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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Category Archives: poetry

Advent Book Week 4 Day 7. The Gap

26 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, poetry

≈ 1 Comment

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

The Gap

God woke, but the nightmare did not recede. Word by word
the tower of speech grew.
He looked at it from the air
he reclined on. One word more and
it would be on a level
with him; vovabulary
would have triumphed. He
measured the thin gap
with his mind. no, no, no,
wider than that! But the nearness 
persisted. How to live with
the fact, that was the feat
now. How to take his rest
on the edge of a chasm a
word could bridge.
                      He leaned
over and looked in the dictionary
they used. There was a blank still
by his name of the same
order as the territory
between them, the verbal hunger
for the thing itself. And the darkness
that is a god's blood swelled 
in him, and he let it
to make the sign in the space 
on the page, that us in all languages
and none; that is the grammarian's
torment and the mystery
at the cell's core, and the equation
that will not come out, and is
the narrowness that we stare
over into the eternal
silence that is the repose of God.

Mthr. Carys comments that this “might seem a curious choice for reflection during this week looking at ‘birthing’,” as indeed it is. The echoes of the story of the Tower of Babel resonates too with the story of the Fall and God’s words in Genesis 3:22

 “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:”

Genesis 3:22

The result, of course, was exile from Eden.

The reference to Genesis helps us contextualise this poem.

The first part – to the break – is written in the breathlesss, driving language of a passionate quest. As Mthr. Cary’s notes:

words fly around in short lines; some are repeated, and often-stacatto sound phrases are hurled quickly in simple, sibilant, sharp words, sometimes with small plosive sounds, or a note of sharp fear …”

Frequencies, p. 133

The serpent told Eve that:

God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil

Eliot gets to the heart of the matter in Burnt Norton in commenting:

human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

And that is central to understanding this poem.

There is in mankind, and I do, I am afraid think it is mankind, an urge to power and control. In many ways it is an admirable and necessary quality. It has taken humankind from caves and short life-spans to comfortable houses and long life-spans. But there is a dark side which we see in our less desirable characteristics. Science is a good thing – in its place. It is a good servant and a bad master. Because we can build atomic weapons does not mean we should; because we can use them to destroy our enemies, does not mean that we should. That industrialisation which has been one of our proudest boasts as a species, and which has done so much good to so many, turns out to have a dark side to it, and I am simply one of many who fear the effects of climate change which seems driven faster by our actions.

So perhaps we can begin to see God’s point here? Mankind wants God on mankind’s terms. Thinking ourselves to be God, we are, nonethless not God, and however much we wish to define God as we want, he will not be so defined. He evades us. Or, to be more accurate, our finite attempts to define him fail. Even when he sent the Light of the world into the world, the world knew him not and would not receive him:

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name

John 1:12

As C451 noted, God defies our expectations, and the Messiah came not as we thought he would come, but as God wanted. No doubt if God thundered from the heavens thrice daily, even the most sceptical atheist would belive – the evidence might have to be that overwhelming, but so what? That would be to convince our intellects; but what of our hearts? It was love with which God created the world, and love with which he redeemed it. Love does not ask to know, love perceives; love does not demand evidence, it provides it. A God we could define in our own words and image would be us – and we would be like Narcissus.

What the wise men seek to divine through sleepless nights and ceaseless labour is revealed to the small child who trusts and loves. That is not how we might want it to be, it might not fit with our sense of how it should be. But it is in humilty, not pride, that he comes to us. And that gap? In that space we grow and become who he means us to be. We are back to the waiting, the silence and their value to driven human beings who want what we want and want it now.

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 6. Other Incarnations, of course

25 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Blogging, Book Club, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Other incarnations, of course

Other incarnations, of course,
consonant with the environment
he finds himself in,
animating the cells,
sharpening the antannae,
becoming as they are
that they, in the transparency
of their shadows, in the filament
of their calculations, may,
in theor own way, learn to confront
the intellect with its issue.

And his coming testified
to not by one star
arrested temporarily
over a Judaic manger,
but by constellations innumerable
as dew upon surfaces
he has passed over time
and again, taking to himself
the first-born of the imagination
but without the age-old requirement of blood.

To read this poem on Christmas Day is, in part, to think of the poet as heretic! There is only One Incarnation – the Word made Flesh, whose coming into the world we celebrate today. But as C451 pointed out yesterday, poetry can take us places where prose cannot. If we read this difficult poem in that light, it reveals some familiar Thomas themes – most notably the idea that God is in everything. If we read “incarnations” as “epiphanies” or “presence” we veer away from heresy into poetry – and that theme we have seen so often – that if we can but still our intellect, then we can find evidences of God’s presence everywhere.

