Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

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Mortal Flesh

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six wingèd seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!

Ever since R E O White, previous Principal of the Scottish Baptist College, mentor, friend and occasionally ascerbic critic, brought a lecture alive with these last lines of Browning’s Paracelsus, they have expressed for me that defiant hopefulness that is part of faith when it is at its most desperate.

Advent is coming – arise shine, your light has come…

O come, O come Emmanuel….., – God with us. The presence that pierces the gloom – that is what Browning means in these lines which fully recognise that the danger and the darkness are real, but yet know, that in that place where knowing matters most, what is really real is the light of God, as it shines in Christ, and the darkness cannot comprehend it, or overcome it.

If I stoop

Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,

It is but for a time;

I press God’s lamp

Close to my breast;

Its splendour soon or late

Will pierce the gloom;

I shall emerge one day.

Robert Browning, Paracelsus

Was privileged to lead worship and preach at Hillhead Baptist Church, and to consider the hopeful imagination of  Isaiah 25.1-9. There were several beautiful if poignant moments – the thoughtful, compassionate and challenging five minute multi-media presentation by the Bible Class; music that included the trumpet and the violin accompanying important words from hymns old and new. And near the end a prayer for ourselves, for the Church and for the world, that we might learn the words of the song that will silence the song of the ruthless.

Lord lead us in the ways of peace –

make us witnesses of reconciliation –

give us a holy impatience with short cuts and political expediencies.

And yes, give us courage to question assumptions

that conflict is inevitable in a globalised, polarised and destabilised world.

Help us to see all those structures of violent power,

of oppressive ideas, of instilled hostility,

as part of that great song of the ruthless,

and help us to silence it –

by persistent, patient actions of peace,

by resilient, responsive acts of reconciliation,

by gentle, gracious words of goodness

by faith-filled, faithful prayers of friendship

by holy, hopeful gestures of  healing,

So may the song of the ruthless be silenced,

by the song of the redeemed.

O Tree of Calvary,

send thy roots deep down

into my heart.

Gather together the soil of my heart,

the sands of my fickleness,

the stones of my stubbornness,

the mud of my desires,

bind them all together.

O Tree of calvary,

interlace them with thy strong roots,

entwine them with the network

of thy love.

Chandran Devanesen.

The Lord’s Prayer

‘Give us this day.’ Give us this day and night.

Give us the bread, the sky. Give us the power

To bend and not be broken by your light.

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And let us soothe and sway like the new flower

Which closes, opens to the night, the day,

Which stretches up and rides upon a power

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More than its own, whose freedom is the play

Of light, for whom the earth and air are bread.

Give us the shorter night, the longer day.

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In thirty years so many words were spread,

and miracles. An undefeated death

Has passed as Easter passed, but those words said

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Finger our doubt and run along our breath.

Elizabeth Jennings.

This is a poem about prayer – you can ask what it ‘means’, but that would be to miss the struggle for faith that for Elizabeth Jennings is more important than unquestioning certainty. When I read this poem, recalling us to words long familiar, ‘give us this day’, I come to that second last line with its haunting phrase ‘but those words said’, and my own faith is again rooted. And rooted not in what I feel, but in what He said, He who went through that ‘undefeated death’, and whose words now touch my doubt and uncertainty, and whose words are formed by my own speaking, ‘Give us this day’.

And stanzas 2 and 3 use the image of the flower that Jesus also used, the lilies of the field, whose dress sense makes a greater fashion statement than Solomon for all his designer robes. This is a poem about trust and uncertainty, words crafted to the shape of our longing. The Lord’s Prayer gives us the words to ask for what we need to be given; the Lord gives the gift of asking the gifts we need. The Word makes articulate our words, prays our prayer, in us and for us.

