Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

G. K. Chesterton’s poem requires little imagination and some humour – but the donkey’s perspective on human behaviour carries rhetorical force because the dumb donkey speaks the foolishness of the human actors in the passion story.

“The Donkey”

by: G.K. Chesterton

WHEN fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

Then surely I was born;

 

With monstrous head and sickening cry

And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

On all four-footed things.

 

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

I keep my secret still.

 

Fools! For I also had my hour;

One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

And palms before my feet.

Did Karl Barth know this poem by the time he spoke the words Graeme quoted, from his 80th birthday party speech?

“If I have done anything in this life of mine, I have done it as a relative of the donkey that went its way carrying an important burden. The disciples had to say to its owner: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ And so it seems to have pleased God to have used me at this time, just as I was, in spite of all the things, the disagreeable things, that quite rightly are and will be said about me. Thus I was used. I just happened to be on the spot. A theology somewhat different from the current theology was apparently needed in our time, and I was permitted to be the donkey that carried this better theology for part of the way, or tried to carry it as best I could.”

Starting Palm Sunday I am going to post a poem a day for Holy Week. Apart from an introductory sentence or two, the poems are allowed to speak for themselves. My own response to Easter is always enriched by the careful shaping and disciplined arranging of words and images that trigger surprise, subvert assumptions, and encourage theological imagination. Several poets have enriched and extended the range of my own imagination and sense of theological adventure.

Few can chisel words more sharply and fit them more precisely than George Herbert, and at the same time achieve such an exact balance between emotion and intellect, intimacy and distance, trustfulness and truth.

When it comes to alert critique of a world whose pain is mirrored in the cross, Denise Levertov articulates essential protest at such wounds as Vietnam, El Salvador and the various political cynicisms of her own times. Joan baez without the guitar.

Emily Dickinson’s is a poet of the inner life, virtually a hermit all her adult life, but a militant soul for whom truth is to be told with rhetorical force – ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ – because the truth is ‘superb surprise’.

R S Thomas is the poet who for me, best captures the interrogative mood of hearts that recognise the mystery and tragedy of life, and the doubting faith and angry questions hurled at God speak of a trust at times more secure than a less questioning acquiescence.

Several hymn-writers, from Charles Wesley to Brian Wren, create the kind of poetry that can be sung by those gathered together for worship – that essential fusion of singability, grown-up language that doesn’t try to bypass the mind, and words at the service of our experience of God, both articulating and at times replicating that experience – ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee’ –

I sing that and I’m already on my feet hurrying after Christ!

Some of these are going to be represented in this week’s posts, some not. We all are likely to have our preferred ways of coming at the truth of Holy Week. I hope some of these poets enrich and extend your own theological imagination as we move towards Easter Sunday.

Before yesterday I didn’t know Paul Bennet. Unaware of the quiet, effective ministry of a man determined to push the church into the community, and to be himself a sign of love as availability and vulnerability. For reasons yet unknown, he was stabbed to death.

Explanations and recriminations don’t help much – from his wife who held him as he died, to his chidren who mourn his death and the manner of it, to his congregation who clearly loved him, and from the small town of Trecynon in South Wales, to all of us who now hear what happened, the ripples extend outward. Acts of violence do that – their impact is not contained, the consequences ripple out, and the killing of a human being diminishes us all.

Dear Lord and Father of mankind

Forgive our foolish ways.

Reclothe us in our rightful mind

In purer love thy service find

In deeper reverence praise.

Lord have mercy!

Christ have mercy!

Lord have mercy!

HOW SHALL WE DEFEAT THE ENEMY?

How shall we defeat The Enemy>

We shall defeat The Enemy by making alliances.

Who shall we make alliances with?

With people in whose interests it is to be enemies with The Enemy.

How shall we win an alliance with these people?

We shall win an alliance with these people by giving them money and arms.

And after that?

They will help us defeat The Enemy.

Has The Enemy got money and arms?

Yes.

How did The Enemy get money and arms?

He was once someone in whose interests it was, to be enemies with our enemy.

Which enemy was this?

Someone in whose interests it had once been, to be enemies of an enemy.

Michael Rosen, 2001. (Writer of Chidren’s Poetry)

The logic is impeccable – it is the opaque logic of self-interest, of fluid loyalties and cynical alliances. The depersonalised abstraction dominating the consciousness, throughout the poem, is ‘The Enemy’. And ‘The Enemy’ is identified with upper case, definite article, certainty and finality. No possibility that we are mistaken then, no recognition that there might be another possibility – of reconciliation, of peace, of friendship.

So this poem with ironic wit and relentless rationality exposes the closed mind that hardens hate into a categorical imperative. Few terms are more depersonalising than that two word abstraction, ‘The Enemy’. It’s when we depersonalise human beings, that we move into the realm of the morally, politically, pragmatically justifiable attack.

Now as a Christ follower I happen to believe that my enemies are important people. So important that Jesus used personal pronouns when he spoke about them – he never objectified people as ”The Enemy’. They are people, like me, subjects capable of response, human beings with the same possibilities of change as me, and even if they don’t or won’t cease being my enemy, they are still not a disposable abstraction called ‘The Enemy’. So Jesus makes enmity personal, and in some of his most demanding yet grace-filled words, he rehumanises enmity and helps us recover our perspective, the human perspective originating from the divine perspective! And he does so by using the personal pronoun, second person, possessive – your enemy belongs to you, and is therefore your responsibility. How scary is that?

Matt 5.44, But I say to you, love your enemies…..

Luke 6.35, Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you….

Rom.12.20 If your enemy is hungry feed him….. (Paul echoing the words of Jesus?)

