Thursday, March 31, 2022

Air and Angels



Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee, 
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
          Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
          But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
          More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
          And therefore what thou wert, and who,
                    I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
             Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
          For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
          Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
          So thy love may be my love's sphere;
                    Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

--John Donne (1572-1631), Anglican priest, poet, essayist, and founding member of the Metaphysical poets, whose feast day is today.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning



As virtuous men pass mildly away,
     And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
     The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
     No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
     To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
     Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
     Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
     (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
     Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
     That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
     Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
     Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
     Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
     As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
     To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
     Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
     Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
     And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne (1572-1631), Anglican priest, poet, essayist, Dean of St. Paul's in London, and founder of the Metaphysical Poets, whose feast day is today.

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

The Anointing at Bethany



Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus
so close the candles stir with their soft breath
and kindle heart and soul to flame within us,
lit by these mysteries of life and death.
For beauty now begins the final movement
in quietness and intimate encounter.
The alabaster jar of precious ointment
is broken open for the world’s true Lover.

The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
with all the yearning such a fragrance brings.
The heart is mourning but the spirit dances,
here at the very center of all things,
here at the meeting place of love and loss,
we all foresee, and see beyond the cross.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, theologian, poet, musician, and singer-songwriter


Lectionary Link: Lent 5C, John 12:1-8


Image: "Mary Anoints The Feet of Jesus," by Frank Wesley

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Mary's Word (Feast of the Annunciation)



With a sound of distant thunder
the rainbow-eyed stranger
spoke to me. She
called me “favored one,”
and that made me stop in mid-step.
Just this morning I’d been
a beast of burden hauling water
for the entire household
so that my soon-to-be mother-in-law
could weigh again the bargain that had been struck
for my labor, present and future.
I could still hear my father
walking away, his pockets jingling,
the matter settled.

“Favored one.”

And for once in my life
now I was presented a proposal,
just as a dove slid down
a shaft of sunlight, revealing
lilies in the ditch,
more radiant than Solomon
in his rumored glory.

No fool, at first
I didn’t speak, much less
laugh, but
hurried home.

She appeared again
as I was spinning flax into thread--
poppies nodding at her feet,
the lilies this time an offering
shoulders shadowed
beneath star-flecked wings
flexed half-open, ready to depart or remain
at my response.

The frosted fields had just begun to green
after winter’s bony grip slackened, yet
the sweet smell of honeysuckle
and rose swirled improbably (only
in my mind?)
with each incredible word
that pulled the tides of my
presumed future moon-ward:
favored by God,
a son with a name like
light and breath.
Unconditional love,
conditional to human consent.

“Who am I
to contain such grace?” My
heart filled with wonder, mind
reeling with choices that I’d never
held in my grasp before. It was
the kindness there, the honor
that gleamed in the angel’s eyes
that rose over the tattoo of my heart
and tempered wonder to resolve.

The choice was mine to make.

The gates of my assent swung wide.

I startled myself
with the sureness of that leap within
my heart. Yes
to bearing the joy, the questions and pain, yes
to Eternity enclosed and growing
beneath my heart’s tempest and flame,
yet my spirit also hovered as if afloat
on the breath of God
who enters only after
my offered “yes”
--THAT was the Word made flesh.

The pulse within me responded,
I am
the hand
maid of
the Lord
Most High.

Before words formed on my lips,
before the spindle fell
from tingling fingers
and I sighed the song
that would frame my life
and burst loose the narrow orbit
I had once inhabited.

Jesus
Jesus
Jesus

In that instant, I knew too
he would be my son, yet
never mine alone.

Assent brought ascent. My eyes raised
to sizzled rasp of receding wingbeat;
the eddied air swirled and reeled.
The messenger departed
bearing my gift
after she nodded and rose, leaving me
this first treasure of many
for the storehouse of my heart.




© 2022 Leslie Barnes Scoopmire- all rights reserved.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on March 24, 2022-- the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation.

Image: "The Annunciation," John William Waterhouse (British/Italian), 1914.