This morning I had an unintended scary moment. Evangelical spirituality was once defined as early rising, prayer and Bible reading. Most mornings I am guilty of all three. And this morning, having risen early, I glimpsed rapid movement across the carpet. A ginormous spider, disturbed in its nocturnal perambulations, was using its over an inch long legs (eight of them) to motor towards whatever hole was home. It didn’t make it. My pencil jar became its temporary prison, till the rest of the house was up and I released it into the less comfy temperatures of our front drive – where it can take its chances, which are likely to be better than if someone else in our house had spotted his incursion.

Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’ is a thoughtful and positive piece of PR for misunderstood and persecuted spiders.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

I like the wistfulness, and playful seriousness of Whitman’s poetry.

‘The Church at Auvers’ is one of my favourite paintings. Van Gogh’s church paintings inspired Elizabeth Jennings poem about the complexity and mystery of prayer.

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The Nature of Prayer

A debt to Van Gogh’s ‘Crooked Church’

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Maybe a mad fit made you set it there

Askew, bent to the wind, the blue print gone

Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer

We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,

Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?

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Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes,

Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell

For long among such loftiness. Our homes

Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell

Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.

Elizabeth Jennings.

Coming into Oxford on the park and ride a fortnight ago I noticed a small street of red bricked houses on the outskirts called Elizabeth Jennings Way. The poet Elizabeth Jennings died a few years ago and is one of several women poets whose work I’ve particularly enjoyed. I rememebr encountering her for the first time in The Tablet, with an advent poem.

Her poems are humane but unflinching in their awareness of all those experiences which give our humanity its rich textured feel – love gained and lost, vitality and mortality and our consciousness of each, art as human language transcending words, suffering as diminishing, frightening and the last thing any person should glamourise with over-inflated claims of its spiritual value, fighting, hurting and forgiving. And because humans are finite with inarticulate longings she explores the ordinariness of human existence against the backdrop of infinity, eternity, but with no cheaply bought settled certainty, more with a faith that’s learned to live with frustration, ambiguity, provisionality.

Many a time reading her poetry I have been aware that this poem, or that poem, captures in 14 lines (she is a tireless player-around with the sonnet) the connection between particular human experiences and specific Christian doctrines. When all the philosophical and moral theologians have had their say about original sin, whether children are born with a propensity to sin, or are environmentally, genetically, behaviourally determined, or are free until their responsible conscious choices can be given moral significance; when the theologians think they have it sussed, Jennings’ poem ‘Warning to Parents’ upsets the tidy theological game being played with the surprise finality of a cat jumping on a chess board.

Again, whether reading Gregory Jones’ remarkable book Embodying Forgiveness, or weighing the truth laden words of Miroslav Volf who knows a few things himself about forgiveness and human evil and the Gospel, I find that this woman sees with unnerving clarity, the necessity for forgiveness, the apparent impossibility of such a thing, but yet the life-saving quality of the language that both says, ‘You are forgiven’, and asks, ‘Forgive me’ – and thus turns enmity to friendship, hostility to love.

Another sublime poet, identified the immensity and mystery of sin and love, and the agonsing tension they create in the heart of God. George Herbert’s ‘The Agony’ in its first verse states that tension:

    Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walked with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:

    But there are two vast spacious things,

the which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and love.

Amongst those who have made the attempt to ‘sound them’, is Elizabeth Jennings. In her best poems she explores the mental, emotional and spiritual turmoil of what it means to be a human being capable of sin, and love.  Next couple of weeks I’d like to post a few of her poems, in memory of the woman who put Elizabeth Jennings Way on the map.

Peace at any personal price: A Personal Prayer, offered today in Worship.

Lord God, Creator of  this world, its beauty, diversity and fertility. You made us human beings in your image, and you made us stewards of your Creation, to act creatively, responsibly, on the side of life.

We pray for those places in our world where human behaviour is not on the side of life, where the resources and provision of your creation, are not used creatively, but with destructive greed, where those with power do not act responsibly, and instead act with cruelty and inhumanity.

We pray for Darfur, and the continuing crisis for millions of refugees, lacking water, food, sanitation and safety. We pray for Zimbabwe, and for those who live under an oppressive, unjust and self-serving regime: the poor, the hungry, the sick, the dying.

