Pilgrimages

There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat, the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches. So I have gone
up the salt lane to the building
with the stone altar, and the candles
gone out, and kneeled and lifted
my eyes to the furious gargoyle
of the owl that is like a god
gone small and resentful. There
is no body in the stained window
of the sky now. Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims? He is such a fast
God, always before us, and
leaving as we arrive.
                                   There are those here
not given to prayer, whose office
is the blank sea that they say daily.
What they listen to is not
hymns, but the slow chemistry of the soil,
that turns saints’ bones into dust,
dust to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events
are dateless. These people are not
late or soon; they are just
here, with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them. It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that, in times
like these, and for one like me,
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather, and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

I remember the first time I went to Bardsey island as a hopelessly romantic teenager. Romantic, I hasten to add, in the sense of being given to fanciful imaginings. As we boated out there I felt something of what I recognised Thomas had felt when I first came across this poem at college. I imagined myself back in time, when what are now ruins were buildings in their prime. I felt one with the countless pilgrims who had been there before me. I have been up that “salt lane” and felt the gravel crunch under my feet. Thomas’ words conjure up well the sheer physicality of a place built for the spiritual. We are in territory now familiar to us on this journey – the continuum between the physical and the spiritual. Nothing expresses that better than a place of pilgrimage. I have felt the same at Walsingham.

Familiar, too, by now to us, is the sense of the absence of God where we might expect to find him, and his presence where we often do not look because we press on to that we conceive to be our destination. In that place, where you come, as Eliot says in Little Gidding, to kneel in prayer, where prayer saturates the walls, you may find what you seek, but Thomas knows about absence. We come expectantly; we find not what we were looking for, but nothing save the beauty of the ruins and of the island.

There is an almost brutal honesty as the poem comes to its close. Have I travelled all that way to come to myself? And worse, to learn that for “one like me

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather, and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

It is looking inwards, it is back to that silent waiting we read so much about in week 1, back too to the hope of those small epiphanies if we wait in silence. But we know, each of us, how hard that is. It is so easy to despair. And yet and yet, the ruins are there, the altar, the cross, and I am not a solitary, no hermit I, but rather part of a church, and it is easy for Romantics to crave the wild and the unusual and to miss the everyday. At that altar for years, monks and pilgrims encountered God in the breaking of the bread – as we can.

If the hardships of lockdown have done nothing else, they have emphasised the importance of fellowship and the Eucharist. There God is.

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!

The Imperative of the Instincts

A constant theme of the poems selected by Mthr Carys for this collection is the importance of waiting, of silence and of seizing those little epiphanies which nature can offer. They are all parts of this beautiful poem, which itself comes towards the end of a long series in Counterpoint which takes us on a journey through the Christian story of Fall and Redemption.

Though we pay lip-service to “reason” – after all which of us wants to seem to be without it? – it is our instincts which can drive us, those deep-seated urges which we share perhaps only with our loved ones, or with the psychiatrist. It may just be me, but I see it in others too, the urge to align the world, and God, with those instincts – there is an imperative there. But Thomas is going to what might happen if we were to still that imperative. What if we were to stop and contemplate?

Any mention of “apple” and “truth’s tree” is bound to create resonances with the Fall and the exile from Eden. The apple here has not been picked, it is ripening as we contemplate it. Refraining from picking it, looking at it, knowing that it is out of reach, heart and mind come together, neither one dominating. It is a precious moment of balance – a state any meditative prayer would be grateful to grasp, even if only for a brief moment. And in that space, what then? Some healing? But what is healing?

Mthr Carys writes that Thomas:

leads us to reflect on the quality of the timeless moment … This fresh, bright, healing place, free from striving or need, is ‘the timeless / place

page 61

As Eliot puts it:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

We strive so hard to keep ourselves going, and work and family press their demands upon us, there is a timetable in our heads – and on our phones. But when the busyness ceases, what then?

Jesus told his followers that the kingdom of God was at hand. Here, in that ‘unaccommodated moment’ we can get a glimpse, a sense. It costs us nothing – except the thing we are most reluctant to give – ourselves in silence. Here we see how it is the the last can be first – the values of this world reversed. If we can stop, if we can make time to listen, we may hear. We may not, of course, but for sure is one thing, if we don’t, we won’t.

