Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

At this time of year, for an hour in the early morning, the sun streams into my study onto the computer screen. Why pull the blind, or move the screen – instead I move myself into the window chair, and sit reading in the sunlight. It reminds me of this beautiful poem by a favourite poet, whose love of the world, and whose attentiveness to its nature as gift, reminds me of the liturgical ecology of the ancient Psalmists.

The Sun

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful

_

than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats towards the horizon

_

and into the cloud or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone—

and how it slides again

_

out of the blackness,

every morning,

on the other side of the world,

like a red flower

_

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

say, on a morning in early summer,

at its perfect imperial distance—

and have you ever felt for anything

_

such wild love—

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure

_

that fills you

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you

_

as you stand there

empty-handed—

or have you too

turned from the world—

_

or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things?

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1, pages 50-51.

One of my favourite poets is Elizabeth Jennings. Her poetry reflects and refracts the truths and questions of her Catholic faith. It wouldn’t be true to say she wrote Christian poetry – she wrote poetry, as a Christian. "Her vocation  is praise, as a lover praises the things made, the makers and the Maker."

One of my favourite paintings is the Starry Night by Van Gogh – I also like Don Maclean’s rendering of the song! I’m not a stargazer, but I am fascinated, awed, and moved in my spirit by the images of the Hubble telescope. Here is one of Jennings poems, written long before those Hubble images came to us. In it "the lover praises the things made,the makers and the Maker."

Delay

The radiance of that star that leans on me

Was shining years ago. The light that now

Glitters up there my eye may never see,

And so the time lag teases me with how

.

Love that loves now may not reach me until

Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse

Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful

And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

.

The wistfulness and the sense of our transience, the longing and the surrender of possessiveness, the mystery, the gift and the maybe of love, are all expressed in the fact that what we now see as light shone light years away and aeons ago – but we still see it. Whatever else love is – it isn’t one of life’s disposable options – it can come to us from a universe away, and so must be cherished. On which enigmatic thought I go to bed thinking of that Love that shines from eternity and arrives here, to find us.

Maggi Dawn quotes part of the prayer of Sir Francis Drake. I like the word disturb even if I usually resent the experience – but now and again, and more often than not, we all need the experience of being disturbed.

I want to be attracted more to risk than safety, to prefer trust to certainty, to question reality with a little dreaming – and yes, to see if when push comes to shove, I talk a better faith than I live – or live a better faith than I talk. Pentecost is getting nearer – and amongst the ministries of the Holy Spirit is the power to disturb. The great liturgical invocation, "Veni Sanctus Spiritus", is not a prayer for protective peace but for faith to take risks! With aplogies to Latin purists, it could be re-written with one added word

"Veni Spiritus Sanctus, Disturbus!

Remove from our souls – complacency – predictability – routine – defensiveness – laziness – ennui – comfort – familiarity – mediocrity – the whole lexicon of undisturbed tedium, from apathy to zonkedness." (by the way this word is in MY lexicon, cos I couldn’t think of another).

So the prayer of Sir Francis (not St Francis – whose prayer is also disturbing but in a different way) is one I want to pray for my own life and its next stages, for the faith community to which I belong (Scottish Baptists), and for the Church in our country. Not moribund peace but creative hassle; not the shoreline but the open sea; not the safe strategies of sensible safe religious behaviour, but the disturbing turbulence of following in the slipstream of the Spirit. Do I really mean this – well I’m praying it anyway, in the words of the world’s first circumnavigator, and if God answers it, God help me and us – as He has promised to do!

Disturb us, Lord,
when we are too well pleased with ourselves;
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;
When we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly –
to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery;
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

Other than this poem about Easter, I don’t know much else of John Updike’s poetry – and I haven’t read his novels either. This poem came onto my horizon a year or two ago and I was immediately attracted by its robust impatience with any softening of the scandal of the resurrection. The poem proceeds on the assumption that Paul wan’t kidding – if Christ hasn’t been raised the church is wasting its time, and is largely a waste of space in an already crowded world.

To read this poem, alongside 1 Corinthians 15, and after reading one of the Gospel resurrection narratives, is an exercise in theological clarity and historical particularity. Christ is risen – was dead and is alive – death is defeated – graves are robbed by grace – if Christ be not risen we are of all people the most miserable. But He is risen – risen indeed – so today is a day of rejoicing and feasting, of loving and hoping, of celebrating life and affirming the persistent creativity and plenitude of God’s love – nowhere more evident than in the incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and living eternal reality of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

John Updike (1932)

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Denise Levertov was one of America’s finest 20th Century poets. A political activist, outspoken and passionately opposed to the Vietnam war, her poems are life affirming and persistent in hopefulness. In 1984 she converted to Christianity – so the poem below is an interesting indicator of her mind and spirit in pilgrimage, travelling hopefully.

.

Many of her later poems use explicitly Christian metaphors and images – but this one captures for me the hopefulness of hope, the trustfulness of faith, and the absolute fragility of a human life exposed to all the possibilities of brokenness. On Holy Saturday, that dark mystery when nothing was happening, the time of fearful waiting before that First Resurrection morning, this brief poem celebrates the nature of hope as propagated by telling and sharing – the body of the crucified Jesus, ‘unlikely source, clumsy and earth covered of grace’.

“For the New Year,1981”

Denise Levertov (1923-1997).

I have a small grain of hope

one small crystal that gleams

clear colors out of transparency.

.

I need more.

I break off a fragment

to send you.

.

Please take

this grain of a grain of hope

so that mine won’t shrink.

.

Please share your fragment

so that yours will grow.

.

Only so, by division,

will hope increase,

.

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower

unless you distribute

the clustered roots, unlikely source

clumsy and earth-covered

of grace.