Thursday, March 17, 2022

A Song of Our True Nature (Canticle S)



Christ revealed our frailty and our falling, * 
    our trespasses and our humiliations.
Christ also revealed his blessed power, *
    his blessed wisdom and love.
He protects us as tenderly and as sweetly 
when we are in greatest need; *
    he raises us in spirit
    and turns everything to glory and joy without ending.
God is the ground and the substance, 
the very essence of nature; *
    God is the true father and mother of natures.
We are all bound to God by nature, *
    and we are all bound to God by grace.
And this grace is for all the world, *
    because it is our precious mother, Christ.
For this fair nature was prepared by Christ
for the honor and nobility of all, *
    and for the joy and bliss of salvation.

--Dame Julian of Norwich (1343-ca 1416), English mystic, visionary, and anchorite

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

A Song of Christ the Servant



(based on 1 Peter 2.21b–25)

1 Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, ♦
    that you should follow in his steps.
2 He committed no sin, no guile was found on his lips, ♦
    when he was reviled, he did not revile in turn.
3 When he suffered, he did not threaten, ♦
    but he trusted himself to God who judges justly.
4 Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, ♦
    that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
5 By his wounds, you have been healed,
for you were straying like sheep, ♦
    but have now returned
    to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.

--from the Church of England

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

A Song of Humility



(based on Hosea 6.1–6)

1 Come, let us return to the Lord ♦
    who has torn us and will heal us.
2 God has stricken us ♦
    and will bind up our wounds.
3 After two days, he will revive us, ♦
    and on the third day will raise us up,
    that we may live in his presence.
4 Let us strive to know the Lord; ♦
    his appearing is as sure as the sunrise.
5 He will come to us like the showers, ♦
    like the spring rains that water the earth.
6 ‘O Ephraim, how shall I deal with you? ♦
    How shall I deal with you, O Judah?
7 ‘Your love for me is like the morning mist, ♦
    like the dew that goes early away.
8 ‘Therefore, I have hewn them by the prophets, ♦
    and my judgement goes forth as the light.
9 ‘For loyalty is my desire and not sacrifice, ♦
    and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.’

-- From the Church of England

Sunday, March 13, 2022

Sabbath Poem, 1985, V (How Long Does It Take To Make the Woods?)




How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among these trees you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood [and sisterhood!] of eye and leaf.

--Wendell Berry (1938- ), American Baptist, farmer, poet, agrarian, and English professor

Come Sunday




Lord, dear Lord of love, God Almighty, God up above,

Please look down and see my people through.
Lord, dear Lord of love, God Almighty, God above,
Please look down and see my people through.

I believe the sun and moon will shine up in the sky.
When the day is gray, I know it’s just clouds passing by.
He’ll give peace and comfort to every troubled mind,
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday, that’s the day.

Often we feel weary, but he knows our every care.
Go to Him in secret, He will hear your every prayer.

Lillies on the valley, they neither toil nor spin;
And flowers bloom in Spring and birds sing.
Up from dawn till sunset, man work hard all the day--
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday, that´s the day.


--Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974), African American Jazz composer and musician

The video above features the incomparable Mahalia Jackson.

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Lent




The lake has a provisional name. It has had other names. 
It’s possible those names were also in some way 
provisional, unless the lake has a name for itself.

Facing it, it’s feasible to believe that the lake really does 
have a name, one it has given to itself and that it keeps. It 
keeps things. My friend, kneeling on the sand, arranged 
stones in a circle while she told me about the dreams she 
has had to commemorate her dead. The lake has eaten 
the stones.

I went in to the church, which is close to the lake. I like 
the melancholy of churches. The minister, breaking the 
bread, wears a small smile that suggests he knows the 
futility of what he does, and does it anyway, from love, 
from habit, from the way the two become, over time, 
indistinguishable from one another.

I love because I have grown the habit of love, I cannot 
love all at once, by choice, it happens gradually, like water 
overtaking the shore. It happens slowly, without noticing, 
and the shoreline has altered. It is not willed. I suppose 
that is what this man might mean by grace.

I am ambivalent about churches. I would rather 
ambivalence than certainty, I will live and die in 
ambivalence, which is a pretty meager supper, perhaps an
excuse for evading the problem of evil, or the other 
problem, of good, by not quite believing in either. By not 
quite believing. By longing for belief.

At eighteen I walked out of a church in another country 
and came out into the square and there was a group of 
boys playing soccer and I knew that God was real in the 
blunt humiliation of that statement.

But then my life went on as before and God was just 
another metaphor.

