Deep, Deep Down Heart

How do you know what you know
because you've seen it with your eyes?
How do you know where to go,
how to identify your guides?
How do you see what was next
In your palm or a show of cards?
How do you learn to detect
The outlines of a scar?

Now the sky holds the night,
As the trees hold the shade.
And the road holds the map
Of every journey I've made.
And the clouds hold the sigh
Of the wind and the rain
In my deep, deep down heart...
My deep, deep down heart.


Now these wheels go so fast
There is nothing here to hold;
I keep pushing back the past
So that the future can unfold.
I guess the best of my mistakes
Show me all that I don't know.
But this strange kind of ache
Never seems to let me go.


And the sky holds the night,
And the trees hold the shade,
And the stars hold the light
That's traveled all this way.
But who holds my hand
So I am not afraid
In my deep, deep down heart
My deep, deep down heart?


I thought I heard my name
Walking late tonight
From the porch after the rain
In this rowing down the light.
There was no one standing there
Beyond the lantern's cast,
But just voices in the air
But just questions that ask,


How the sky holds the night?
How the trees hold the shade?
How your sleep holds your dreams
Till they shake you awake?
And how love holds you up
And then to chooses to break
Your deep, deep down heart...
Your deep, deep down heart?

--Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Things That We Are Made Of, 2016

 

Change

If you knew that you would die today
If you saw the face of God and Love
Would you change?
Would you change?
If you knew that love can break your heart
When you're down so low you cannot fall
Would you change?
Would you change?
How bad how good does it need to get?
How many losses how much regret?
What chain reaction
What cause and effect
Makes you turn around
Makes you try to explain
Makes you forgive and forget
Makes you change
Makes you change
If you knew that you would be alone
Knowing right being wrong
Would you change?
Would you change?
If you knew that you would find a truth
That brings a pain that can't be soothed
Would you change?
Would you change?
How bad how good does it need to get?
How many losses how much regret?
What chain reaction
What cause and effect
Makes you turn around
Makes you try to explain
Makes you forgive and forget
Makes you change
Makes you change
Are you so upright you can't be bent
if it comes to blows
Are you so sure you won't be crawling
If not for the good why risk falling
Why risk falling
If everything you think you know
Makes your life unbearable
Would you change?
Would you change?
If you'd broken every rule and vow
And hard times come to bring you down
Would you change?
Would you change?
If you knew that you would die today
If you saw the face of God and Love
Would you change?
Would you change?

--Tracy Chapman, Where You Live, 2005 

 

The Hidden Singer

The gods are less for their love of praise. 
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together --
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.

--Wendell Berry (1934- )

A Song for Simeon

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house,
where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation

Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

--T. S. Eliot, The Ariel series, 1927

Scripture Reference: Luke 2:25-35

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise. 

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996)

Christmas Carol

The earth has grown old with its burden of care,
But at Christmas it always is young,
The heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair,
And its soul full of music bursts forth on the air,
When the song of the angels is sung.

It is coming, Old Earth, it is coming to-night!
On the snowflakes that cover thy sod.
The feet of the Christ-child fall gentle and white,
And the voice of the Christ-child tell out with delight
That mankind are the children of God.

On the sad and the lonely, the wretched and poor,
The voice of the Christ-child shall fall;
And to every blind wanderer open the door
Of hope that he dared not dream of before,
With a sunshine and welcome for all.

The feet of the humblest may walk in the field
Where the feet of the Holiest trod,
This, then, is the marvel the mortals revealed
When the silvery trumpets of Christmas have pealed,
That mankind are the children of God.

--Phillips Brooks

Sonnet for Christmas

These are the things our Christmas Day should leave
Untarnished and untouched by dust and blight:
The warm, sweet kindliness of Christmas Eve,
Its heavenly glow of rapture and delight;
The breathless wonder that the stars awake;
The new-found faith that where a child is born
There is a little life for God's own sake,
Though lowly be its lot on Christmas morn;
The wide good-will we feel for all mankind
And that true peace that heals the aching mind.
And though the hurrying years be loud with strife,
A radiance lives that all men yet shall see,
A golden glory, rich with fullest life,
When each shall know his own divinity.

--Vincent G. Burns

A Song of Christ's Goodness (Canticle Q, Enriching Our Worship 1)

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
  You are gentle with us as a mother with her children;
Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
  tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgement.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
  in sickness you nurse us,
  and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
  by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.
Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness:
  through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.
Your warmth gives life to the dead:
  your touch makes sinners righteous.
Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us:
  in your love and tenderness remake us.
In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness:
  for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.

--St. Anselm of Canterbury, (1033-1109)

Mosaic from the altar of Dominus Flavit Church on the Mount of Olives.

Song of True Motherhood (Canticle R, Enriching Our Worship 1)

God chose to be our mother in all things
and so made the foundation of his work,
most humbly and most pure, in the Virgin's womb.
God, the perfect wisdom of all,
arrayed himself in this humble place.
Christ came in our poor flesh
to share a mother's care.
Our mothers bear us for pain and for death;
our true mother, Jesus bears us for joy and endless life.
Christ carried us within him in love and travail,
until the full time of his passion.
And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy,
still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.
All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God,
for the love of Christ works in us,
Christ is the one whom we love.

-- Dame Julian of Norwich, Shewings, 1395

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet and Jesuit priest, 1877

The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air We Breathe

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet and Jesuit priest, 1877

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces. 