Around the time Moltmann’s The Crucified God was published, a slim book of pastoral and constructive theology was published, with the telling title, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Some of Moltmann’s finest insights into the love of God were anticipated in this slim volume. Canon William Hubert Vanstone (whose contribution to church economic theory was to sell the vicarage furniture to pay for the repair of the church roof!) wrote of his ministry in a commuter estate in the sixties and seventies, and of his search for a theology that would sustain the church in its mission, and himself in his vocation. I’ve read this book several times through, and countless times revisited some of its finest passages. I’ll blog on this book later, but on Good Friday I again turn to Vanstone’s book, and the hymn with which it concludes. He speaks of the precariousness of love, and insists love can have no guaranteed outcome, and that the love of God is expressed precisely in this risk-filled vulnerability of self-giving – the cross is Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense.

“Morning glory, starlit sky”

W H Vanstone (1923-1999)

1. Morning glory, starlit sky,

soaring music, scholar’s truth,

flight of swallows, autumn leaves,

memory’s treasure, grace of youth:

.

2. Open are the gifts of God,

gifts of love to mind and sense;

hidden is love’s agony,

love’s endeavor, love’s expense.

.

3. Love that gives, gives ever more,

gives with zeal, with eager hands,

spares not, keeps not, all outpours,

ventures all its all expends.

.

4. Drained is love in making full,

bound in setting others free,

poor in making many rich,

weak in giving power to be.

.

5. Therefore he who shows us God

helpless hangs upon the tree;

and the nails and crown of thorns

tell of what God’s love must be.

.

6. Here is God: no monarch he,

throned in easy state to reign;

here is God, whose arms of love

aching, spent, the world sustain.

Brian Wren’s hymns are amongst the freshest, at times the most provocative, of contemporary offerings. His book What language Shall I Borrow, sets the benchmark for deconstructing the masculine, power-based language of many traditional hymns. Wren would not subscribe to any theory of the feminisation of the church, simply because the church in its classic traditions continues to marginalise women. The church has achieved this, Wren argues, by cultural default and deliberate intent, by using language of power shaped by male oriented images, and many of these borrowed uncritically from earlier patriarchal societies – though Wren has no illusions about the patriarchal nature of much contemporary church life and assumptions. As a result, historically the church has largely been theologically resistant to a biblically informed revision of imagery and metaphor, which would provide a more balanced approach to human gender as a theological implicate of the imago dei. Wren’s academic study was on the poetry of the Hebrew prophets – he knows about poetry, images and their theological payload.

…

The hymn below is one of my favourite expressions of worship that takes Jesus seriously as the One who reveals God, and that takes just as seriously human failing, guilt and aspiration to recover the sense of being reconciled through love to the living, loving God. The penultimate verse is made for Maundy Thursday, but the whole hymn is replete with Easter themes. Sung to the tune of the Sussex Carol it combines resurrection confidence with the costly work of Good Friday.

“Love is making all things new”

Great God, your love has called us here

as we, by love, for love were made.

Your living likeness still we bear,

though marred, dishonored, disobeyed.

We come, with all our heart and mind,

your call to hear, your love to find.

...

We come with self-inflicted pains

of broken trust and chosen wrong;

half-free, half-bound by inner chains;

by social forces swept along,

by powers and systems close confined;

yet seeking hope for humankind.

...

Great God, in Christ you call our name

and then receive us as your own

not through some merit, right, or claim,

but by your gracious love alone.

We strain to glimpse your mercy seat

and find you kneeling at our feet.

...

Then take the towel, and break the bread,

and humble us, and call us friends.

Suffer and serve till all are fed,

and show how grandly love intends

to work till all creation sings,

to fill all worlds, to crown all things.

...

Great God, in Christ you set us free,

your life to live, your joy to share.

Give us your Spirit's liberty

to turn from guilt and dull despair

and offer all that faith can do

while love is making all things new.

Today is my day for blogging at hopeful imagination. The poem is one of my recent discoveries – and its story shows why still, hopeful imagination is a necessary Christian virtue in a dangerous world.

Yesterday and the day before I cleaned the lock-block drive with a power hose and got into a mucky mess. There’s something therapeutic about removing 6 years grime, moss and the detritus of car tyres and bird offerings – clean stone is so, well, ….clean. Next therapy is painting the white roughcast of the house – more symbolic acts of whiter than snow, cleaner than clean; then as my contribution to restoring order on a disordered creation, I’ll include re-shaping the 25 foot trees at the front of the house. If all that is accomplished it will feel like I’ve been on holiday, huh?

Mary Oliver writes in A Poetry Handbook, one of the finest justifications I know for writing, reading and cherishing poetry.

"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision, a faith, to use an old fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."

Fires for the cold, ropes for the lost, bread for the hungry – good metaphors for a sermon at its best too.

Oliver is one of the most attentive nature poets, discovering in the world around, meaning that reflects back on human life – in this poem, ‘the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation’, is a line which, with what follows, takes me deeper into the meaning of Holy Week.

“In Blackwater Woods”

By Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Few of Emily Dickinson’s poems give up their meaning on a first reading. The enigmatic complexity of her interior life is often expressed in verses – even phrases- that simply can’t be opened like a packet of crisps and their contents scoffed.

The fast food – junk food metaphor is deliberately crass, and should act as a warning to the age that values the sound-byte as a literary achievement, and a culture that idolises public success and equates it with celebrity.

Throughout a life dedicated to solitude and celibacy Dickinson explored the frontiers of belief, its great affirmations and its great uncertainties.

On Monday of Holy Week, reading this poem, I like the long view that looks through crucifixion to resurrection, without flinching at either.

Poem112.

"Success is counted sweetest”

by Emily Dickinson.

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires a sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated — dying —
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!