In place of the morphemes and phonemes which are the building blocks of words, here we encounter God in the buolding blocks of things – in cells, in shadows in filaments. God adapts himself to whatever environment he is in. So, yes, that star over the manger in Bethlehem, but also in “constellations innumerable” where he has been, is, and will be. Born not, as the ancient Israelites imagined, of the blood of Jacob and David, but of our “imagination”. Again, read literally, there is a skirting with heresy. Is he saying we imagine God? In one sense yes, but not in the literal sense.

We encounter him in the crib, in the Magi moving towards it, in the shepherds, in Mary’s song of praises, the Magnificat. The Light came into the world and the darkness did not overcome him. Indeed, far from it, the Light is the light by which we see all things and are, in turn seen, therefore it follows that if we let ourselves, we can see him in everything. God is Ineffable, unknowable as he is, but discernable in all things if – another familiar theme – we would stop, wait, and take in this world he has created.

May you all have a happy and holy Christmas!

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Great Expectations

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Advent, Bible, Book Club, Catholic Tradition, Christmas, Faith, poetry

≈ 11 Comments

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Paradoxes, Poetry as theology, St Ephrem

It is easy to see why the Israelites of old did not spot the Messiah when He came. As we read through the lectionary for Advent, it is hard not to be struck by the image which predominates. It is not the only image, Isaiah’s “suffering servant” is also there. But there is a longing for the Messiah to come, and he will be strong, mighty, he will smite the foes of Israel, he will restore the Temple, he will purify the Levites, he will set all things right. The long-suffering Chosen People will get their reward, and the unrighteous will be smitten hip and thigh and consigned to the “pit”. It’s a very human concept we see here. A desire that one’s enemies should be confounded and that you, because of course you are among the righteous, should prosper.

God had other ideas. To our expectations He posed paradoxical opposites.

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Without losing His divinity, or mixing it with our humanity, the Word became human – fully human. The Word came not with a loud crash of thunder, shaking the heavens, but silently. He who created the heavens and the earth was a babe in arms, totally dependent upon others – and silent except for cries of hunger and need. He was one of us in every way. It is understandable that one of the earliest heresies was docetism. The idea that God could be fully human was not one easily digested. There is in us, a longing that says flesh is weak and spirit is the thing that matters. But that is not what God says. St Anthanasius helped us understand what St Peter meant when he wrote:

3 as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, 4 by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the [a]corruption that is in the world through lust.

1 Peter 2:3-4

As St Athanasius put it: “‘The Word was made man so that we might be made God”. This concept of “theosis”, common in Eastern theology, is less familiar to many in the Western tradition (though less unfamiliar than it once was). That is why the Church rejected docetism, the idea that Jesus merely “assumed” a human form. Even after the Resurrection, many found, and still find, it hard to believe that the Messiah lived a fully human life and died a fully human death. The Creed tells us that “he died and descended into hell”. So He did. All that He did for us. Our sinful bodies are washed clean with His blood; He restores our spirit.

This is all a far cry from avenging troops of angels. It also sits uneasily with our most common Western method of doing theology.

Jessica, in her marvellous series of posts on the Advent Book, Frequencies of God, has called R.S. Thomas an “Apophatic Poet“. That is an apt phrase and one appropriate to my theme here.

In the Weast we have inherited a theological tradition based on Greek philosophy, which seeks to locate and identify the central point in an argument, setting boundaries and pathways on the way to better definitions. But there is another, and perhaps better way of doing theology, which is why poets and musicians can make the best theologians. Definitions, whilst we think them necessary, can be dangerous. Thomas writes about the problems we face when writing and talking about God because the very tools we use are finite and limited. In using such tools, in devising such definitions, we run the risk of unconscious blasphemy. Setting limits to the subject of enquiry, when that subject is the human experience of the Infinite, can have a deadening and even fossilising effect. In trying to “define” God, we are attempting to contain the Uncontainable and Limit the limitless. It is here that poetry can be far more useful to us than prose, as it is better as sustaining a dynamic and fluid sense of God.

The poems chosen by Mother Carys upon which Jessica is commenting, provide examples of what I am talking about here. Let me illustrate in with an apt poem by that great theologian/poet in the Syriac tradition, St Ephrem, where he uses paradoxical pairings of opposites to give us a dynamic sense of God.