And maybe God was only present because I was a tourist, 
thinking the boys and the paving stones placed there so 
that I might find them and be transfigured, and they 
themselves remain luminously flat, without fault or flaw, 
without meaning except for mine.

As a child, my father heard a sermon in which the 
minister told the congregation that they must pray 
unceasingly. He was a serious child, with no mother, not 
because his mother was dead but because she had left, 
not because she had left but because she was sent away by 
his father. Boys belong to fathers.

She was returned to the country where she was born. She 
was not permitted to say goodbye. He came home. His 
mother was not there.

The few times I met her, she was like a moth at a light 
bulb, buffeting against him, not knowing what to do with 
the intervening time, that he was a man now, that she was 
old.

My father snuck back into the church later on to begin 
his career as an unceasing prayer. He knelt, intending to 
praise forever, assuming that is what prayer is, to praise 
and to plead.

Someone came in. Embarrassed, he lay on the floor and 
hid.

Call: O Lord hear our prayer

Response: And may our cry come unto thee

When I think of God, I think of hiding. The way a child 
hides. In hope of being found.

This church is nearly empty. There is a table in the aisle 
and a tray of small stones. We are asked to remember our 
dead by dropping the stones into a dish of water. I hold 
mine until the stones are warmed. They darken as they 
sink.

On Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent, the 
priest marks the forehead of the believer with ash. 
Formerly, it was only women who had their foreheads 
marked, while the men had ash scattered over their hair, 
which must have looked like billows of smoke from a 
small fire. Women covered their heads in church. The 
priest says Remember you are dust and to dust you shall 
return, a modern formulation replacing Remember, man, 
that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return, spoken to 
Adam and Eve in the garden, before they were turned 
out of the gates and had to start walking.

What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.

A friend is fretting over her father’s books. Her father 
must move to a retirement home. He fled the Iranian 
revolution along with his wife and daughters when the 
woman was a child; she has never returned, though she 
knows that the house of her earliest memory is still 
standing, uninhabited, an orphan in a street where every 
other house has been replaced by concrete slabs of 
apartment blocks. Her father, who was a civil servant and 
then a security guard, has read devotedly all his life. 
His books number in the thousands. Eighteenth

century love poetry, illegally distributed Marxist theory, 
which he collected at enormous risk to himself and his 
family, books of history and philosophy. I don’t even read Farsi 
anymore, not really, not at that level, the woman says, and 
who will want these books, who will read them now?

The woman and I smile at each other bleakly. To preserve 
the past, you would need to let it crush you. You would 
need to be nothing except a receptacle for memory, as 
though you were a glass case. We keep smiling. Decent, 
conscientious. Not willing to be obliterated.

I read a story about Bristlecone pines, a tree that grows 
along arid mountain ridges. These trees can live to be 
5,000 years old. They are squat, twisted. Survivors, not 
conquerors. They are as secret as the name of the lake.

In 1967, a graduate student in Arizona wished to cut down 
what he believed to be the oldest specimen of this 
tree. He summoned a forester. The man laid his hand on 
the trunk and turned to the student and said I will not 
touch this tree. Then he left.

The young man found another forester, who cut down 
the tree for him.

This is a story of useless sanctity. The first forester could 
not save the tree. But I hope it can stand as an epitaph. 
That he refused. I think there would be no better way to 
be remembered. To have said I will not touch this tree. To 
have left.

If the world were a way out? A river? A door? If this was 
not a rhetorical question?

I first became aware of the work of Expressionist painter 
Charlotte Salomon because of a

series of panels painted on cardboard squares torn from 
grocery delivery boxes and arranged along one wall of a 
barn in Vermont. The series is entitled Let Us Praise The 
Wondrous Life of Charlotte Salomon and is painted in the 
style of medieval religious

paintings and also in the style of the subject and also in 
the style of the old man who painted them, who lives 
near the barn.

He makes, among other things, cardboard testaments to 
things that might be praised, or marked, or just 
remembered for a while.

Not permanently. Just for a while.

The barn is very dry. One spark, and it would go. This 
does not trouble him. Let it burn, he said. The burdens of 
history are already over-plentiful. Let something exist for a 
while, and then burn, and be forgotten, and make room.

Having spent time with this man, I believe he is not 
lying. He does not wish to inflict a permanent mark on 
the world. He is reconciled with being. He is in being. 
Not guarded against the spark. He has laid himself down.