Rather than re-enact the instinct to eat of the apple and to be wise as God, the beginning of wisdom. And Eliot captures this at the end of Little Gidding

Quick now, here, now, always–

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

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!

Emerging

Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was...
Once I would have asked healing.
 I go now to be doctored...
to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem
Of the scalpel. I would have knelt
long, wrestling with you, wearing
you down. Hear my prayer Lord, hear my prayer. 
As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals
have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me...I begin to recognize
you anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution 
to, others whose echoes we must expand
to contain. Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to the snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

What is it we do when we pray?

Last week we opened up the question by writing about silence – the waiting. But what do we expect? Writing at the height of faith in science, Thomas sees the scientist replacing many of the needs we used to have for God. In the UK it has often been said that the NHS is the new national religion. The advent of the vaccine to ward off Covid has, understandably, been greeted with the same acclaim that the Second Coming might expect. Medical science teaches us that genetic defects can be inherited – the sins of the fathers are, in that sense, passed on to the children – literally. But this is not the same as thinking, for example, that those with leprosy somehow are being punished by God.

I don’t know about you, but for me some of the most difficlt parts of the Old Testament and Psalms are to do with what seems to me almost a self-righteous satisfaction in the enemies of Israel being smitten with all varieties of plague. No doubt the Chosen People were often unworthy, and the Psalmist often excoriates them for their infidelity and the plagues it brings down upon them. But this is a mindset now, in most places, banished by the light of modern science.

But, if in the 1970s “Science” rode high, and as a consequence, our need for God seemed to shrink to the margins, then for the poet that posed questions about prayer and its purpose. God created all things, and the patterns of numbers, what Thomas called the ‘adult geometry/of the mind’ reflects him the way all Nature does. Was the new Eden to be found, perhaps in the temples of science?

How stand such shining hopes now? Grateful though we shall all be as and when the vaccines mean that we can find a way to stop socially distancing, the lockdowns and social distancing have suggested to us the limits of science. I tread carefully here. When I pray to God for healing, I do not disparage the science of medicine, but I recognise something else, which is that the spirit has needs of which the medical doctor knows but little. Blind faith is a bad idea, and that applies to science as much as to faith. Some things we need medicine for, but while it can heal the body and save our lives, one of the things covidtide leaves us with is the question of “living for what?”

A society in which I am free to go into a supermarket with dozens of people as long as I am masked and try to keep my distance, but where I am not free to go to Church and do the same, where people cannot attend a dying relative on her death bed, where the tender love and care we give through touch and contact are not allowed, raises real questions about what life is for?

Those are the questions to which, in the silence of meditative prayer, I put to God and await his answer. It may just be that I lack the scientific mindset, but I still pray ‘as of old’.

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!

This to do

I have this that I must do
One day: overdraw on my balance
Of air, and breaking the surface
Of water go down into the green
Darkness to search for the door
To myself in dumbness and blindness
And uproar of scared blood
At the eardrums. There are no signposts
There but bones of the dead
Conger, no light but the pale
Phosphorous, where the slow corpses
Swag. I must go down with the poor
Purse of my body and buy courage,
Paying for it with the coins of my breath.

We read about dying to the old Adam (and Eve) and about being reborn, and some of the ways in which this is talked about makes it sound as though this will happen as a Damascene moment. Bosco, who has written here, always describes his experience of being born again in such a manner. I cannot say, though I can say it has never happened to me. What I have experienced is what the poet talks about here.

I have in me a myriad, a legion. There is still the little girl whose father used to wait outside church every Sunday, refusing to go in because he did not believe in God, but fulfilling his dead wife’s last wish that their daughter (me) should go to church. There is still the gawky pre-teen grieving for her father and wondering what would become of her. There are even more traces of the teenager who retreated into her books because the world there was better. Then there are the strangers I was. The young (too young) virgin bride who looked forward to living happily ever after; if only Pride and Prejudice had not stopped with Lizzie and Mr Darcy getting wed. The confused ex-wife wondering where her life was going. The patient, awaiting, patiently, the results of the cancer tests and operation (successful). All of these were me, they are layers, deep waters, and as part of my life as a Christian I have to do what the poet describes here. If I am going to be ‘made new’ I need to dive deep.

