Category: Poems, Prayers and Promises

In the beginning was the Word…..

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said….Let there be light’.

Speech,

Holy Word,

the articulation of divine intention and purpose,

‘Let there be…’

Made in the image of God, we too speak,

and what we say vibrates with possibility.

Words call into existence,

make possible,

shape relationships,

communicate meaning,

become freighted with significance because…

once we speak, words are let loose.

They cannot be recovered,

unsaid,

and their healing or hurt may have a long afterlife.

Made in the image of God,

we are wise if we listen not only to what God says,

but to how God speaks;

and if we pay attention to why God speaks.

 

When James tackles the fundamental spiritual disciplines

he says little of contemplation,

mystical joy rides, charismatic gifts,

exciting worship, or relevant programmes

 – he speaks of wisdom and words,

and therefore wise speaking and even wiser listening.  James 3.1-12

 

Prayer 

Lord we all make many mistakes in our conversation;

     the way we choose words and construct sentences,

     which temper and tamper with truth.

The tone of voice, the pace of diction, the volume of our speaking,

     communicating impatience and self-importance.

 

Lord forgive us when we use words as weapons to hurt others,

     or as shields to hide behind when we are criticised:

Lord forgive us, when our words are arrogant and self serving,

     when we would rather speak than listen

     and rather be seen and heard than seen and serving

 

Lord, whose words called worlds into being,

     Make our words creative and life-giving;

Lord whose words wrestled order our of chaos,

     and still speak light out of darkness

Put words in our mouth which call chaos to account,

     challenge injustice and defend the vulnerable.

So may we too speak light out of darkness,

through Jesus Christ,

the Word and the Light of the world,

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue.

Light.

Light blue.

Clematis.

Tenacious tendrils.

Genus Ranunculaceae.

Unlikely exotic cousin of the buttercup.

Consider the clematis how it grows – not even Solomon's glory can compete!

Geometry, botany, aesthetics, theology combine to prove "we're closer to God in a garden, than anywhere else on earth"!

…………

The picture is of the clematis that has adorned our back patio this year; the Fibonnaci a piece of holiday doodling with words. Feel free to suggest improvements. You can find out how Fibonacci works at this previous post

 

Accept surprises

that upset your plans,

shatter your dreams,

give a completely

different turn

to your day

and — who knows?–

to your life.

It is not chance.

leave the Father free

himself to weave

the pattern of your days.

Dom helder Camara, A Thousand Reasons for Living.

Kathleen Raine's poetry is not a recent discovery for me – but it is a recent re-discovery. I'd forgotten just how perceptively she sees, and the lucid integrity with which she describes, the human condition.  And there are lines that give voice to those subterranean longings that run through our souls, their sound the distant echoes of what we have lost or have never yet found.  Her poetry is imaginative and wondering, mystic without being vague, compassionate but avoiding indulgent sentiment that distorts the vision of what life is at its most real, and what it might be if only we had the courage to see it  and say it and live it with honesty and freedom. Some of her poems exemplify the poet at her most visionary and prophetic, able to play with ideas that are light or dark, allusive yet descriptive of her way of seeing the world, and beyond. Here's one.

WORLD'S MUSIC CHANGES

World's music changes:

The spheres no longer sing to us

Those harmonies

That raised cathedral arches,

Walls of cities.

 

Soundings of chaos

Dislodge the keystone of our dreams,

Built high, laid low:

Hearing we echo

Rumours of the abyss.

 

There was a time

To build those cloud-capped towers,

Imagined palaces, heavenly houses,

But a new age brings

A time to undo, to unknow.

 

There are few poems I know that so succinctly define post Christendom and the Post-modern malaise of the spirit, as Christians struggle to come to terms with a fading tradition, lost influence, the confused climate of moral life and the intellectual challenge of transposing the Gospel into a different key for a different and changing age.  In my own canon of poets R S Thomas comes closet to her in voice and in the unflinching honesty with which he sees the world. More of Raine in the next few days.

This is one of the loveliest poems I know about that slow transition from dark days to light, from winter to spring, from February to March.

Full of sentiment but not sentimental, because Larkin isn't remembering golden days of childhood, and he is well aware of the frostiness and chill that have their equivalent in human relationships – but Larkin's capacity to see beyond winter is optimism sensibly restrained – and "it will be spring soon" is a refrain echoing that most thrilling of bird songs, the mavis or song thrush. 

The song of the thrush and the extending light of day are intimations of life though, new possibility, coming opportunities, including that great human healer of tired spirits, laughter. I've never lost the love of bird song first instilled in the mind but installed in the heart through a childhood spent on farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I can still identify dozens of them, and sadly miss some that used to be common – the Yellow Hammer and Curlew being two favourites now seldom heard unless you go to where you know they still have a foothold on a land so greedily messed up by us lot!

So Larkin's poem is a nostalgic reminder that our world's beauty is fragile, is gift, and is entirely provisional on our capacity to value, appreciate and protect it. (The photo is by Nigel Pye from Aberdeen University – I found it

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin

Driving to Aberdeen on Thursday through gales and rain and surface water pounded into opaquely fluid airborne spray by anything travelling on tyres, I was listening to Radio 4. That station is an oasis of sanity, a source of solace, a conservator of culture, an always fulfilled promise of intellectual pleasure, and that without which some of us would find the world of airwaves bereft of one of our life's essentials.

I listened to Afternoon Reading: The Poet's Year, read by the Welsh National Poet Gillian Clarke, and adapted from her wonderful book, At The Source. I've just discovered Gillian Clarke's work. The reading was exquisite – from her Journal of the turn of the year, a description of harvesting honey and observing with closely attendant affection and respect for the livingness of the countryside.

In complete contrast to the darkness of a late winter's night, buffeting gales and trillions of driven rain pellets all homing in on my windscreen, I listened to a poet reading the prose poem account of her summer. The description of honey harvest was contemplative, and quietly, trustfully, reverent of the cost in millions of bee-flights to achieve the 36 lbs of amber honey lovingly potted, sealed and stored. Now where else in all the wide world would I have been lifted from the concentrated misery of such a night drive in appalling weather, to that other place of the imagination, than in a car with Radio Four playing? Just going to listen again on IPlayer to all three episodes.