – you might think she’d look out of her depth at a quite good house group – but she’d wipe the floor with the lot of us if it came to serious theological engagement with the meaning of the Cross, the relations of human and divine suffering, and the mystery and reality of the provident purposes of God. In that short essay on ‘prayer as will’, she probes deeply into the truth of God’s will as it encounters human volition, and recognises that finally faith has to rest not in answers and certainty, but in a knowing trust in God revealed on the cross. One of her poems, for a long time a favourite in hymn-books, is an uncomplicated meditation on the trust-worthiness of God in Christ, no matter what.

I am not skilled to understand

I am not skilled to understand
What God hath willed, what God hath planned;
I only know at His right hand
Is One Who is my Saviour!

I take Him at His word indeed;
“Christ died for sinners”—this I read;
For in my heart I find a need
Of Him to be my Saviour!

That He should leave His place on high
And come for sinful man to die,
You count it strange? So once did I,
Before I knew my Saviour!

And oh, that He fulfilled may see
The travail of His soul in me,
And with His work contented be,
As I with my dear Saviour!

Yea, living, dying, let me bring
My strength, my solace from this Spring;
That He Who lives to be my King
Once died to be my Saviour!

Dorothy Sayers wrote some of the most accomplished detective stories in the genre. She wasn’t so much a crime-writer who could write well, she was an exceptionaly fine writer who wrote crime stories, plays for radio, and a translation of Dante still popular enough to remain in print half a century later. She was also a fine theologian whose slim essay on the vocational value of work, and whose The Mind of the Maker, and Creed or Chaos? are as lucid examples of accessible, thoughtful theology as you’re likely to pick up. I wish she’d written more theology – but some of her theological fingerprints are all over her poetry.

The following poem shows her characteristic sharpness of mind just held in check by an acknowledged deference before mystery – that word ‘perhaps’ at the end of the last line but three, is an unmistakeable giveaway. I confess I love and trust the God revealed in Christ crucified as the One who refuses by lightning to smite the world perfect.

The Choice of the Cross

Hard it is, very hard,

To travel up the slow and stony road

To Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better

To make but one resplendent miracle,

Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power

And with a sudden lightning smite the world perfect.

Yet this was not God’s way, Who had the power,

But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn,

The sorowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps,

That power destroys in passing, something supreme,

To whose great value in the eyes of God

That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.

Dorothy L Sayers, From ‘The Devil to Pay’.

Emily Dickinson was an enigmatic genius. Her poetry presents condensed thought, ideas triggered by allusive but precisely chosen and positioned words, often indicating the direction rather than the content of thought.

"Her poetry is ‘romantic’, that is derived from observations and meditations on phenomena of ‘nature’, but it is also metaphysical, making use of unusual and extended metaphors."

Quite – but such comments hide as much as they say. Reading Dickinson’s poems can be like encountering the astringent wisdom of the Desert Fathers, or the contemplative challenge of Zen teaching, but in the diamond-cut terminology of a 19th Century New England woman, who knew a bit about desert, solitude and the essential if elusive wisdom that resides in words and silence, when each is rightly used.

Metres of shelf space and gigabytes of word documents are devoted to secondary studies of commentary, criticism, context and much else about Dickinson. More important is the work of reading her – and allowing her poetry to do its own work. That work is best described by the word ‘deep’, used in a currently fashionable sense of "deep listening", "deep feeling", "deep understanding".

That I Did Always Love (No. 549)

That I did always love

I bring thee Proof

That till I loved

I never lived—Enough—

.

That I shall love alway—

I argue thee

That love is life—

And life hath Immortality—

.

This—dost thou doubt—Sweet—

Then have I

Nothing to show

But Calvary—

Holy Week is a good time to honour martyrs, those who bear witness to their faith by sacrificial living or by surendering life itself. Elisabeth Alden Scott Stam was raised by missionary parents in China in the early 20th Century. After missionary training at Moddy Bible Institute she married and returned to China. They had a daughter in 1934 and six months later, during the Chinese Civil war, she and her husband were executed by Chinese Communist soldiers. In the looted wreckage of their home, written on scraps of paper used to wrap around chinaware, a number of her poems were later found. They had been preserved by their faithful cook, disguised as mere wrappings.