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet and Jesuit priest

Photo: Kingfisher, from the Irish News: https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2017/04/08/news/take-on-nature-why-the-kingfisher-is-known-as-the-halcyon-bird--986553/

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

-- William Butler Yeats (1865-1933), 1890

Sand and Water

All alone, I didn't like the feeling
All alone, I sat and cried
All alone, I had to find some meaning
In the center of the pain I felt inside.

All alone, I came into this world
All alone, I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water and a million years gone by.

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave.

All alone, I heal this heart of sorrow

All alone I raise this child
Flesh and bone, he's just bursting towards tomorrow
And his laughter fills my world and wears your smile.

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave.

All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water and a million years gone by.

--Beth Nielsen Chapman, Sand and Water, 1997

Every December Sky

Every December sky
Must lose its faith in leaves
And dream of the spring inside the trees.
How heavy the empty heart,
How light the heart that's full.
Sometimes I have to trust what I can't know
Sometimes I have to trust what I can't know.

We walk into Paradise;
The angels lend us shoes.
'Cause all that we own,
We'll come to lose,
And Heaven is not so far
Outside this womb of words.
With every rose that blooms
My soul is assured
It's just like a song I've known
Yet still unheard.

And every leaf of fire lets go,
Melting in the arms of earth and snow.
And if I could hold you now,
You'd enter like a sigh.
You'd be the wind that blows
The answer to "why?"
You'd be the spring-filled trees
Of every December sky.

--Beth Nielsen Chapman, Deeper Still, 2002

When I Was The Forest

When I was the stream, when I was

the forest, when I was still the field
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky

itself,

No one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not

love.

It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known

before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged—I begged to wed every object

and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you
been?”

For then I knew my soul—every soul—
has always held
Him.

-- Meister Eckhart, 1260-1328

Death Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet X)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

--John Donne (1572-1631), from Holy Sonnets, 1633

Scripture reference: 1 Corinthians 15:26

Photo: Victory over death, churchyard of the Cathedral of St. Michael and All Archangels, Christchurch, Barbados, July, 2013.

Affinity

Consider this man in the field beneath,
Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,
Without joy, without sorrow,
Without children, without wife,
Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,
A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,
For his name also is written in the Book of Life.

Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers
That rot in your heart's dust, and what have you to give
To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?
From the standpoint of education or caste or creed
Is there anything to show that your essential need
Is less than his, who has the world for church,
And stands bare-headed in the woods' wide porch
Morning and evening to hear God's choir
Scatter their praises? Don't be taken in
By stinking garments or an aimless grin;
He also is human, and the same small star,
That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind
With the old hunger, born of his kind.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest

Annunciation

The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound’s perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

--Edwin Muir (1887-1959, Scots poet and translator, from The Narrow Place, 1943 

Annunciation, George Hitchcock, 1887, Art Institute of Chicago

Links: Notes on the Hitchcock Painting from AIC

Scripture Reference: Luke 1:26-38

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning 
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

--Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early, 2004

Christ-hymn from "The Everlasting Mercy"

...I kneeled there in the muddy fallow,

I knew that Christ was there with Callow,

That Christ was standing there with me,

That Christ had taught me what to be,

That I should plough, and as I ploughed

My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,

And as I drove the clods apart

Christ would be ploughing in my heart,

Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,

Through all my bad life's rotten fruits.

 

O Christ who holds the open gate,

O Christ who drives the furrow straight,

O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter

Of holy white birds flying after,

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn,

And Thou wilt bring the young green corn,

The young green corn divinely springing,

The young green corn forever singing;

And when the field is fresh and fair

Thy blessèd feet shall glitter there,

And we will walk the weeded field,

And tell the holden harvests's yield,

The corn that makes the holy bread

By which the soul of man is fed,

The holy bread, the food unpriced,

Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.

 

The share will jar on many a stone,

Thou wilt not let me stand alone;

And I shall feel (thou wilt not fail),

Thy hand on mine upon the hale.

 

-- John Masefield (1878-1967), 1911

 

Links: Full Poem

Some keep the Sabbath by going to Church (236)

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church --
I keep it, staying at Home --
With a Bobolink for a Chorister --
And an Orchard, for a Dome --

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice --
I just wear my Wings --
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton -- sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman --
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at least --
I'm going, all along.

--Emily Dickinson

At the round earth's imagin'd corners (Holy Sonnet VII)

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if Thou'dst sealed my pardon, with Thy blood.

--John Donne, Holy Sonnets, 1633

Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

-- Robert Frost (1874-1963) from A Witness Tree (1942)

a man who had fallen among thieves

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less 
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal 
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly 
confessed a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.

-- e e cummings,  Complete Poems 1904-1962, 1926

i am a little church(no great cathedral)

i am a little church(no great cathedral)

far from the splendour and squalor of hurrying cities

– i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest

i not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;

my prayers are prayers of the earth’s own clumsy striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around them surges a miracle of unceasing

birth and glory in death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols

of hope,and I wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic

world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature

– i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to

merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

--e. e. cummings, 95 Poems, 1958

 

Links: A Theological Reflection on the little church of e e cummings

The Pillar of the Cloud

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom;
   Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
   Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

O was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou
   Shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
   Lead thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long thy power  hath blest me, sure it still
   Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
   The night is gone;
And with the morn, those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

--John Henry Newman, 1801-1890