One retreat, two poems

I was on retreat on the Island of Lewis last month with three friends, directed by a fourth friend who lives on the island in a community of two Anglican religious. We four stayed in a self-catering house in Back; Sister Clare came over from Gress - though one day we walked there for the Evening Office. It was memorable in several ways, which I don't intend to go into here, and produced two poems.


OUTBURST

O, be silent when the God speaks - 

do not blurt your blunted vision

to distort or seek to bend

the flow of love and pain.

Listen. Open. Feel the keenness

of the shaft that wounds the soul;

feel the way you change, but quiet

like a child that hears a call.

Only then, within that silence

can the music truly sing,

make the wordless song of heaven

sweep you up until your tongue

is freed from all the weight of language

 - free to wonder, free to cease -

and your soul can shed what has been,  

free to wander heaven’s peace.

© C.M.M. Back, Lewis, June 2019

JORDAN

The burden of that sudden light

Overwhelms my shrinking self

As I step into the surge

Of life and what will come.

The holy dove, its wings outspread,

Hovers close. No comfort there.

I see the darkness pressing back

Around the edges of my world

Through eyes half closed,

Through lash and hair

That covers my defenceless face.

The water swirls. I feel the tug

Of forces far beyond my reach.

I will obey. God, I accept

- will lift this burden that is Light.

© C.M.M.

Back, Lewis, June 19.

This second poem was inspired by a painting by Daniel Bonnell of the Baptism of the Christ, which you can see here: http://www.bonnellart.com/2012-2015.html

(The Baptism of the Christ II, 42x68", oil on canvas, Sold)

Not easy on a bus

I was reflecting the other day how much more difficult simple faith (in God, mostly, on this occasion, but not exclusively) has become in the past century or so. And I think I was ruminating ruefully - do you have a vision of a sad cow? Trouble is, we know too much. All of us, in varying degrees, are equipped with more awareness of what constitutes our surroundings than were our forebears.

Start with something non-religious. Think of these medical dramas which show even the time of my own childhood, the documentaries which show doctors as white-coated invincibles, the patients as wide-eyed innocents ready to believe that all will be well as they descend into what Robert Frost called "the dark of ether". Nowadays fully-fledged hypochondriacs like me can look up procedures, statistics, symptoms, photos (God preserve us from the photos) and learn doubt. We realise when we are being soothed, and the best that can happen is that when we're actually in extremis we feel soothed. It's when normality returns that the doubt arrives.

And I think it's much the same with religion. All the old certainties - from hell to heaven and places in between - are now subject to the scrutiny of science and knowledge. We know what's up there, out there, beyond ... it's not a mystery any more. We can no longer feel sure that God's in his (note - his) heaven, which is up there in the sky. I remember wrestling at University with the teleological and ontological proofs of the existence of God, at a time when I didn't believe in anything. It was a struggle, but not a spiritual one. It changed nothing; it was easier than Formal Logic; I passed the exam.

All this conspires to make me increasingly irritated at people who assume that if you adhere to a faith you are either "throwing reason out of the window" (what my father said when I announced I was going to be confirmed at the age of 28) or are somehow sufficiently ill-informed to accept a child's version of religion. (I also become irritated at Christians who insist that that's the only way, but that's another story). Someone who thinks and challenges and argues is going to bring that attitude to what they call God - and if having done so they can find themselves happy with the language and attitudes of a faith system, that is where they will exercise their minds as well as their souls.

God - that word we use to describe the indescribable, remember? - God hasn't shrunk because we know the workings of the world that we used to consider a sacred mystery. God isn't the little shrivelled creature of some celebrated fiction. My understanding of this word, this concept, is of something at once all-encompassing and omnipresent and at the same time tiny enough to be within every mind that allows itself to wonder, every heart that allows itself to melt. God is in every moment of thankfulness; still there when the heart hardens and shuts God out.

When a faith-structure allows for this kind of vision, provides the framework of beauty and wonder and loss of the self-consciousness that inhibits, gives space for sorrow and joy and the tears of both, that is what I call Church.  When I find myself in it, I am grateful. When it is threatened - and it can so easily be threatened - it is like an impending death. When it solidifies into something else, I'm better off without it, sad though that feels.

But try explaining that over the dinner-table. Or on a bus.

Vernacular - a poem from a sermon. Sort of.

The opening two lines of this poem appeared unbidden in my mind as I was listening to the sermon in Holy Trinity last Sunday. Hugh, this is for you!