The story of the deaths of John and Betty Stam is almost forgotten. The book The Triumph of John and Betty Stam written by Mrs Howard Taylor is now available here and there on Amazon, but like many classics of Christian faithful Christrian witness is now an almost forgotten genre. Some forms of post-modern and post-colonial theology have taught us to recognise the failings and consequences of the role of Christian missionary activity in Western imperial politics. Fair enough, and there is plenty to require a long repentance

But when all due consideration is given to this, it doesn’t in my view eclipse the significance of faithful Christian witness, the combination of compassion and courage shown by countless followers of Jesus who discovered in their own experience the cost  of sacrifice in their own personal passion story. So I honour this woman and her husband, who the morning she and her husband were beheaded, managed to hide her baby Helen in a rug, later smuggled to her grandparents; this woman who whatever the murky implications of national politics simply wanted to share her faith by the practice of kindness; this woman whose passion for God led to the personal passion of martyrdom. Accounts of their death seem embarrassed by terminology – ‘put to death’, ‘murdered’, ‘executed’ – each with its own connotations of the motives of those who killed them. More important was the motive that took them there in the first place – passion for God, the call to bear witness to the love of God in Jesus, a love for a people amongst whom they chose to live.

Here is one of the poems, used to wrap china – I note the irony of the image – china wrapped in the poetry of Christian devotion, China wrapped in the witness of devoted Christian living.

"Stand Still and See"

Exodus 14.13.

     "I’m standing Lord.

There is a mist that blinds my sight.

Steep jagged rocks, front, left, and right.

Lower, dim, gigantic, in the night.

     Where is the way?

.

     "I’m standing, Lord.

The black rock hems me in behind.

Above my head a moaning wind

Chills and oppresses heart and mind.

     I am afraid!

.

     "I’m standing, Lord.

The rock is hard beneath  my feet.

I nearly slipped, Lord, on the sleet.

So weary, Lord, and where a seat?

     Still must I stand?

.

He answered me, and on his face

A look inefffable of grace,

Of perfect understanding love,

Which all my murmuring did remove.

.

     "I’m standing, Lord.

Since Thou hast spoken, Lord, I see

Thou hast beset; these rocks are Thee;

And since thy love encloses me,

     I stand and sing!"

The epitaph on her gravestone reads, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain". When we’ve learned what we must learn from the mistakes and wrongs of history, It’s no part of post-colonial hermeneutics to minimise the sacrifice and integrity of such remarkable witnesses, who in following after Jesus, entered their own Passion story.

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. 

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.

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.

Came across this prayer in David Runcorn’s book, Spirituality Workshop (London: SPCK, 2006). The sanctification of tedium, and the consecration of the ordinary, and the acceptance of times of boredom, are each part of what makes time and circumstance important media for our experience of God. The prayer is on page 149.

Creator God

Whose gift of life is found as much in tedium as in glory,

teach us to be faithful in the most ordinary tasks of life,

and to consecrate our bordeom to your service

lest in mistaking dullness for your absence, we lose heart

and in confusing excitement for your presence, we lose faith.

For the glory of your name

in all the world

Amen

Anger, pity, always, most, forgive.

It is the language we surrender by.

It is the language where we have to live… (Elizabeth Jennings).

Today’s world, contemporary culture, current social realities – whatever collective abstract nouns we use to describe where and when we live, one feature of it that increasingly troubles me is an unforgiving spirit that extends from personal, to social, to international and even global relationships. The words of Elizabeth Jennings are spiritually wise, but they are also politically necessary. Events in Pakistan and Kenya are merely the latest occasions for simmering hatred and repressed suspicions to erupt in violence and legitimised retaliation. Reading  Christopher Wood’s tome, Victorian Painting the other night, and turning over in my mind a definition of forgiveness written years ago, in the Apostle Paul’s Elizabethan English, "I am persuaded….". I am persuaded that forgiveness is the language where we have to live. And retaliation, recrimination, litigation, compensation, satisfaction, strict justice, confrontation, payback, is the language where usually something, or worse someone, has to die.

So. A second generation pre-Raphaelite artist, whose piety was inspired and formed by the example of John Henry Newman, and whose religious imagination conceived some of the most telling works of religious art; and a mid-20th Century Secretary General of the United Nations whose personal diary reveals the sacrificial nature of Christian commitment and who died in circumstances still unexplained. Two men from different centuries, one from England and one from Denmark, one a Victorian artist the other a political diplomat, one who trusted imagination as the way to truth, the other insisting on the world of real human affairs as the place where truth is to be lived. But two men of such integrity that their different ways of embodying the truth that commanded their conscience, became for them another art form expressed in the ultimate human art medium – human life portrayed with accuracy and beauty through the demanding artistic discipline of vocational obedience to Christ. Both were skilled in the language of forgiveness, ‘the language we surrender by. The language where we have to live’.

