A Sonnet for Candlemas

Against the dark our Saviour’s face is bright

Though the 12 days of Christmas ended at Twelth Night and Epiphany, there is another sense in which this season, in which we reflect on the great mystery of God in Christ as an infant, continues until February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.

This feast came to be called by the shorter and more beautiful name of Candlemas because the day it celebrates, recorded in Luke 2:22-40, is the day the old man Simeon took the baby in his arms and recognised him as ‘A Light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.’ It became the custom of the church to light a central candle and bring it to the altar to represent the Christ-light, and also on the occasion of this feast to bless all the ‘lights’ or candles in the church, praying that all who saw that outward and visible light would remember also and be blessed by the inner light of Christ ‘who lightens everyong who comes into the world.’

It had always been prophesied that God would one day come into the Temple that human beings had built for him, though Solomon, who built the first temple had said ‘even the Heavens are too small to hold you much less this temple I have built’. Candlemas is the day we realise that eternity can come into time and touch us in the form of a tiny child, that God appears at last in His Temple, not as a transcendent overlord, but as a vulnerable pilgrim, coming in His Love to walk the road of life along side us.

I am grateful to Margot Krebs Neale for the beautiful image above. She writes:

“This picture is of my first born on his first outing to walk to the station
with his grand-mother who was returning to France. he was four days old. On
the way back I stopped at the local bakers, whom I knew well and we were
both properly feasted. Was I proud and pleased! I choose it because
something of these lines was my feeling

Though they were poor and had to keep things simple,

They moved in grace, in quietness, in awe,

For God was coming with them to His temple.

He was a new little Temple of the Lord. There was definitely a sense of awe
for me. We chose his name for the Olive branch brought by the dove. I did
not like that shirt very much (it had been passed on) but for the dove…”

As always you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears or on the title of the poem

Candlemas

They came, as called, according to the Law.

Though they were poor and had to keep things simple,

They moved in grace, in quietness, in awe,

For God was coming with them to His temple.

Amidst the outer court’s commercial bustle

They’d waited hours, enduring shouts and shoves,

Buyers and sellers, sensing one more hustle,

Had made a killing on the two young doves.

They come at last with us to Candlemas

And keep the day the prophecies came true

We glimpse with them, amidst our busyness,

The peace that Simeon and Anna knew.

For Candlemas still keeps His kindled light,

Against the dark our Saviour’s face is bright.

O Adonai, my second Advent Antiphon reflection and sonnet

Back on December the 1st I posted a reflection and sonnet on the first of the seven great ‘O’ Antiphons of Advent; O Sapientia. today I turn to the second of these Antiphons; O Adonai. O Adonai touches on the ancient title of  God himself, who was called ‘Adonai’, meaning Lord, in the Old Testament, because his sacred name, the four letters known as ‘The Tetragramaton’, could not be uttered by unworthy human beings without blasphemy. But the Advent Hope, indeed, the Advent miracle, was that this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord, chose out of His own free will and out of love for us, to become known, to bear a name, and to meet us where we are. The antiphon prayer reflects on the mysterious and awesome manifestations of God to Moses on the mountain in the sign of the burning bush. For early Christians this bush, full of the fire of God’s presence, yet still itself and unconsumed, was a sign of the Lord Christ who would come, who would be fully God and yet also fully human. I have tried to pick up on some of these themes in the sonnet I wrote in response to this antiphon.

These sonnets now form part of Sounding the Seasons, a longer sequence of seventy sonnets for the Christian Year. It is out now, published by Canterbury Press. You can buy it from them, from Amazon, or order it through your local bookstore. You should be able to hear the antiphon and the sonnet by clicking on the ‘play’ button below, or if that does not appear in your browser then click on the title of the poem and you will be taken to my audioboo page.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,

et ei in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,

who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush

and gave him the law on Sinai:

Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm

O Adonai

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,

Unseeable, you gave yourself away,

The Adonai, the Tetragramaton

Grew by a wayside in the light of day.

O you who dared to be a tribal God,

To own a language, people and a place,

Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,

If so you might be met with face to face,

Come to us here, who would not find you there,

Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,

Who heard no more than thunder in the air,

Who marked the mere events and not the myth.

Touch the bare branches of our unbelief

And blaze again like fire in every leaf.

Image by Margot Krebs Neale

Thanks to Margot Krebs Neal for the beautiful photo above.For more information about the Advent Antiphons and the wisdom of the mediaeval mystics see Julia Bolton Holloway’s great site Umilita

To read and hear my first Advent sonnet O Sapientia click here

My Three talks on the Way of the Cross

Diego-Velazquez-The-Crucifixion-1632

This Good Friday I gave three talks, during our three hours devotions at St. Edwards of the Way of the cross, drawing on some of the Stations of The Cross sonnets which you can find on my previous post. I thought that some of my readres might like to hear them so here are the links to my podcast for them.