Just before Charlotte Salomon, five months pregnant, 
was gassed at Auschwitz, a witness claims she saw the sky 
and cried out God my God, how beautiful it is!

The circumstances of this statement make me wary of 
ascribing meaning.

And yet. And yet.

A talismanic hope that it might be possible to notice that 
the sky is still there?

Something that means we are praise.

God my God, how beautiful it is.



-- Kate Cayley, Canadian poet and playwright, Mitchell Prize winner for 2021, from Image Journal 

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Prayer of Saint Boniface



Eternal God, the refuge and help of all your children,
we praise you for all you have given us,
for all you have done for us,
for all that you are to us.
In our weakness, you are strength,
in our darkness, you are light,
in our sorrow, you are comfort and peace.
We cannot number your blessings,
we cannot declare your love:
For all your blessings we bless you.
May we live as in your presence,
and love the things that you love,
and serve you in our daily lives;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.


--St. Boniface (ca. 672-754)

Sunday, March 6, 2022

Exiles



1

Only they had escaped
to tell us how
the house had gone
and things had vanished,
how they lay in their beds
and were wakened by the wind
and saw the roof gone
and thought they were dreaming.
But the starry night
and the chill they felt were real.
And they looked around
and saw trees instead of walls.
When the sun rose
they saw nothing of their own.
Other houses were collapsing.
Other trees were falling.
They ran for the train
but the train had gone.
They ran to the river
but there were no boats.
They thought about us.
They would come here.
So they got to their feet
and started to run.
There were no birds.
The wind had died.
Their clothes were tattered
and fell to the ground.
So they ran
and covered themselves
with their hands
and shut their eyes
and imagined us
taking them in.
They could not hear
the sound of their footsteps.
They felt they were drifting.
All day they had run
and now could see nothing,
not even their hands.
Everything faded
around their voices
until only their voices were left,
telling the story.
And after the story,
their voices were gone.


2

They were not gone
and the story they told
was barely begun,
for when the air was silent
and everything faded
it only meant that these
exiles came
into a country
not their own,
into a radiance
without hope.
Having come too far,
they were frightened back
into the night of their origin.
And on the way back
they heard the footsteps
and felt the warmth
of the clothes they thought
had been lifted from them.
They ran by the boats at anchor,
hulking in the bay,
by the train waiting
under the melting frost of stars.
Their sighs were mixed
with the sighs of the wind.
And when the moon rose,
they were still going back.
And when the trees
and houses reappeared,
they saw what they wanted:
the return of their story
to where it began.
They saw it in the cold
room under the roof
chilled by moonlight.
They lay in their beds
and the shadows of the giant trees
brushed darkly against the walls.



--Mark Strand (1934-2014), American poet and US poet laureate, from The Late Hour, 1978.



Photos: Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion, March, 2022; and migrants crossing the southern border of the US, 2021.



Friday, March 4, 2022

On the Pinnacle



'Temples and Spires are good for looking down from;
You stand above the world on holy heights,
Here on the pinnacle, above the maelstrom,
Among the few, the true, unearthly lights.
Here you can breathe the thin air of perfection
And feel your kinship with the lonely star,
Above the shadow and the pale reflection,
Here you can know for certain who you are.
The world is stalled below, but you could move it
If they could know you as you are up here,
Of course they’ll doubt, but here’s your chance to prove it
Angels will bear you up, so have no fear….’
‘I was not sent to look down from above
It’s fear that sets these tests and proofs, not Love.’

-- Malcom Guite, (1954- ), English priest, poet, theologian, musician, and songwriter, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness.


Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C
 
Image: "The Temptations of Christ," from the Drogo Sacramentary, mid- 9th Century, French (in Latin).


Rev. Guite's Commentary:


The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” Jesus answered, “It says: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time’ (Luke 4.9−3).