Burne-Jones’ painting, The Merciful Knight represents the Victorian fascination with medieval chivalry and honour. But what is portrayed in the picture is the subversion of the knight’s code of honour by a higher call. The kneeling knight has earlier forgiven another for the murder of his kinsman. He has stopped at a wayside shrine to pray, and finds himself embraced by the wooden crucified Jesus whose hands are unpinned in order to reach out to the one who is forgiven as he forgave. The helmet is removed revealing the face of the knight as he faces the crucified Christ and is fully and deeply known. The sword is laid down, on the left hand side, the hilt not easily accessible to his right hand. The symbols of power and worldly status are thus surrendered, at the feet of Christ crucified. In a reversal of Jesus prayer for his crucifiers who were oblivious of the eternal consequences of a routine execution, the painting shows that same eternal love reaching out, without the protection of armour, from an instrument of inhuman cruelty to affirm, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

Interestingly, and just perhaps intentionally, The Merciful Knight is an alternative portrayal of atonement, in which the medieval code of offended honour requiring satisfaction, is subverted by a Knight who forgoes the cultural norm of satisfied honour and in an act of counter-cultural foolishness, forgives the offender. And it is this unreasonable, indeed unchivalrous act of mercy which brings him into the embrace of the Crucified God, as his individual act of forgiveness is drawn into the redemptive suffering of Christ.

Dag Hammarskjold’s slim volume Markings, is one of the 20th Century’s most intriguing spiritual documents. Notes, quotes, thoughts, prayers, complaints, jotted in a diary found only after his death, revealed a man whose interior world was profoundly influential in how he construed the world of political action. It was in this lean and spare volume of political spirituality and personal longing that I first encountered Hammarskjold’s childlike definition of forgiveness. Childlike isn’t the same as juvenile or reductionist. The word is used in the ‘Except you become as little children’ sense of what the kingdom of God is about. "Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle, by which what is broken is again made whole, and what is soiled is again made clean." The most childlike wish when faced with the harsh reality of the broken favourite toy, is that it be made like new, made whole as if the brokenness hadn’t happened. And when newness is soiled, or beauty spoilt, the same childlike longing is for someone to make it clean. The decisive word is ‘again’, because what is described is renewal, restoration, a process of healing and repair that is costly but enduring.

One of the most cited lines from Markings asserts, ‘In our era the road to holiness necessarily runs through the world of action’. Hammarskjold knew, as our own age must rediscover, that forgiveness is more an activity than an emotional stance, a making whole and a making clean by acting mercifully and as peacemaker. Burne Jones spent much of his creative energy painting themes and images which celebrated a world where ‘beauty is beautiful’ and where the highest norm is not displayed by personal honour defended by shedding blood. On the contrary, The Merciful Knight, is one who in the world of necessity and action, enacts forgiveness, is embraced by the crucified Christ, and speaks the language where, if our own world is to have a future, we have to live.

Worship

is a way of seeing the world

in the light of God.

.

Prayer may not save us

but prayer makes us worth saving.

.

There is a task, a law and a way;

the task is redemption,

the law to do justice and to love mercy,

and the way is the secret of being human and holy.

.

The wisdom of Heschel…nudged by his thoughts prayer seems less of a chore, and becomes again a viewpoint of the soul. Students sometimes become impatient with our urging them towards theological reflection. No mere academic exercise, but ‘a way of seeing the world in the light of God’. Hard to think of anything more indispensable for responsible, responsive ministry. And ministry too has its task, its law and its way – redemption, justice and mercy, holy humanity. Heschel is a forceful if gentle reminder of the deep Jewish roots out of which Christian spirituality has grown – and away from which it must not grow.

Prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore. We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of texts. Where is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil? Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.

Heschel understood as few others have, that when deep calls unto deep, words are not only irrelevant, but their utterance can seem irreverent. In a culture battered into submisssion by torrential verbiage, I am looking for writing that values the holiness and humility that gives human longing its trajectory towards eternity. So I find Heschel’s description of prayer hints at the ineffable mystery and compelling attractiveness of God.

When I read a paragraph like that quoted above, I long to be that ‘tree, seeking to utter fully the passion of the soil’. And that ‘incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible’ points to the deepest desires of which, if mine is any to go by, the human heart is capable. Sometimes I am embarrassed by the superficiality, pragmatism and functionalism that turns prayer from such wondering adoration into a pious exercise akin to retail therapy. In the way that matters most, Heschel’s writing does my heart good.