Vernacular

Abraham, Abraham - gonnae no?

Gonnae no dae that?

Is that how you might hear the God

these days, the moment that you’re poised 

to do whatever horrid thing seems suddenly 

a pressing need - the familiar

cadence of a homely voice? No

thundering winds, no wildfire roar

but unmistakably addressing you

with some urgency - no chance of

misunderstanding that.

You drop the knife right there, son,

and your boy lives.

How was it in the dark of night

when the Temple slept and the voice 

whispered through the echoing space

where the lamps flickered 

and the boy woke and heard

his name - Hey, Sam, Sam, 

gonnae waken up? 

And Elijah under his solitary bush?

Son, ye cannae sleep - Elijah 

eat your tea and get your strength and

get tae where ye’re gaun.

Are we bereft because we listen 

for the voice in perfect prose

preferably with a touch of

sixteen hundreds charm

and then we miss the total

urgency of what we need 

to hear, to heed, to know?

And so the cosmic words go on

in Babel tones among the crowd:

Écoute-moi - escucha -

 hören - ascoltare! The voice persists, 

the voice of  friend, of stranger

in a bar, a chance 

meeting by the way. So, all of yous

gonnae listen the noo?

©C.M.M. 06/13

Offspring of a poem

The poem that grew out of writing the previous one is now here on frankenstina.

Singing to God

Read this the other day and couldn't resist sharing it. It's from a commentary on the psalms by Augustine.

'Sing to God a new song, sing to him with joyful melody.' Each of us tries to discover how best to sing to God. We must sing to God, but we must sing well. God does not want his ears assaulted by our discordant voices. So sing well, my brothers and sisters, sing well!

If you were asked: 'Sing to please this musician,' you would not dare to do so without first having had some music lessons, because you would not want to offend such an expert in the art. An undiscerning listener does not notice the faults that an accomplished musician would point out to you. Who, then, offer to sing well for God, the great artist whose discrimination is faultless, whose attention notices the minutest detail, whose ear nothing escapes? When will you be able to offer him a perfect performance so that you will in no way displease such a supremely discerning listener?

Augustine goes on to tell us that in fact we should be bursting out with joyful song like harvesters in the fields, and I can't help feeling that this is a somewhat naive picture - can't help thinking of all these sore backs and aching muscles and the harvesters too exhausted to sing. But there are days when I think of poor God with his fingers in his ears.

Cosmically speaking, of course.

Norman MacCaig on God

This is the poem I read on Sunday which moved me to write again. I have Mr B to thank for pointing it out to me as we discussed the morning's readings. I can hear Norman MacCaig's voice in the words. I think it's great. I shall keep trying!

The big tease

When the flood went down
Noah was glad
in his gloomy way
and gave thanks to the Lord.

When the ram
made its pitiful noise
in the thicket
Abraham gave thanks to the Lord also.

They thought big in those days.
- Anyone who carried a joke
so far
must be the Lord.

Even Ishmael
had to admit it.

Norman MacCaig.

A Lenten thought.

When I first encountered the Episcopal church, I was fascinated by the structures and rituals by which ordinary people could order their lives. Brought up on the fringes of the Kirk, I had never even seen anyone kneel to pray in church - in fact, it was rare for anyone other than the minister to utter a word during the service unless in singing hymns. So when I became an active Episcopalian, I welcomed Lent as another opportunity to express my commitment - but to what? To God? Or to the church I had recently found?

Now I find I don't think about Lent in quite the same way. What I have done is spend time considering the relationship between the church and its teaching and the God we profess. And I find myself drawn to the idea that the whole structure has grown out of the difficulty of containing and expressing something too big for any of us to cope with. Perhaps all we can do, in Lent or at any other time, is stand in wonder and stop pretending we know anything.

But you don't make converts that way, do you?

The dying business

I read this extract from Le Milieu Divin by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin last night. I thought it was an extraordinary take on the business of dying - or the contemplation of it anyway - and reproduce the extract in its entirety.

It was a joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel that in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favourable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence. Now that I have found the joy of utilising all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.

After having perceived you as he who is ‘a greater myself’, grant, when my hour comes, that I may recognise you under the species of each alien or hostile force that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me. When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibres of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

The more deeply and incurably the evil in encrusted in my flesh, the more it will be you that I am harbouring – you as a loving, active principle of purification and detachment. Vouchsafe, therefore, something more precious still than the grace for which all the faithful pray. It is not enough that I shall die while communicating. Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion.

Gosh.