Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

This photo was taken during a holiday in Alnwick and while visiting one of the big National Trust houses. In a week when Twelve Years a Slave won at the Oscars, it is a powerful representation of the beauty of a human being, and the ugly brutality of which human beings are capable in their pursuit of commercial prosperity and political dominance. I stood for a while here, feeling a deep shame for a history which includes the realities which underlie this work of art. What I find so moving about this bronze is that slavery is not condemned by portraying its cruelties and brutalities and disfigurements of the image of God – it is condemned because it puts chains on the freedom of this glorious human being to live with dignity, purpose and the fulfilments of love and life. The loveliness of the form contrasts with the sadness of the face, and those hellish chains. It is a morally irrefutable condemnation of oppression.

The prayer below gives expression to a powerful ecclesiology – by which I mean, Teresa of Avila takes seriously Paul's statement, 'you are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it'. Too often these words are reduced to mere metaphor, a grown up children's address on how the community is to work together, be co-ordinated, respect each other's contribution, never be dismissive of others as though we didn;t need them. All good and proper – but nowhere near the radical theology of Paul if that's all we think those words mean.

Christ is risen and present in the world by his Spirit; and where two or three gather together there He is in the midst. That isn't metaphor either – He really is present, and Paul's words carry an ontological force which means we are, yes, we are, the Body of Christ. We are In Christ, and Christ is in us; we are crucified with Christ and raised with Him as children of God. All of this Teresa understands, and this famous prayer-poem succinctly reminds us of what that means. One of the questions our severely practical and pragmatic culture likes to ask about anything not covered in the latest book for dummies is, "Yes, but tell me what that looks like"

"You are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it".

"Yes Paul, but tell us what would that look like?"

This is Teresa's answer:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

no eyes but yours

no hands but yours,

no feet but yours,,

Yours are the eyes through which is to look out

Christ’s compassion to the world;

Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;

Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

……………

Yes. And the bronze statue above is a potent reminder of precisely what it is Christ calls us to oppose with our bodies, and to generate in the world compassion, goodness and blessing in His name. 

The photo was taken this morning on Cairn O' Mount. Low cloud drifting across mountain moor, sunlit cloud and the line of the far horizon inviting into the unknown. This prayer by Thomas Merton likewise acknowledges mystery, trust and the mixture of obscurity and insight that is the essential tension of spirituality, the cloud of unknowing and sunlight epiphany.

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think that I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always

though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton.

…………….

The integrity, honesty with self and radical trustfulness of this prayer have always moved me. The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton's naively brilliant autobiography, is a remarkable conversion story, written with an intensity of devotion which left the immature monk struggling for humility that wasn't put on. That humility and self-deprecation is all the more attractive and authentic for its tone of uncompromising naivete which would later mature into a knowing humility; and an honest self-knowing in which Merton recognised humility and self assertion as the two poles of a powerful personality, given over to grace yet true to itself in its longing for self-transcendence.

Merton has been a companion all my Christian life – often quirky, sometimes annoying, wisely critical, funny without malice, passionate about justice and peace, compassionately humane, a lover of solitude and silence and one who found written communication irresistible. His Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation, Contemplative Prayer, volumes of letters, essays and journals, are a repository of monastic reflection in which the early Merton is undiscerningly positive, and the later Merton is lovingly critical. With all its faults The Seven Storey Mountain remains a remarkable story of a soul being saved, and then going on being saved, by a grace tougher than his own will. The prayer above comes from a heart that knows its limits, and trusts a love that has no limits.

I lent my well used and annotated Faber paperback of Markings to a friend who left it on a train. I now have a used Knopf Hardback which has untrimmed edges. I still like the odd book that is distinctive with its rough edges. But I miss that paperback which I bought in 1976 in John Smith's in Glasgow – now long gone, and sadly so.

Hammarskjold was to many an enigma, and yet a highly effective diplomat; a man of the world whose inner strength enabled a highly effective and influential active life in the world of affairs. I place Markings alongside Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, Moltmann's The Crucified God, Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense as amongst the 20th Century masterpieces of Christian reflection and committed, passionate discpleship.

The photo was taken on the road to Fort William in the autumn of last year. Sometimes an image is itself a kind of prayer – faith as surrender, trust and joy.

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord. 