If the first two temptations in the wilderness were in some sense ‘obvious’; the temptation to mere physical satisfaction of appetite, and the temptation to worldly success and power, then the third temptation is subtle and dark, all the darker for pretending to a kind of light, or enlightenment. The third temptation takes place on the ‘pinnacle of the Temple’ on the height of religious experience and achievement. What could be wrong with that? But the best things, turned bad, are the worst things of all. A ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ life can be riddled with pride and a sense of distinction, judging or looking down on others, despising God’s good creation! Such a twisted religion does more damage in the world then any amount simple indulgence or gratification by sensual people. One of G. K. Chesterton’s wonderful Father Brown stories, ‘The Hammer of God’, explores this theme with his usual combination of acuity and humour. In the story a curate who has constantly taken to ‘praying, not on the common church floor with his fellow men, but on the dizzying heights of its spires’ is tempted to deal justice to his sinful brother by flinging a hammer down on him from the heights. It is Father Brown who sees and understands the temptation and brings the curate down from the heights to a proper place of repentance. Here’s a fragment of their dialogue before they descend:

‘I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray,’ said Father Brown. ‘Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from.’

‘Do you mean that one may fall over?’ asked Wilfred.

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest …

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with his pale grey eyes. ‘I knew a man,’ he said, ‘who began by worshipping with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.’

Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

‘He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor.’

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest.

I was remembering something of this story when I wrote my sonnet on the third temptation, but thanks be to God that in resisting this temptation to spiritual loftiness and display, Jesus shows his solidarity once and for all with all of us, trusting himself to our flesh and blood so that we can trust our flesh and blood to him. He does not look down on us but looks up with the humble eyes of the child of Bethlehem.

All The Kingdoms of the World



‘So here’s the deal and this is what you get:
The penthouse suite with world-commanding views,
The banker’s bonus and the private jet
Control and ownership of all the news
An ‘in’ to that exclusive one percent,
Who know the score, who really run the show
With interest on every penny lent
And sweeteners for cronies in the know.
A straight arrangement between me and you
No hell below or heaven high above
You just admit it, and give me my due
And wake up from this foolish dream of love…’
But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem.
Love is the waking life, you are the dream.’

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician, songwriter, and theologian, from Sounding the seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.


Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Third Temptation of Christ," from the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons, French manuscript, 1280-1299 CE.



Here is Rev. Guite's wonderful commentary on this sonnet, from his blog:

‘Then the Devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the Devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me and I give it to anyone I please. If you then, will worship me, it will all be yours”’ (Luke 4.5−7).

This second temptation is the temptation to worldliness, to ‘success’, money and power, set up obsessively on the throne of our hearts as rivals to God. It is the supreme temptation of our own materially obsessed culture. And it is our failure at this point that has led to the gross imbalances between what has recently been termed the ‘1%’ and the ‘99%’.

‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority’ is the dreadfully conditional offer that the Devil still makes, and in my sonnet I have tried to flesh out in contemporary terms some of the figures who seem to be making and receiving that offer now, and the contemporary contexts in which this dreadful deal is transacted. It’s a striking thing that the old terms ‘wordly’ and ‘worldliness’ are scarcely ever used in contemporary moral discourse. We still talk of course, and rightly about fairness, and fair distribution of resources. We are rightly concerned with justice and fair dealing in the worlds of finance, commerce and trade, but we seem to have lost sight of the long Christian tradition, and the substantial Christian teaching, that there is something essentially tainted and corrosive in the very desire for worldly pre-eminence and success.

A symptom of this amnesia, of this serious spiritual malaise that afflicts our culture, can be found in our extraordinary use of the word ‘exclusive’ as a positive term! The liberal West is allegedly the most inclusive culture there has ever been and we deploy a great deal of rhetoric about including the marginalized, and take care that everyone should use politically correct and ‘inclusive’ language. But this is of course just a fig leaf. One look at the advertising in any magazine or website, one glimpse of the commercials that saturate our airwaves tells a different story. Every Estate agent advertising their residential properties (or ‘homes’ as they like to call them- as though a home was something you could sell) reveals that their favourite word is ‘Exclusive’. Come and view these ‘exclusive’ flats, come with us on this luxurious and ‘exclusive’ holiday! And nobody asks, just who is being excluded. Nobody responds to these ads with a letter to say: ‘I am interested in your product but perhaps I am one of those unfortunate people whom you and your exclusive clientele would like to exclude! No one asks themselves, as they read these ads, ‘Just what is it in me that is being roused and appealed to here?’ For it is not our generosity, our courtesy, or our sense of community that is being worked on and developed in this appeal. Rather it is the worst in us; the desire to be considered ‘special’ and ‘better’ and ‘superior’ at the expense of other people that is here being inflated and inflamed. In his chilling essay ‘The Inner ring’ C. S. Lewis lays open this fallen desire in all of us to belong to exclusive clubs, cliques, and circles, to be someone who is ‘in’; ‘in the know’, ‘in the right circles’, ‘in on the real knowledge and power’ among ‘those who really count’, and to look down on those who are ‘out’, excluded, not part of the magic circle. So much of the consumerism that is choking our society and bringing misery, alike to the haves and the have-nots, is driven by this desire to have and to wear, and to drive, the status symbols, the ‘exclusive’ signs of belonging. Time and again goods and services are offered by their manufacturers not for their intrinsic virtue, the beauty of their design, or the genuine pleasure that might be had from owning or using them, but for their ‘exclusive’ cachet, their ‘exclusive designer label’.