Salvation is a process. I was saved in baptism, I will, I hope, be saved at the Last, and in between times the blessed sacraments renew my life in him. But there is nothing automatic in this life-long process. And when I sin, or when I break down (as I did not long ago) I have to do something hard. In the first place accept these things and not deny or hide from them. And then this I have to do – dive deep, down to where the picked bones of my pasts remain. It costs. It hurts. If it doesn’t, I have not dived deep enough.

What I find there is not easily put into words, and as Thomas remarked in an earlier poem, the very act of putting it into words denudes it of much of its meaning, diminishing it. It involves a death, a death to a part of me which I don’t like and doesn’t like me diving deep, a death to sin, of sin. But to dive that deep means you lose control and yes, there is that rush of blood to the eardrums you get if you dive too deep. You have to accept that if you want to die to sin. But it is not a one-off process. The process, the dive, and the pain, is repeated. And if you wait, if you accept, then when the moment comes round again, you breathe in deeply and head down, right down to where but the rocks remain.

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!

Amen

Waiting was last week’s theme. we explored its varied nature, it surprises, its frustrations, its longeurs and its ephiphanies. There was, as there is always with Thomas, an acknowledgement, too, of its difficulties. As creatures we do not take to waiting easily. But this week’s theme is an even more difficult one – “Acceptance”.

It is difficult because it we are not careful it can become an excuse for injustice:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

The Church has form here. Acceptance is not the same as fatalism. Jesus was not a therapist, neither was he a political agitator, he was the Son of God, the Word made flesh, and he came because God does not accept that our sinful nature is incurable. Christians are called to act, but before we get on with the task of changing the world, we might begin with the hugely hard task of changing ourselves. It is immeasurably hard because, put simply, we can’t do it; not by ourselves. He hung and suffered there for us; he accepted death, even death on a Cross, for our sakes. We should accept that love – but also accept what comes with it.

Our Holy Mother, the Virgin Mary, is the model of acceptance. I can imagine how it must feel to be told at a very young age that you are pregnant – there was a girl at my school who had to “withdraw” in the lower-sixth because she had had an “accident.” Early pregnancy was more of a common occurence in the past, and women accepted it. But there was a proviso – you were supposed ot be married. Patriarchal societies have always put a value on female virginity. We are told Joseph was a “righteous man”, and the evidence is that when he discovered his bethrothed was pregnant he did not do what he had the right to do, which was to shame her for her infidelity, but was minded to put her away privately.

We are so familiar with the story it is worth standing back for a moment to see what “acceptance” means here, and why this poem is so appropriate for us at this point in our journey.

Mthr. Carys, in her essay, points out that it is a reflection of

a radical attempt to “domesticate” God … acceptance … is rooted in prayer, observation, questioning, acknowledgement of our own folly and frailty

p. 38

And we see here all of that in the actions of the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph.

Imagine, if you will, as a young fiancée trying to explain to your bethrothed that ‘yes’ you are a ‘virgin’ but ‘yes’ you are pregnant. I suspect most men would simply refuse to believe it – how unlikely a tale is that? But let’s go back one step to Mary. You are reading quietly, a figure appears and tells you you are going to be with child and that child will be the Messiah. You ask how it can be, you are a virgin? A choice was offered her. Whatever else she knew, she must have known how people would react. We know from extra-biblical sources that there were rumours about the parentage of Jesus circulated by his enemies. Mary must have known it would be hard, and yet she accepts:

And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Luke 1:38

By her acceptance of the word of God the gates of salvation were opened – though her heart would be pierced many times. And let us not forget Joseph. He accepted what the angel told him, he did not question or doubt. He accepted. We cannot know how hard that was, but in doing so, he protected Mary and became the foster-father to her son. He accepted all that in faith.

So too, in the poem, does the hill farmer, amid the strains, stresses and weariness of everyday life, accept God, the God he sees around him in those everyday things. It is no Eden, there is no idyll, and the sceptic might point and say “where is your God?” There is no easy answer. Our farmer’s heart has been broken, life is bleak, but he, like Our Lady and St Joseph, accepts and says “So be it.”

In acceptance lies Grace. If we embrace God’s will then the path will not be smooth, neither will it be strewn with primroses. Acceptance means we align ourselves as best we can with God’s will – and yes, wait, and see him in the moon and the stars even as we meet him this day in the breaking of the bread. Come, Lord Jesus, come!