Prayer

Lord may I recognise in my enemies,

your image,

their humanity,

my unknown friend.

Forgive all dehumanising abstractions,

that reduce personal humanity to impersonal hostility.

Forgive the willed blindness to the truth of ‘the other’;

open my eyes

to see their face

open my mouth

in the saying of their name,

open my arms

in welcome to their presence,

open my heart

in honouring their humanity.

In the name of Jesus the Lord

Who died rather than kill his enemies,

Amen.

Went to a service on Sunday night to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley. All the music was Wesleyan – and the organist had just gained his M.Phil on the theology of James Denney. A night of sound theology and responsible hymn singing guaranteed!

Several observations though:-

"And can it be" should never, ever, be sung to any other tune than Sagina. The confluence of evangelical theology at its most attractive and musical dynamic at its most singable should be declared sacrosanct.

"O Thou who camest from above" remains one of the finest hymns in our langauge. The clearly expressed longing and aspiration of the human heart open to the coming of the Holy Spirit is simply sublime.

"Lo he comes with clouds descending" is an awe-full hymn. Heavy theology informs sombre reflection on the end times – but the hymn is redolent of transcendent glory and coming majesty. Sung by a full church supported by a 60 voice choir – this was hair raising praise – even for bald worshippers such as me!

This all took place in Aberdeen Methodist Church, within sight of Wesley’s chair, gifted to the Society in Aberdeen because it was a gift from someone in Huntly and he had no room in his coach to take it south. Ive sat on it, and while not being too enthusiastic about evangelical relics, this was different!

Later this year I am going to blog on Wesley’s hymns – and why it will be liturgically unacceptable, spiritually diminishing, theologically impoverishing, and pastorally irresponsible to lose such hymns through the default mechanism of what C S Lewis called chronological snobbery. Few hymn writers come close to articulating the Evangelical experience with more precision and passion, than Charles Wesley at his best.

For about a month I’ve made my way through Eliot’s Four Quartets using Howard’s slim commentary, Dove Descending, as a guide. And Howard is a good guide – not too talkative, not prepared to explain ad nauseam as if you had no eyes of your own, but well informed, not pushing you along too quickly, and clearly in love with his subject.

I have seldom read a poem more historically specific in its imagery, (the first half of the 20th century). And yet there is in its power and subtlety, unflinching realism about human experience of precious life and inevitable death, penetrating truthfulness about fear and hope, anxiety and aspiration, time and eternity, an unnerving contemporary feel. It isn’t easy poetry – apart from the intellectual artfulness, the technical construction, the precision of language and subversion of form – it is the emotional and spiritual interrogation that takes place when the four poems are read in 2007. These quintessentially modern poems, accurately and specifically, diagnose the symptoms and trace the complexities of the post-modern worldview as it impacts on human existence. And Eliot does so profoundly informed by Christian tradition.

Time and timelessness, the centrality but elusiveness of human experience, the loss of the metaphysical structures of thought, the "chronological snobbishness" that thinks newest is truest and the accompanying suspicion of meta-narratives; these are some of Eliot’s themes. I know some of what he says doesn’t ‘work’, ‘connect’, with where we are today; what he’d have made of a world wired to the Web, welded to the mobile phone, dissolving into globalised standardisation – I’ve no idea. But if I want to even begin to examine life’s deepest foundations, his is one of the voices I would want to hear.  Why? Because he is honest about how hard Christian faith is, both to hold on to, and to relinquish – because we are caught in the love of the God who is caught in the love of the world.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we might be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort by which we ourselves are comforted by God.

It is difficult to improve on Paul’s circular argument of consolation. In the community of Christ we are comforted comforters, consoled ministers of consolation. Following in the way of Christ isn’t always a serene saunter; the places of affliction become hard schools of learning, in which the lessons learned, are transmuted by grace, to become a source of strengthening for others. So any help we can be is as conduits of God’s comfort, making real and present to those struggling with the hard times in life, the faithful compassion of a God who also carries our sorrows. Hard to improve on this – and maybe even harder to live it – but living the love of God, and the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Spirit, is the essence of the obedience that is faith.

Over the past six weeks, a number of those close to me, in our family, the College, personal friends and colleagues in ministry, have been living through the kinds of suffering and anxiety that fill the heart with sorrow and fearfulness. The last week has brought several pieces of what we ominously call ‘bad news’. Recent bereavement, life-threatening illness, major surgery, worry about those we love as part of ourselves- for any one of us such experience tests our faith at the sore places. My own trust in God has seldom been of that anxiety free variety that gives outward shows of serenity. I suppose the urge to live, and to live fully, the need to love and to be loved, the joy and preciousness of all that makes this existence of ours both human and yet precarious, makes it hard to be prepared for those scary interruptions to our well-being; hard not to panic and be afraid; making trust a big ask. It’s then we need the faith and faithfulness of each other, the trust and love of others holding and supporting us, because most of our usual handles on life are broken.

Years ago, Joseph Parker, on the sudden death of his wife, preached on ‘When life crashes in – what then? It was a brave protest sermon against catastrophe – and it was made from the standpoint of faith. Asking hard questions of God – refusing simply to acquiesce as if God was beyond the reach of his most passionate complaints – owning both his sorrow and fearfulness for the future, admitting the need for God’s love and mercy to be translated into the kindness and companionship of others. So that life could go on.

So today Paul’s circular argument of consolation becomes for me a focus of activity and reflection and prayer. Intercession is to love others in the presence of God – it is to comfort with the comfort by which we ourselves have been comforted, it is to look on others from the perspective of the Crucified and Risen Saviour – who has been, and is, where they now are.