The other word which worldliness loves and has in turn subverted is the word ‘Dream’. We are to have ‘dream homes’, ‘dream holidays’, ‘dream wedding days’. As though all dreams were to enmesh us deeper in the tangles of getting and spending, not to lift our vision, change our perspective and give us glimpses of Heaven. I have tried to highlight some of these issues in the following poem, and here I see Jesus taking the worldly ‘dream’ on its own terms and calling us instead to wake up to the fullness of life. Perhaps only then can we, in Eliot’s phrase ‘Redeem the unread vision of the higher dream’.



Stones into Bread



The Fountain thirsts, the Bread is hungry here
The Light is dark, the Word without a voice.
When darkness speaks it seems so light and clear.
Now He must dare, with us, to make a choice.
In a distended belly’s cruel curve
He feels the famine of the ones who lose
He starves for those whom we have forced to starve
He chooses now for those who cannot choose.
He is the staff and sustenance of life
He lives for all from one Sustaining Word
His love still breaks and pierces like a knife
The stony ground of hearts that never shared,
God gives through Him what Satan never could;
The broken bread that is our only food.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician,  and theologian, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.


Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Temptation of Christ by the Devil," Spanish, from the Hermitage of St. Baudelio de Berlanga, Castle-Leon, Spain. The first Temptation, the subject of this sonnet, is depicted on the left. For more information, click here from the Metropolitan Museum of Art cloisters.

Tempted



Mark 1:12–13

Still wet behind the ears, he’s Spirit-pushed
up Jordan’s banks into the wilderness.
Angels hover praying ’round his head.
Animals couch against his knees and ankles
intuiting a better master. The Man
in the middle—new Adam in old Eden—
is up against it, matched with the ancient
Adversary. For forty days and nights
he tests the baptismal blessing and proves to his dismay
the Man is made of sterner stuff than Adam:
the Man will choose to be the Son God made him.

--Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018), American Presbyterian elder, translator, theologian, and poet

a desert planet



In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.


A desert planet....


Once we stood by the clear waters,
knowing who we were,
who the church was and where we were going....
...now we’re in the desert....
...uncharted territory.
...severe and bleak.
...but full of Eastern promise.
...the rules are different.
The old ways don’t work.
...it is a lonely place,
and dangerous.
There are snakes and scorpions.
Alien creatures.
we have been stripped of our illusions
of growth...
of plenty...
and we are in the desert.
waiting...
for God to speak.

Turn these stones into bread.
the instant solution.
the quick fix. If we just…if we just...
change our chairs, change our prayers, fix the roof.
Then everything will be lovely.
Won’t it?

The tempter said. Go on. Turn these stones into bread
bread. like the bread used to be, in the old days...
in a warm hearth in Nazareth.
It was so good then. I can almost smell the yeast.
A quick-fix and they’ll all come back.

But it is written. You can’t live by bread alone.
We need more than that. In this desert planet.

Every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Living God, we need you here, to tell us what to do.
Feed us with your words, we are hungry!
Show us the next step. How to be your church in this
undiscovered world.
As we sit in the sand and try to hear you.

And the tempter said. Look.
Here are all the kingdoms of the world.
I’ll give you all of this. If you just worship me.

Yes. Maybe that would be easier.
Maybe we should give up. And join the others.
Worship at Ikea, religiously.
Or Kylie, or Microsoft, or Visa,
I believe in the Holy Catalog Church.

You can have it all. Worship me.
Everything we’ve ever wanted.
At a price. But that price would be too high.

