Wayside Pulpit (below) - Updated May 2010
The Year's Turning
Seasons of Sadness - Seasons of Joy; Christ's Church Ever Replenishes Its People
As, Year by Year, They Travel Through "The Wilderness of this World"
Towards Their Appointed Home.
Temporality
Little more than a chip flown off from the solid stone of eternity,
A fragment, this, melted and flowing, running, never still:
Time, the so-fast river we all run in, racing – for us – to its end;
But it, too, will reach conclusion, cease also, for that is the nature of frantic motion,
It runs to its end, ineluctably.
And then will return all its ways and things to solidity, totality, to what it always is.
And that is why my present choices and decisions are one with true predestination,
Since all is truly set beyond my present choosing
(At times, in my fancy, I glimpse, peer, beyond this life, at all that always was, always is; a tiny opening.
Our inability, though, to recall aught before this life is one with blindness to that beyond; veiling.
How might the temporal the eternal scan?)
Eternally real though, the fragment’s source (the only reality) for all that.
2010
Sacrament
Indeed, he has no hands but our hands,
To do his work of helping, showing, upholding;
But these hands are hands that have held, in their palms,
The soft, fragile form of an oh so-vulnerable one,
He in his weakest and smallest;
Yes, a little thing, white, and brittle-seeming.
Surely, he has no mouths but our mouths,
To speak his words of wonder, comfort and constrain;
But this mouth is a mouth that has held within it, briefly,
The full shock of his presence,
Disquiet almost … glory …indefinable warmth …
Weak, brittle - but of a power I could not begin to know,
Not comprehend or analyse,
Only look back, longingly,
at how this secret moment
Has worked its loving ministry
In all my otherwise-drabness.
I have words, many words,
Words that can scan and snare a myriad things,
Throw out to view, expose;
But I have no words to hold, embrace, this wondrousness,
Sort it out and slice it, open it to others’ view;
Convince them.
2010
Rejection
Even the harsh, hard straw scratched at his thin salted flesh, in the place he was laid,
Refusing the soft tenderness of any warm caress, gentleness, even in his earliest beginning;
- And see how Christmas sentiment makes the warm, adoring tongues of peaceful beasts
Lap against him, lovingly,
Where, in reality, their angry hunger perhaps pushed him roughly aside
(Not enough, it was, for worried parents to be thrust into an outhouse, in the first place).This is not our home, this thing of earth, and now-ness, the familiar fact of being in a known place,
Known before aught was known.
For if the world of first experience throws one out (angered, more embarrassed, probably), as it did him,
Then the whole world is alien, other.
Surely not our home, this scrap of moving earth, this passing, this ending moment,
Gone before present;
A place outraged at us, shocked.
But not a shock to him.Important, at the centre, was his owns’ transience, shallowness,
For only when it came in power, Spirit, could the things of our world solidify to certainty, resolve,
Capacity to change everything, all;
Till then, those around him, no less than any, folded and feared, rushed back to safe certainties –
Such they surely appeared; compliance, silence,
The same non-opposition to all, that mars our latter-day leaders - weakness.Solid becoming, also, were the awkward strands,
For even soft straws can easily harden to thorns,
Easily, also, enmesh to serve harsh cruelty,
Turn hardness into sharp pain,
Stiffness wreathed, entangled, into a mocker’s ring,
That runs and writhes in circles to flaunt its stained victory.Only seeming so, however, since only the once could our rejection work; it will not the next.
2009
Some of the images of this poem were inspired by some words of G. W. Target:
“ … Nazareth of Galilee, where He was now so entirely without honour that He had been thrust out of the synagogue by His wrathful fellow-citizens, ... for preaching that He Himself, Joseph the carpenter’s son, was the fulfilment of scripture …” – p. 37
“His mother bore Him, then, flesh made God, God made flesh, tended Him, washed Him in water to supple Him, rubbed Him in salt, as was the custom, suckled Him … … And a manger for the child, with straws almost as sharp to His tenderness then as the thorns after, His first bed as uneasy at first as His Cross at last.” – p. 57.
- G. W. Target, Watch with me. Spiritual exercises towards learning the lesson of penitence and humiliation at the foot of the Cross, London, Gerald Duckworth, 1961.
Action: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, etc.
I used to work in an office next to a young woman who always had a List of Things to Do next to her computer. Thinking about this, recently, I realised that St. Paul was a compulsive “list maker”. You know about list-making – as in all those time-management task-oriented training days, at work, which encourage you to set out everything the boss thinks is important (and then prioritise, and “action” them); or all those lists of need-to-do things stuck to your fridge door, by friendly-looking magnetised badges; sometimes they can appear threatening – so much to achieve, so little time. But alternatively, they can be encouraging if we think to use them in another way: they can be lists of things we’ve succeeded at – like CVs, listing qualifications and experience – or lists of good, virtuous, powerful things that are on our side - or can be, if we choose to concentrate on them. Paul’s lists are of precisely this kind. In one, he seems to hint that all the good and virtuous things will develop naturally if we simply tend, properly, the seed we’ve planted. Thus love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5, 22) are the “fruit” or “harvest” of the Spirit, so that if we water the plant regularly (well, not much need for watering at the moment) they will flourish, perhaps without our realising it. Concentrate on the one essential, I’ve often considered – filling your life with the presence of God – and the rest will simply follow; here is something which does its work imperceptibly, without our knowledge or effort, as seeds bring forth shoots, or the life of prayer and worship, which can silently spread out into all areas of one’s being. But in another list, Paul suggests we need a bit of effort, thus he sets out at great length the many things that the Christians at Phillipi should be concentrating on: that which is true, noble, just, pure, lovable, gracious, excellent, and admirable (Phillipians 4, 8) and, “Think on these things”, he says (in the language of the older translations); and myself, I always take that to mean think on these things, not all the rubbish that the media throw at us all the time, most of which is rarely excellent, and never pure. Above all, it’s very hard – I consider – to discover much truth in modern life, unless you look very persistently. Ours is a world ruled by fashions, illusions, and hopeless substitutes for what is real, most of them taking the form of some kind of pretend salvation, which seductively beckons in the form of possessions, wealth and fame – the false values of the celebrity culture (worse still, authorities and powers press magic formulae upon us – isms - whereby the answers to all the world’s problems can effectively be found). We live, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, in the City of Clap-Trap.
Perhaps the reality is a bit of both, we need effort, and inattention - working hard to practice the good things Paul lists, but also letting go of them in order to concentrate on the one priority, the source from which all will come. Actually, I think Paul had been on one of those task-management training days, for notice how good he is at the prioritising and “ranking”, in 1 Corinthians 13, 13: faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love.
October 2007
Wayside Pulpit
It is a long tradition, at least in Britain, that churches have external notice-boards on which Christians proverbs, mottoes or sayings ("sentence sermons") - perhaps quotations from the Bible, or a classic Christian writer - are displayed. I first remember seeing them outside one of our local Methodist churches, when I was growing up in Staffordshire, in the 1950s. I now intend to reproduce several such pithy sayings, many taken from The Complete Book of Zingers. Over 5000 Perfect One-Liners, by Croft M. Penz, Tyndale House Publishers (1990) (see my short review: Zingers in The Good BookStall) Here are my latest offerings:
It is Better to Die for Something Than to Live for Nothing
Peace Rules the Day, When Christ Rules the Mind
Gossip Doesn't Hurt Anyone - Unless It Is About Us
God Does Not Ask How Many Talents One Has - He Asks for Faithfulness
"A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it",
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, "Introductory".