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

I came across these lines a while ago, noted them, and intended to go looking for where they came from – and forgot. They turned up again and this time I Googled them. I was surprised to find that, unsurprisingly, they are written by Wendell Berry. Surprising because to be honest I should have recognised them, and that for several reasons. Unsurprising because, first, I've now read swathes of Berry's poems, and his Sabbath Poems is at my bedside.

Second, I can almost hear his slow diction as he looks out at the world of people and says, slowly, "So, friends…" I know few poets who use the word 'friend' with such convincing sincerity – Seamus Heaney being another.

Third, the benevolent Luddite exhortation against the human obession with computing, calculating, bottom line, data-gathering ways of evading the beauty of the world.

Fourth the underlying grace and humanity of the last three lines, which define love not by definition but by disposition, action and the unselfing of the self.

The words come in one of Berry's signature poems, a long series of exhortations and life guidance, a sharing of experience that is the essence of wisdom, but to many others would sound like folly, and perhaps, above all, a poem that calls in question much of the trivia we invest with exaggerated significance in a world consumed by the human desire to consume. Our culture loves the sound byte and the buzz phrase – one of the kore recent 'taking the long view'. In ways much deeper than shrewd business strategies, Berry's poem takes the long view, and encourages the dispositions and actions of love, for others, for the world, for the Lord.

(The photo was taken from a ruined castle in rural Aberdeenshire)

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front.

Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

I just watched the documentary on Seamus Heaney, shown on BBC 4 last night and available on IPlayer now on the link below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03b9q6j/Seamus_Heaney_Out_of_the_Marvellous/

Heaney has a secure place in my poetry canon, both as poet and as human being. Few poets whose lives have overlapped with my lifetime, have captured so much of what I recognise and discover to be true, important and durable in my own experience. R S Thomas and Denise Levertov more often than not; Mary Oliver now and then; Elizabeth Jennings when on her good and very good days.

But Heaney's poetry, and the persuasive humanity and generosity of mind he exhibited, make his poetry accessible and familiar. He makes the local universal, his poetry combines lyrical beauty and ethical depth – the observations included in the speech of conferral for the Nobel Prize.

Just go watch this programme and encounter the poet who gives poets and poetry not only a good name, but does so with a self-effacing modesty and knowing humanity that is his poetry's own justication.

I first read Wendell Berry in 1993 sitting under trees in Lyme, New Hampshire, while visiting our friends Bob and Becky. I bought a couple of his books in the Hanover Book Store, one of the best stocked booksellers I've ever had the joy of wasting a day in. Just down the road were the old Stables and the clapboard Church as quintessentially New England as you get. The novels were about farming people in rural Kentucky, and as yet I hadn't discovered his poetry. But it was plain Berry understood the the land and the weather, the rhythms of growth as sun, rain, soil and human toil coincide in agricultural fruitfulness. And he understood just as deeply the agriculture of human love and hopefulness, friendship and attentiveness, the routines and the tedium necessary to allow growth to happen, and the way we each become who we are by the relationships that nourish and prune us, and draw us to live with the best we are towards that same fruitfulness. The first seventeen years of my life were lived on farms in Ayrshire and rural Lanarkshire, with their daily rhythm of milking cows and cleaning and feeding them; ploughing, sowing and then leaving alone till the season for harvest; walking across fields, climbing fences and drystane dykes, in and out of woods, across burns and up the glens – all to our hearts' content. My dad called it stravaigin – which means to wander freely, – it's also a Restaurant in Glasgow!

So Wendell Berry's writing immediately sent strong signals, wakening memories of hard work, farmyard smells, small communities where the unasked and assumed helpfulness of independent minded neighbours created ties amongst those humble enough to offer and receive the small gifts and courtesies of a hard life shared, and where possible, eased. My love for the open air and my own sense of belonging were woven by those years into what remains a sense of freedom, an accumulated knowledge base about our countryside, and a capacity to be stopped in my tracks by any number of intimations that I am not alone. A yellow hammer's song, (photo) the sound of a breeze playing conifers like the stringed section of an orchestra, the reduction of apparent anarchy to chevron discipline as migrating geese take off from Loch Skene and fly overhead towards the coast, the unobtrusive beauty of a dog rose evolving later into the rust red roundness of ripe rosehips – "the whole earth is full of Thy glory'.

Here is the kind of poem I wish I could write – it's written by one who understands trees, his own heart, and therefore helps me likewise, to understand, to stand under, and wonder. 

I Go Among the Trees

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing,

the day turns, the trees move.