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.
Who else can we turn to.
You’re the one who gives us life.
And though we may we walking in the wilderness.
You are here with us.
Let us glimpse a burning bush somewhere on the way.
This is a lonely planet.

He will command his angels.
They’ll protect you.
You needn’t even stub your toes.

Our attendance is plummeting but we needn’t fear
the angels will catch us.
Someone else will fix it. We’ll leave it up to them.
An evangelist with a funny name, or the parish next-door.
This desert is too difficult. So maybe I’ll just sleep.

Jesus answered the tempter.
Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Jesus Help us.
Its hard to find the energy. When the sand pushes against us.
When we stumble in the wilderness. When we can’t see the way.
When the old signposts have disappeared
And all we have are sand-dunes.
But we know...
We can’t do a quick-fix
We can’t give up
We can’t leave it to someone else.

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit returned.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
Because he has anointed me.
To bring good news to the poor.

Good news came from out of the desert.
There is good news.
God has brought us here to hear it.
And God will lead us the Promised Land.



--Sue Wallace, found at re-worship blog


Lectionary Link: 1 Lent C, Luke 4:1-13

Thursday, March 3, 2022

The Third Temptation: Image from the Book of Kells

 


Here is the commentary from Trinity College's website on the image from the Book of Kells:

"The third Temptation of Jesus (f. 202v) is currently on display in the Old Library. The episode is described later in the narrative, at Luke’s Gospel 4.9–13 (f. 204r), where Satan urges Jesus to throw himself from the roof of the temple in Jerusalem in order to demonstrate that the angels will save him:

‘And [the devil] brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written that He hath given his angels charge over thee that they keep thee. And that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering, said to him: It is said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’

Jesus is represented on a shingle-roofed building which resembles an Irish shrine, with lions as finials. Protected by angels directly above him and in the top corners of the page, he holds out a slender glass vessel, possibly a chalice filled with Eucharistic wine, in response to the small, black winged figure of Satan on the right. Stylized peacocks, symbols of his Resurrection, are placed within the crosses on either side of Jesus.

The image presents many complexities and difficulties of interpretation. The haloed figure with crossed flabella at the centre of the temple may portray Christ as Judge in a Last Judgment scene. The temple and Jesus may represent, in an almost literal manner, the body of the church with Christ as its head, while the human figures – thirteen at the foot of the page and nine to Jesus’ right – seem to represent the faithful of the congregation. It is also possible to read the page as the ground plan of a church with four pillars, showing both side and front elevations. 

The figure of Satan has been disfigured by around twenty small stab marks to the neck, the arms and the torso. This controlled attack, not visible to the naked eye at first glance, seems to have been undertaken at a time when the book was bound, with the knife going through the vellum to previous leaves. The date of this intervention in the life of the Book of Kells is impossible to determine with accuracy, though it may be supposed to have occurred in the middle ages."

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Attention, Astonishment, Witness: Homily for Ash Wednesday



Some might find it ironic about the gospel reading for today—to hear Jesus warn against disfiguring our faces when many of us are getting ready for the imposition of ashes. On the surface, it would seem that we are engaging in exactly the kind of grandstanding that Jesus is warning about. But when we have the ashes placed upon our foreheads, the purpose is to remind US that we are entering a penitential season, and that since we are ashes, it is important to live our lives in the most faithful way possible.

But also, Jesus spoke at a time when big shows of piety were often put to work for gain in social status or influence, because religious performance was something most people took for granted. And while many people nowadays may do the first part of that last sentence—putting on a show of their supposed religious affiliation, those numbers are getting smaller and smaller each year all across the West. For many of us, walking around all day with a sign of a cross on our foreheads makes us stand out in a different way in an ever-secularizing world.

It's not about showing off. It IS about what you most treasure and proclaim in your life.
The late, beloved American poet Mary Oliver, in her poem “Sometimes,” offered seven linked poems together. Right at the fulcrum, at number 4, she offered these instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

I am convinced that those are also the instructions for discipleship:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Attention. Astonishment. Witness.

So let’s start with paying attention right now. 