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We pray for Iraq and Afghanistan, and the millions of those embroiled, day after day, in death dealing violence, and the cycles of hate. We pray for those who work to bring a secure power base yet we recognise the decades of peacemaking that will be needed. We pray for the millions of young Muslim people, born and growing up in an ethos of lethal hostility, that they will not think followers of Jesus to be lovers of violence.

Darfur, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan.

God of hope, God of righteousness and justice, we hardly know for what to pray, except for hope, for justice, for righteousness to be done. But we worship and serve the Prince of peace, and we follow the one of whom it was promised, ‘the government shall be upon his shoulders’.

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So help us, as your church, as ordinary people yet children of God, to bear witness to our faith in Jesus Christ; to do so in ways that act out peacemaking; to inhabit the ways of reconciliation and just practices;to speak outspokenly, to protest, to not ignore, to not shoulder shrug helplessly, to not think a broken world is someone else’s problem.

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Lord make our praying and our living one. Help us to live the faith we sing and preach and believe. Give us courage to lift up hands in holy prayer as a protest against, as a subversion of, the status quo. For we follow a Lord who challenged the status quo and was crucified. We believe in a Lord whose resurrection created a new status quo, communities called to be the people of God, the God of peace, hope, love and justice,

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Darfur, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Lord when we hear the names of these nations, forgive our resignation to evil we think we cannot change. By your Spirit, anointing and indwelling us, propelling and energising us, make us outspoken ministers of reconciliation. Call us to be peacemakers and therefore children of God. And help us to believe that, one way or another, your promise will come true; the promise of a river of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb,and on each side the tree of life, and the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations.

Lord heal this broken world, for you are the Lord who heals;

Bring peace to earth, for you are the Prince of peace;

Lord reconcile those who hate, for you are the God of love,

Through Jesus Christ, in whom your love is revealed,

By whom peace is given, and through whom our wounds are healed., Amen

  There is a passionate integrity in the lyrics of this album. Carrie Newcomer’s writing is human, humane and humanising – passionate love, reverence for the mystery of human joy and longing, controlled but targeted questioning of the way things are, unembarrassed use of words like tenderness, try to be kind, no shame in asking for help, the importance of our true name, and as she admits – love is too hard to figure. I’ve found myself listening to the lyrics and sensing in myself an answering inquisitiveness about what matters – the relaxed almost conversational singing, the gently interrogative mood of several of these songs, the affirmation of life’s limitations and the need to accept that mistakes, regrets and loss are balanced by possibility of joy, undeserved gift of love and an experienced eye for what is hopeful and worth striving for. I’ve chosen a song as an example of what makes her lyrics(and her performance of them), human, humane and humanising – it’s about our struggle to know and love who we are, and how that’s connected to who loves us.

My true name

Let me call you darlin’, maybe call you sweetheart
Don’t you hate it when they call you Louise
But isn’t it scary, when they want to call you Mary
A whore, or a saint, or a tease.
But you came here in summer, you’d been living in Manhattan
You caught me wide eyed and half sane
But you saw to my center past every imposter
And you whispered My True Name

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I have been Betty, Eleanor and Rosie
I’ve been the shamed Magdaline
And if the truth be known I’ve attempted Saint Joan
Donna, and Sarah, and Jane
For we all have our heros and we all have tormentors
and we’ll play them again and again
But you saw to my center, past every imposter
And you whispered My True Name
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And if you see me standing on the banks of Lake Griffy
Throwing white bits of paper to the wind
I’m just throwing the shards, of all my calling cards
And I’m speaking My True Name
I’m just throwing the shards, of all my calling cards
And I’m whispering My True Name.

Identity depends on being recognised, on the perception of others as well as that inner awareness of who we are and who speaks our name. I have little difficulty theologising this song – but only after I’ve heard its human longing for recognition from the other, ….and from the Other.