Your mother is a cause for wonder: the Lord entered her
and became a servant; He who is the Word entered
—and became silent within her; thunder entered her
—and made no sound; there entered the Shepherd of all,
and in her he became the Lamb, bleating as he came forth.
Your mother’s womb has reversed the roles:
the Establisher of all entered in His richness,
but came forth poor; the Exalted One entered her,
but came forth meek; the Splendrous One entered her,
but came forth having put on a lowly hue.
The Mighty One entered, and put on insecurity
from her womb; the Provisioner of all entered
—and experienced hunger; He who gives drink to all entered
—and experienced thirst: naked and stripped
there came forth from her He who clothes all 
(Hymn on the Nativity 11:6-8).

For Ephrem, God’s identity is both revealed and concealed. He is the Hidden One who becomes Revealed; the Almighty One, who becomes weak; He is the Immortal One who suffers death; He is the Great One who became small. This method of doing theology avoids the danger of our sounding as though we have worked out God. Poetry, and music, can be better ways of descrbing the indescribable.

I would like to wish Jessica, Neo, Nicholas, Scoop, Catholic-Anon and all who have written here, a peaceful and holy Christmas, and to extend that wish to all our readers. With His birth, all things were made new, and as we approach the Christ-child this Christmas, perhaps above all others, may we find there the peace and love He alone can bring us.

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 5: Emerging

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Emerging

Well, I said, better to wait
for him on some peninsula
 of the spirit. Surely for one
with patience he will happen by
once in a while. It was the heart
spoke. The mind, sceptical as always
of the anthroporphisms
of the fancy, knew he must be put together
like a poem or a composition
in music, that is what he conforms to
is art. A promontory is a bare 
place; no God leans down
out of the air to take the hand
extended to him. The generations have
watched there
in vain. We are beginning to see
now it is a matter of the scaffolding
of spirit; that the poem emerges
from morphemes and phonemes; that
as form in sculpture is the prisoner
of the hard rock, so in everyday life
it is the plain facts and natural happenings
that conceal God and reveal him to us
little by little under the mind's tooling.

We have seen earlier how for Thomas the “un-born” is, in God’s eye, like the statue in the uncut marble which only the sculptor sees. We have seen, too, how the idea of the limitations imposed on us by words, which are also our only means of communicating to each other, exercises the poet. The theme that we find God in stillness, in waiting, in the silences, was shot through our first week’s poems. The meta-narrative, if you will, of the “absence” of God is part of this, as of so many other poems by Thomas. But here, in this later “Emerging” (the first was Week 2, day 5’s poem), the poet confounds our expectations.

Where we might expect a “promontory” to join the moor or the bright field as a place of epiphany, here Thomas turns inward. The heart may say “wait” and he “will happen by”, but the mind’s eye suggests our own resources may not be as limited as sometimes Thomas can imply. If (another major theme) body and spirit are not divided, then our words may be of some use to us after all. Not in prose, not in theological musings, but in art.

How often, listening for example to Tallis, can I hear something which my mind cannot grasp but which directs me toward God? How often, reading those smallest units of language, put together by a great poet like Eliot, George Herbert or Thomas himself, resonate with a sense of the divine which, though coming from words, I cannot render back into them? Tallis, Byrd, Bach, Handel, like the poets just mentioned, all seem to find the sculpture within the marble and then, in their art, reveal something of it to us. This is not a matter of intellectual reasoning, it is the revelation of great art.

We can lose him in the quotidian – another of Thomas’ themes – but find him “under the mind’s tooling” – as Tallis shows us here:

But to do that, we need to take that “narrow way”, away from the main road. We need to make ourselves open to the insights of those great artists, including Thomas himself, who can reveal God to us “little by little.”

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 4. Top left an angel

23 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Top left an angel

Top left an angel
hovering. Top right the attendance
of a star. From both
bottom corners devils
look up, relishing
in prospect a divine
meal. How old at the centre
the child's face gazing
into love's too human
face, like one prepared
for it to have its way
and continue smiling.

As so often with Thomas, we are catapulted into the middle of a scene, and a train of thought. Mthr Carys likens the poem to a painting. Its elements are familiar to us from a million Christmas cards. Its message is a reminder to us of what this birthing means for us all.

On high the symbols of his lordship – the angels from the realms of glory, the star which guided the Magi. Below, well there we find the symbols of the devil who will tempt this new-born child as they tempt all of us. At the centre is that image which dominates so many icons and paintings – the Madonna and child. But this is not just a sweet and sentimental scene – it could hardly be a poem by Thomas and be just that.