1) The Way of Exchange

2) The Way of Coinherence

3) The Way of Transformation

A Sonnet for Candlemas

Against the dark our Saviour's face is bright

Though the 12 days of Christmas ended at Twelth Night and Epiphany, there is another sense in which this season, in which we reflect on the great mystery of God in Christ as an infant, continues until February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.

This feast came to be called by the shorter and more beautiful name of Candlemas because the day it celebrates, recorded in Luke 2:22-40, is the day the old man Simeon took the baby in his arms and recognised him as ‘A Light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.’ It became the custom of the church to light a central candle and bring it to the altar to represent the Christ-light, and also on the occasion of this feast to bless all the ‘lights’ or candles in the church, praying that all who saw that outward and visible light would remember also and be blessed by the inner light of Christ ‘who lightens everyong who comes into the world.’

It had always been prophesied that God would one day come into the Temple that human beings had built for him, though Solomon, who built the first temple had said ‘even the Heavens are too small to hold you much less this temple I have built’. Candlemas is the day we realise that eternity can come into time and touch us in the form of a tiny child, that God appears at last in His Temple, not as a transcendent overlord, but as a vulnerable pilgrim, coming in His Love to walk the road of life along side us.

I am grateful to Margot Krebs Neale for the beautiful image above. She writes:

“This picture is of my first born on his first outing to walk to the station
with his grand-mother who was returning to France. he was four days old. On
the way back I stopped at the local bakers, whom I knew well and we were
both properly feasted. Was I proud and pleased! I choose it because
something of these lines was my feeling

Though they were poor and had to keep things simple,

They moved in grace, in quietness, in awe,

For God was coming with them to His temple.

He was a new little Temple of the Lord. There was definitely a sense of awe
for me. We chose his name for the Olive branch brought by the dove. I did
not like that shirt very much (it had been passed on) but for the dove…”

As always you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears or on the title of the poem

Candlemas

They came, as called, according to the Law.

Though they were poor and had to keep things simple,

They moved in grace, in quietness, in awe,

For God was coming with them to His temple.

Amidst the outer court’s commercial bustle

They’d waited hours, enduring shouts and shoves,

Buyers and sellers, sensing one more hustle,

Had made a killing on the two young doves.

They come at last with us to Candlemas

And keep the day the prophecies came true

We glimpse with them, amidst our busyness,

The peace that Simeon and Anna knew.

For Candlemas still keeps His kindled light,

Against the dark our Saviour’s face is bright.

Beginning again; re-reading GKC post-9/11

Came ruin and the rain that burns

I have been re-reading GK Chesterton’s astonishing poem The Ballad of the White Horse, the story of how, against all odds, King Alfred the Great resisted the seemingly inevitable collapse of England before the Danes. Chesterton intended his poem not so much as an historical work as a comment on his own times, when he was summoning England to resist the nihilism and despair embodied in the writings of Nietzsche and others. But it became again and again a poem of succeeding times, because it is a poem about the courage to begin again when evrything seems lost. When France fell and England seemed open to swift and inevitable invasion by the Nazis, the times leader was headlined by a quotation from this poem “Naught for your Comfort” which expressed at once the bleakness of our situation and a call to hope and resistance, for the lines go on:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, naught for your desire,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

….

“Night shall be thrice night over you,

And heaven an iron cope.

Do you have joy without a cause,

Yea, faith without a hope?”

That same phrase ‘Nought for your Comfor’t was taken up again by Trevor Huddleston in the great struggle against appartheid. Now it sems to me a we come to remember the fall of the twin towers that another part of this great poem can speak to us afresh.

I am reading from a point in the poem where Alfred has been apparently routed at Ethandune and his men are about to give up and accept the inevitability of destruction and defeat. Chesterton suddenly introduce the image of a child patiently building and rebuilding a tower that keeps falling. That child-like capacity to renew and begin again, seems a good thing to remember today

As always you can here me reading the extract on audioboo by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears, or on the link in the words ‘beginning again’

From Book VII Ethandune: The Last Charge

Beginning Again

Away in the waste of White Horse Down

An idle child alone

Played some small game through hours that pass,

And patiently would pluck the grass,

Patiently push the stone.

…..

On the lean, green edge for ever,

Where the blank chalk touched the turf,

The child played on, alone, divine,

As a child plays on the last line

That sunders sand and surf.

….

Through the long infant hours like days

He built one tower in vain–

Piled up small stones to make a town,

And evermore the stones fell down,

And he piled them up again.

