The meeting

THE MEETING

This the night when under the dark dome
the hard stars shine and that one
shines brighter than them all, the night
when power and pomp and wisdom and wealth
come seeking a king and find instead
love in ordinary, human love, vulnerable
to all that wounds beneath the sky -
This is that night. It comes again.

For earthly power was melted then
in tears of joy, of journey done,
of understanding what lay there
in poverty of place and rank
and all they knew, these visitors,
collapsed in shards of sudden loss
and left them free to live again -
This is that night.

©C.M.M. 6/01/16

All we go down ...

I was at a funeral yesterday, not as a mourner but as a provider of music, one of a quartet singing the Kontakion for the Departed at the end of a service in the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. This was significant for me personally in one important feature: it was doing exactly that at my very first funeral in that same cathedral 42 years ago that convinced me of all that I now believe in, as a consequence of which I was confirmed 9 months later and as a further consequence of which I came to live in Dunoon. There were differences, of course - that first funeral was of a friend, it was a requiem mass, the coffin was between the choir stalls and therefore right on front of me.

So I'd actually have gone a long way to sing this music again in that place and with these same musicians. But another truth dawned on me yesterday as I sang, and after the plainsong Nunc Dimittis with which we finished. It was a truth about music - that kind of music, timeless and beautiful and still. For after all the words, the telling to God of the deceased's character (thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts ... ) and the hymns that were deemed suitable, this was the moment when it seemed to me that the otherness of death came close, that the life of the world was dimmed and the life of heaven opened, and the possibilities of eternity were real and endless.

And weeping o'er the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia.

I would like to think that this music will be present for my end.

The Journey

Of course there was no serpent.

The tree's fruit was a mirror,

its temptation reflection.

R.S.Thomas wrote these words sometime around 1990, three years after I discovered his genius for the first time, three years after I wrote what I confessed was no more than a fan letter and was amazed and touched to receive a reply, weeks later. Having sent the letter c/o his publisher, I was thrilled by the extreme Welshness of his address: Sarn-y-Plas, yRhiw, Pwllheli, Gwynedd ... It seemed so remote, so other - and yet here was a poet whose writing had become, as I told him, like a liturgy to me. The poem of which the opening is a part comes from the collection Counterpoint, and I bought a copy in the church in the photo, R.S.'s last charge, in Aberdaron, right at the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula. The sea thundered on the beach outside, the wind whistled round the twin aisles, and I had arrived at the end of my journey.

That journey has brought me through collected poems, slim volumes, biographies, autobiography, film and audio - brought me to a road on which I visited two of his parishes and met two people who had known R.S. One, the kind man who hurried his lunch to open up the church at Eglwys Fach, had gone birdwatching with him. "He was a different man then, quite humorous, but in the pulpit - oh dear! If you went wanting to hear there was no hope, then that's what you heard." And he smiled gently. You could see that he'd been fond of him, this "typical English vicar" who followed "his own interests" and who had hidden so many bits of church furnishing in the boiler room - brass candle stands among them. He'd also painted the woodwork - all of it - matt black, disliking the shiny varnished yellow pine. The matt black remains, and looks wonderful, though it must've given his flock a fright. But the large black electric candelabra remain, put there by R.S. - maybe he thought the candle stands would have been superfluous.

The candelabra reappear in Aberdaron, in Eglwys Hywyn Sant, perched precariously on the edge of the beach, surrounded by a great tumble of tombstones. In this light, airy church I met one of the wardens, a woman who thirty years ago had been married by R.S. I asked what he'd been like - had she found him forbidding? "I get cross at people saying that" she replied. "He wasn't like that at all." She'd liked him, and people found him kind and attentive. Aberdaron felt very far from everywhere, there on the very tip of Wales, with the gales whipping up the Irish sea, and it was there that R.S. found his journey's end, a journey into the West.

But the inner journey went on. Counterpoint is opening new doors for me, as I ration myself to two poems a day - and yet these doors open and I find myself in familiar territory. R.S. famously got into bothers with his description of theology as metaphor, and yet what else can I think? What are we pretending, when we preach or try to share our Good News with one another? What the journey leads to is a greater insight, a greater awareness - of what is now, not of what once was - and whatever we call the greater good that illuminates that journey, surely that is the end to which we aspire?

There is no Trinity

in a glass. The self looks at the self

only and tenders its tribute.

(R.S. Thomas, Counterpoint.)

I shall return to Aberdaron, for there is still much to see, and to the journey ...

A strange Resurrection

I've just finished reading The Resurrection of the Body by Maggie Hamand. It was sent to me by a friend whose recommendations I trust, but for a while I wondered why I was reading it. Beginning with an apparent murder on Good Friday, this short novel explores belief, incredulity and loss of faith in the course of investigating a mystery, and is written in the simple, direct style of someone recounting a story they have gone over so often that all artifice has gone.

I read the greater part of the book today, having reached the point where I couldn't bear not to know what the outcome would be. I had grown accustomed to the dry style of narrative, to the short chapters with their artless titles. And now that it's done I find myself wishing it wasn't, and wanting to go on - except that the end of this story can't be written in twentieth-century terms. For how would we cope with the Resurrection? Would we not all be like the first century sceptics who said the disciples had hidden the body of Christ to prove a point? In giving us this very ordinary Anglican priest with all his flaws and hangups, Hamand has given us the chance to look again at our own beliefs - and perhaps our own deepest needs as well.

Re-engaging the brain

Feeling slightly recovered from the malaise of the past four days, I felt up to opening my new book. ( I must just add, however, that it is dispiriting to note that the 4lbs shed during the aforementioned four days seem to have come off such unhelpful parts of the anatomy as the fingers and the face. Perhaps this is why I needed to engage my brain again).

But a nos moutons. Spong's prologue and opening chapter have left me asking the same question as he does:

"Is faith so weak and life so afraid that those who dare to pose questions must expect to be attacked for faithlessness by the religiously insecure?"

Immediately before that question, he asks his readers if they have felt the tension between their inability to believe literally the supernatural things said about Jesus in the Bible and reiterated in Christian history and their being drawn "deeply and expectantly" into the Jesus experience. As one of these readers, I know that there are areas of my religious thought that I simply don't share - unless, perhaps, with an interested non-believer. Safer that way, don't you know.

There is little chance that someone like me will receive death-threats over this - unlike Spong. And my job doesn't depend on my toeing the party line. But surely all these highly-educated clergy of my acquaintance must know all this stuff? So what happens? Does every priest have to stick to the curriculum regardless of what they know? Is there a rule about this? (These aren't rhetorical questions: feel free to enlighten me)

I wasn't really brought up to believe much. I was taught the basics and allowed to go my own way, and it was experience of something which happened in an Anglican framework which caught me, so perhaps it was always going to be easy for me to question and to feel it was ok to use the brains I'd been given rather than give them a Sabbath rest. And yes, I'm a Christian, one who doesn't want to live in a mediaeval cosmology. Just let me keep the music ....