God, St John tells us, is love. Thomas often reminds us of the limitations of words, but he uses them so well that he almost takes us beyond what they alone can tell us, despite that; it is his gift as apophatic poet. We know the word “love”. We use it promiscuously though: I’d love a glass of wine; I’d love to see that film; I’d love to be able to see my relatives this Christmas; I’d love to go there; all the way through to “I love you” to my other half. “Through a glass darkly”, as St Paul puts it, we see love; but God is love and if we observe him, we too will have an insight.

At the centre of this poem is the Divine Word made Flesh, that face so full of ancient wisdom, gazing into the face of human love in its purest form. There is no love so unselfish as that of the love of the mother for her child. Sometimes, Divine Love is called “Sophia”, and here there is an echo of that. The love of mother for child is as the love of God for each one of us. He formed us in our mother’s womb, he numbers the hairs upon our head. And yes, and yes, at the last he is willing to suffer for us. He knows where our passions can lead – to what Passion he will come. Mary is told by Simeon:

35 (yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also), that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Luke 2:35

but she loves her child and will go all the way to the foot of the Cross with him. His love takes him to Golgotha for us. However much the “devils” lick their lips, Love will triumph.

As we prepare homes to celebrate the birth of the Lord, let us not forget that love which prepares us for him and that we were bought at a great price, paid willingly. At such love we can but marvel – but the mother and the child give us a taste of how great God’s love for us is. Maranatha!

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 3 Nativity

22 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Nativity

Christmas Eve! Five
hundred poets waited, pen
poised above paper,
for the poem to arrive,
bells ringing. It was because
the chimney was too small,
because they had ceased
to believe, the poem passed them
by on its way out
into oblivion, leaving
the doorstep bare
of all but the sky-rhyming
child to whom later
on they would teach prose.

Great Expectations! So many awaiting the inspiration for the poem, so many bells ringing – for so little. The narrow way did not work – the expectations were wrong. The echo of Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:3 is clear:

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3

It is to the foolish and the children that the word comes first. Why? Because they are not over-thinking it. They do not have their pens prepared, they do not have a narrow chimny down which everything must fit; they are open to the Word. The wise, at least wise in their own estimate, can be so pre-occupied with minutiae and detail that they miss the forest because the shape and nature of the leaf occupy the forefront of their minds. They have forgotten the importance of belief. I believe because I can do no other.

Only the “sky-rhyming child”, a phrase I love, catches the real “poem”, but, sadness awaits, as that girl will have the poetry schooled out of her. Christ’s birthing changes everything. God’s love means everything. Such vastness fails, and always will fail, to fit any tidy patterns we try to set. It saddens me when I hear people say that only x or y will be saved, and that z is doomed to hell. God alone knows these things, and as I am not God, I don’t; the people doing the condemning are not God either. As humans we are beloved by God. Not beloved because we are perfect – Jesus came for the lost sheep and for the sinner. What the five hundred poet misses, the small child finds. Mthr. Carys wisely asks:

Have we reduced the poem to prose? Are we tempted to name and pin down the incarnate one so that we can grasp and understand rather than allow Christ the child to live and breathe within us. Is our temptation to shape the newborn to fit our lives, our world, rather than allow the infant to shape us. Are we able to learn the poetry rather than teach prose?

p. 117

There’s the challenge. Are we able to accept the message that God is love? It is the simplest – and hardest – of messages. How, we say, looking inward, can I be loved by God? But the sculptor sees deeper within the marble than the marble can. He came in humility to save us. Have we the humility to be saved?

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 2 Blind Noel

21 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

≈ 8 Comments

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.

Yet there is always room

on the heart for another

snowflake to reveal a pattern.


Love knocks with such frosted fingers.

I look out. In the shadow

of so vast a God I shiver, unable

to detect the child for the whiteness.

Mthr. Carys, in her reflections draws out the way in which Thomas pairs words which are not usually put in juxtaposition can cause unease. We associate “Noel” with positive things; it is not so with blindness. The language is “paradoxical, unstable and dynamic” – it invites us, as Mthr Carys puts it, to “surrender our need to understand” – and nonetheless reflect on our being moved “by what we cannot explain in other terms”. What cannot be spoken can, nonetheless, as the Israelites knew, be experienced.