And crimson kings on battle-towers,

And saints on Gothic spires,

And hermits on their peaks of snow,

And heroes on their pyres,

And patriots riding royally,

That rush the rocking town,

Stretch hands, and hunger and aspire,

Seeking to mount where high and higher,

The child whom Time can never tire,

Sings over White Horse Down.

….

And this was the might of Alfred,

At the ending of the way;

He saw wheels break and work run back

And all things as they were;

And his heart was orbed like victory

And simple like despair.

….

And as a child whose bricks fall down

Re-piles them o’er and o’er,

Came ruin and the rain that burns,

Returning as a wheel returns,

And crouching in the furze and ferns

He began his life once more.

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Marriage 1 The Ring

The garden at Westcott House

To start my series of poems leading up to the Royal Wedding, here is a sonnet I wrote for Maggie for our wedding on St. Mary Magdalene’s day in 1984. We had chosen ‘the wedding at Cana’ as our reading, our reception was in the beautiful cloister garden of Westcott House in Cambridge. As always you can hear the sonnet either by pressing the ‘play’ button, if it appears in your browser, or else by clicking on the title of the poem.

The Ring

Join hands with me and step into the ring

Shining in white with flowers in your hair.

The word Himself will give us songs to sing

And move the hidden voices of the air.

Here in his garden, where He laid His treasure

And came Himself before the day was dawning,

Here where he gave a gift beyond our measure,

And Mary’s footfall echoed in the morning,

Here He will raise us up and quench our thirst,

Setting upon our happiness his sign,

As, at His bidding in the wedding feast,

Waters of cleansing reddened into wine.

Then we shall turn to him with joy and sing

Whose love surrounds us in a golden ring.

Letting Go for Lent

Van Gogh’s painting of The Sower

Sing a song of sowing, of carrying the seed

A song of hopeful planting, to meet a future need,

Sing a song of letting go, and falling to the ground,

Of burying that feels like loss, still waiting to be found

These are the opening words of a lyric I wrote for Redemption Song, a play about the story of Ruth and Naomi, but they have come back to me as I turn my thoughts to the late Lent that starts this month. It seems fitting that Lent, a season for ‘letting go’ should coincide with spring, a season for sowing seed. Perhaps we should see our Lenten observance as the ‘letting go’ of a Sower of Seed, and not just the ‘giving up’ of an Abstemious Pharisee. If there are things we choose to do without, perhaps we should let them go into God, drop them as seeds, into the good ground of His Love, so as to receive them back at his hand, in another form and another season. This is what Jesus did for his forty days in the wilderness. He let go, and said ‘no’ to the temptation to make stones into bread, to make a private feast in the desert. But God took the seed of what he had ‘let go’ and it bore fruit a hundred fold when he broke bread in that same wilderness and shared it with five thousand. God gave him back what he gave up, but in a newer and better form, made possible by that first letting go.

And that was true of the deepest letting go of all. When it comes to Holy Week and Passiontide we shall see Jesus let his whole life go into God; “into thy hands I commit my spirit” he says from the cross. But that Good Friday ‘letting go and falling to the ground’, that ‘burying that felt like loss’ was the prelude to a glorious finding, and giving back on Easter Day.

Perhaps we can so ‘let go’ our lives into God this Lent that we may find that God has let his life go into us too, has planted his Love, His Son, as a spring-sown seed, to grow in our lives from Easter and Beyond.

Oh and by the way the lyric I mentioned above is from a song, also simply called Redemption, which I hope will appear on my next cd. Meanwhile the full lyrics are here and you can hear an early ‘mix’ of the whole song  here, or by clicking on the ‘play’ button below.

The Words for ‘What If…’

Since I mentioned my poem ‘What If’ in the previous post and linked to my audioboo reading of it, various people have asked me for a copy of the words, so here they are, including the quotation from Mathew’s Gospel which is the poem’s point of departure. when I first posted this poem on facebook I prefaced it with this remark:

For different reasons we have all on both sides of the Atlantic, been reflecting on the way our words can travel and unravel beyond us, on the need to care for the tenor of what we say, here’s a poem reflecting further on that:

What If…

“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” Mathew 12:36-37

What if every word we say
Never ends or fades away,
Gathers volume gathers weigh,
Drums and dins us with dismay
Surges on some dreadful day
When we cannot get away
Whelms us till we drown?

What if not a word is lost,
What if every word we cast
Cruel, cunning, cold, accurst,
Every word we cut and paste
Echoes to us from the past
Fares and finds us first and last
Haunts and hunts us down?

What if every murmuration,
Every otiose oration
Every oath and imprecation,
Insidious insinuation,
Every blogger’s aberration,
Every facebook fabrication
Every twittered titivation,
Unexamined asservation
Idiotic iteration,
Every facile explanation,
Drags us to the ground?