And yet this poem is peculiarly suited to this covid-ravaged year. If ever there was one in which the “themes” of Christmas were exhausted, it is 2020; if ever there was one in which we needed the joy of Christmas, it is 2020. We know of God only that he is love, and it is fitting that it is the heart, in our poetic imaginings the seat of love, which melts the snowflake. How ever “frozen” we may be, however weary, however dim our sight in the “whiteout” of sin, the birthing has happened.

On this, the shortest day of the year in the Western hemisphere, when the run rose (here) at just after eight o’clock, and will set at four, and when, thanks to the cloud cover and the rain, it is unlikely to make any appearance, it would be easy to suppose it is not here at all. Last night, on the beach, we saw a wonderful sunset, the skies aflame with the setting of the sun. How easy it would be to assume in the grey half-light of this non-day that it is no longer there – that light’s “themes” are exhausted. And yet I know that though the Light came into the world and the world rejected him, nonetheless the darkness did not triumph. Faith, sometimes is not only all, it is all we have.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen

Hebrews 11:1

We speak of “blind faith”, and in that context “blind Noel” may speak to us. When the “themes” of Christmas are as exhausted as we are, when we feel that we can’t go on and want to turn our face to the wall, all we can do it to know that birthing has happened, and that at the end of this Advent journey there is for us a chance to be re-born, or reminded of his love.

Thomas is sometimes called the poet of the absence of God, but I think it is more that he knows and admits what we know but perhaps do not like to admit, that if God seems absent, it is because we, so busy on our journey, make so little time to sit with him. As I look across the room to my other half, I wonder what sort of love it would seem if I spent only a few quarter hours a day and an hour on Sunday with them? I know, from one failed marriage, the effects when one of the partners is away all the time, and when they are back, are so habituated to other routines that they might as well not be there at all. Have we stopped to ask ourselves whether we are like that with God?

As we come closer to the manger, let us make time for our loved ones, and for God. Maranatha!

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 4 Day 1 Un-born

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

≈ 1 Comment

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Un-born

I have seen the child in the womb,
neither asking to be born
or not to be born, biding its time
without the knowledge of time,
model for the sulptor who would depict
the tranquility that inheres
before thought, or the purity of thought
without language. Its smile forgave
the anachronism of the nomenclature
that would keep it foetal. Its hand
opened delicately as flowers
in innocency's grave.
Was its part written? I have seen
it waiting breathlessly in the wings
to come forth on to a stage
of soil or concrete, where wings
are a memory only or an aspiration.

At the end of the journey of Advent is a birth. In his Journey of the Magi, Eliot makes one of them comment:

were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot

Birth, about which we tend to write with joy, can also be hard and bitter agony. Not just the transitory pain of birthing, but sometimes the death that can come with it. My father would not talk of my birthing. It gave him too much pain; my mother died two days later. I never knew her. My father used to say “you never asked to be born”, to me and felt an obligation to me, the child of his old age. My mother was thirty years younger than him, and knowing that at the age of sixty-two he was unlikely to see me as an adult, he had taken comfort in knowing she would be with me, and might even marry again after his death. He was right about his death, he died at the age of seventy-two; he was wrong about my mother surviving him. Birthing, the theme of our Advent Book this week, is a time of hope, but one tinged with anxiety.

When friends show me scans of their unborn child (I am just at that age where even those of my friends who said they never wanted children seem, now to want them) I coo as I should. There is something so infinitely touching about the child in the womb: innocence personified; life as a tabula rasa with all to come. We know, of course, that that tabula is already imprinted with genetic code, but there is in that scan the human equivalent of the angel in marble – the sculptor will create who we shall be. God shaped us in our mother’s womb; life will chip away at that, and there is that sadness of “never glad confident morning again”. When I look at that old photograph of me in my confrmation dress, all white frills and ribbons, at the time I only thought how poorly white went with my red-hair and freckles; now I wonder how that little girl got to be the skinny bespectacled woman who stares back at me when I do my make-up? Mthr. Carys captures something of this when she writes that the poem captures:

… new life, suspended between conception and birth. It captures a moment both in time and out of time, caught between purity and fall, innocence and wounding, and it brings us a picture of life on the edge of consciousness, creativity and destruction

Frequencies of God p. 106

Only nine months earlier than the arrival of the Magi, a young virgin living in Nazareth, betrothed to an older man named Joseph, was told that she would give birth to the saviour of the world. She knew enough about life to know that could not be the case, as she was still a virgin, but when the Archangel gave her the news, and with it a choice, she accepted:

 Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.