What if each polite evasion
Every word of defamation,
Insults made by implication,
Querulous prevarication,
Compromise in convocation,
Propaganda for the nation
False or flattering peruasion,
Blackmail and manipulation
Simulated desparation
Grows to such reverberation
That it shakes our own foundation,
Shakes and brings us down?

Better that some words be lost,
Better that they should not last,
Tongues of fire and violence.
O Word through whom the world is blessed,
Word in whom all words are graced,
Do not bring us to the test,
Give our clamant voices rest,
And the rest is silence.

The Daily Miracle

What a miracle that you should be reading this! The everyday miracle that we call ‘reading’, a miracle of interpretation, of leaps from shapes on paper, to unsounded sounds in the mind, leaps from sounds to meaning, and from common meaning to a communion of minds! We take it all for granted, we scarcely notice what we are doing, but sometimes we should pause and reflect what an extraordinary achievement literacy is, and how privileged we are to be able to do it.

In my first post of the year I mentioned that we had cause to celebrate the anniversary of the King James Version, and literacy itself is one the many good fruits of that perpetually fruitful book. The KJV clarified, dignified, and replenished the English language, but it was also the prime motivator for a spread of literacy. Countless local schools, philanthropic trusts, and bible societies sprung up in the wake of this translation with the prime aim of teaching literacy to ordinary people so that they could take the Bible up in their own hands, and draw from the deep well of the scriptures for themselves. The great revivals in our history since then, the evangelical revival for example and the rise of Methodism led to an explosion in demand for Bibles and for the skill of reading them. Then those people, many of them adults, who first learned to read so as to read God’s word, went on to read and write more widely and to create that culture shift whereby we now see literacy as a birthright that should be extended to all, not , as it once was, the preserve of an elite. Even in our own age the desire to share, to make the Bible available in many new languages and in many remote places is also the driving force for literacy campaigns that bring with them so many other benefits for human development and wellbeing.

But even as we pause in the act of reading this text and give thanks for the gift of literacy and those whose time and effort gave us that gift, thanks for all the truth and pleasure we have found in reading and writing, we might ask: ‘Is there another, and deeper literacy we have yet to acquire?’ As children we learned that each of the outer shapes, made of ink on paper that we call ‘letters’ was more than just a shape, but that they made sounds which in turn made words, words that carried a meaning , a meaning meant for us and sent to us by the one who wrote them. And so we learned to Spell. Perhaps the time is coming when we will learn that the world itself is full of shapes and sounds that also have a meaning, when science will move on from learning and describing the outer shapes of nature, like a child learning the letters of an alphabet, and become a more holistic and spiritual science by putting the letters together and starting to spell out slowly  the deeper truths God wants to teach us, written for us in his works as well as in his word. As George Herbert put it, reflecting alike on the twin mysteries of the scriptures and the world around us:

‘Thy Word is all, if we could spell‘

Next time, a poem of mine reflecting on these themes; “Summon the Summoners, a Good Spell”

 

A New Painting and an Interview

I’m so fortunate to be surrounded by all sorts of creative people here but a couple of my friends have each in their own way, come up with a some surprises for me that I’d like to share here, not least because the insights and skills of these two friends ended up giving me some new insights into who I am and what I’m meant to be doing.

The first of these surprises was unveiled in the course of my Birthday gig at the Blue Ball. Henri Schmitt is a painter and musician whom I first met at a talk I was giving on Bob Dylan. He sings and plays guitar, mandolin and bozouki, and has occasionally played at my gigs. I knew he also painted but I had no idea how well or powerfully until last Thursday night when he unveiled a beautiful painting inspired by my song The Green Man and just gave it to me. I was  amazed both by the generosity and by the power of he painting itself. you will be too, here it is:

The Green Man

The second surprise ‘unveiling’, was the publication on her Rawgarden Blog of an interview by my friend Karen Wells, whose lovely felts and friendship had inspired my song Lente Lente. She does an occasional series called “from where I’m sitting; tales from a garden bench”. She chose her questions so well that I ended up saying more than I knew I knew about my vocation as a poet. Reading the interview on her blog turned out to be another revelation, rather like Henri’s painting, of who I am and who I am meant to be. Karen illustrated the interview with a picture she took in my garden, she is a real garden spirit and I always feel relaxed and rooted when she is around, maybe that’s why both the photo and the interview have brought out things I hardly knew were there.

I am still  sifting through, and learning from the rich experiences and new friends I made in Texas, but watch this space, I will be reflecting a little more on that soon.

Malcolm brings 'tales from a garden bench'