Luke 1:38

It was not an easy choice. Her betrothed might reject her and scorn her as impure: “An angel did it? You really expect me to believe that? What’s the man’s name?” was a much more likely reaction than acceptance. Symeon would tell her that

(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed

Luke 2:25

In that birth there would be for Mary pain. In our birth there is pain, even if we have no conscious memory of it. In our rebirth in Christ there is also pain, “hard and bitter agony for us”. Like the Magi we are:

… no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their god

We are strangers in a strange land. Those hands open in “innocency’s grave”, ignorant of the “hands growing to gather them”, and we none of us get through this life without being wounded on the way. We have a choice, to walk with him or not. We do not have a choice about being wounded on the way; we have a choice about the way and the healing.

As we enter the week of the birthing of the Christ-child, let us pray for each other and know that we are all one in him. Maranatha!

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book Week 3 Day 7 Llanno

19 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Llananno

I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me. But as a gesture
of independence of the speeding
traffic I am a part
of, I stop the car,
turn down the narrow path
to the river and enter
the church with its clear reflection
beside it.
There are few services
now; the screen has nothing
to hide. Face to face
with no intermediary
between me and God, and only the water’s
quiet insistence on a time
older than man, I keep my eyes
open and am not dazzled,
so delicately does the light enter
my soul from the serene presence
that waits for me till I come next.

The echo of “Little Gidding” is loud for me here. We are in familiar territory, oddly for a poem which is about unfrequented territory. You will recall that Eliot writes:

It would be the same, when you leave the rough road

And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all.

Little Gidding

The car, that symbol of modern hustle and bustle, taking one from A to B by the easiest route, the very image of the purposeful, the very opposite of the leisurely ramble whose purpose lies only in itself, is stopped and the poet finds at the end of the “narrow path” a shell, that “husk of meaning” mentioned by Eliot.

Familiar territory is the seeming absence of God and the importance of silence and waiting – we have here another of those little epiphanies we have seen so often with Thomas. We also have, despite appearances, that quiet insistence on place and on the church itself.

I have been down that “narrow lane” and seen the church, with its magnificent rood-screen (illustrated above). It is entirely unexpected. How, in Wales of all places, it survived the iconoclasm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I do not know, but assume a local landowner’s influence. But survive it does. This Western equivalent of the iconostasis, protecting the most holy place from profane eyes, now has “nothing to hide”. There is here no epiphany of the sort gifted in “The Bright Field”, but, paradoxially, without an intermediary the poet can have direct access – the church itself was that place, waiting for him, as it will always wait for him – and as it waits for us.

The absence is the absence of us, not of God. In our busy world it is we who make no time to be with God. Stop the car. The “narrow path” leads to salvation, we are told in Scripture; here it leads to a soul-comforting moment. Churches are special places. Their walls soaked in generation after generation of prayer, where God is present in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine, where his love has been poured out for us. So, as we journey, let us once more remember to stop our equivalent of the car, and go down that narrow path of prayer and contemplation – he waits in the silence; can we bear the silence?

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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Advent Book. Week 3. Day 4. Evening

16 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Evening

The archer with time
as his arrow--has he broken
his strings that the rainbow
is so quiet over our village?
 
Let us stand, then, in the interval
of our wounding, till the silence
turn golden and love is
a moment eternally overflowing.

As Mthr Carys points out in her reflection on this poem, it is perfectly placed as almost and oasis in this mid-point on our journey. It exemplifies some of the themes which which we should now be familiar: Time, whether in his wingèd chariot, or his speedy arrow, is not our best friend; Quietness, if we can find it, is. Those little epiphanies which have so often been mentioned? This is what they feel like, although we know that Thomas knows that the attempt to put them into words inevitably drains some of the life from them. It’s a tribute to Thomas’s skill as a poet that he is able to convey much of that experience in words. Words are all we have. For all that Thomas is critical of them, in his hands they take us into the heart of silence.

What we find there depends in part on what we bring with us, and also in part on our patience. The “wounding” he mentions will be familiar to us all, and there have been times in my own life when I have wondered where God was and why he did not rescue me. And the “silence” did become “golden” in those precious moments when it did seem as though I was tuning into something that was eternal. The love of the Trinity overflows into creation, as my belovèd St Isaac put it:

In love did He bring the world intro existence; in love is He going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him Who has performed all these things;

HOMILY II.38.2,22

Only in that stilled silence, when the world is quieted and the heart open could I find that frequency of God and know that he was there; the question was where was I?

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!

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