Just where did those ashes come from that we will soon have pressed into our brows? They came from the palms that we waved on Palm Sunday, ten months ago. They were once young fronds on a palm tree, and then we blessed them and waved them as we re-enacted Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem a week before his trial and crucifixion. Then they sat and dried out for almost a full year. Eventually the dried out remnants were collected, and then they were burned. A match was lit, and light and heat were released from the gases that remained in the palms from the materials they had absorbed from the ground during their life on the tree. They were then ground up, and mixed with the same chrism that we use when we anoint people at their baptisms and at their confirmations. Oil and ashes. Light and heat. And a human touch to press them onto our foreheads—one soul to another.

So what is the astonishing thing about this? We are reminded that we came from the dust and we return to the dust. That sounds dreadful—until you consider that the ash and dust that we are marked with contains atoms which resonate in you, me, everyone and everything, everywhere. The elements that make up that dust were in that palm frond and in that tree and in its roots, but have also been here all along in the billions of years since the Earth’s creation. And those elements were deposited here and fused together to create this beautiful planet, born from the explosions of stars halfway across the galaxy. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We are stardust….” That is indeed astonishing, and it reminds us that here at the start of Lent we are called to recognize the acknowledge the way that this common heritage makes us all one. Especially as the drums of war beat right now across eastern Europe in Ukraine, what could be more astonishing than that bold statement of fact? We are all dust, and we are therefore all one with each other and with all that is.

And then, that mark on our foreheads is part of us telling about it. We are not called to come to church merely to feed ourselves or tend to our own needs. We are called to TELL the world about what we have encountered in Jesus. We are called to let that black smudge on our foreheads be not just an acknowledgement of our finitude, our own mortality, but our own encounter with the love of God as it became human and mortal, just like us, to show us how to live a fully human life—one of love and concern for others, and faithfulness to our God.

And so how does Mary Oliver demonstrate that sense of attention, astonishment, and witness? Now that we have looked at the balancing point, let’s hear the poem in its entirety:

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.

I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless…

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.



This is our chance to repent. I know that word makes many of us wince and edge away. So let’s try to rephrase it. This is our chance to re-center ourselves, not just for forty days but for each moment.

Lent calls us to attention, astonishment, and witness. Lent calls us to see the potential rather than the dreariness and horror of pandemic and now war, to look for the beauty and unity among ourselves and all God’s sparkling mysterious creation placed here for our support and care. Lent calls us to proclaim, to tell, to be truthful and reliable in our witness to God’s love by embodying God’s love. I don’t know about you, but I have never needed that kind of Lent more than right now. A Life-giving Lent. A Lent of slowing down and inviting ourselves to wonder and gratitude. A Lent that calls us to stand for right and honor and compassion no matter what the price tag. Lent calls us not to more suffering and uncertainty, but to holiness, which is ALWAYS within our range of choices.

Lent is not a season to be endured, but a gift of insight into what we really should treasure. It is in the everyday world that we live, and we need to make our faith not just a Sunday faith or a Lenten discipline but a part of a living and breathing. Some call this mindfulness, and it is such a wonderful concept.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.



Preached at the 7 pm AshWednesday service, online and in person, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Ballata: In Exile at Saran

Because I think not ever to return,
Ballad, to Tuscany,--
Go therefore thou for me
Straight to my lady's face,
Who, of her noble grace,
Shall show thee courtesy.

Thou seekest her in charge of many sighs,
Full of much grief and of exceeding fear.
But have good heed thou come not to the eyes
Of such as are sworn foes to gentle cheer:
For, certes, if this thing should chance,--from her
Thou then couldst only look
For scorn, and such rebuke
As needs must bring me pain;--
Yea, after death again
Tears and fresh agony.

Surely thou knowest, Ballad, how that Death
Assails me, till my life is almost sped:
Thou knowest how my heart still travaileth
Through the sore pangs which in my soul are bred:--
My body being now so nearly dead,
It cannot suffer more.
Then, going, I implore
That this my soul thou take
(Nay, do so for my sake,)
When my heart sets it free.

Ah! Ballad, unto thy dear offices
I do commend my soul, thus trembling;
That thou mayst lead it, for pure piteousness,
Even to that lady's presence whom I sing.
Ah! Ballad, say thou to her, sorrowing,
Whereso thou meet her then:--
"This thy poor handmaiden
Is come, nor will be gone,
Being parted now from one
Who served Love painfully.'

Thou also, thou bewildered voice and weak,
That goest forth in tears from my grieved heart,
Shalt, with my soul and with this ballad, speak
Of my dead mind, when thou dost hence depart,
Unto that lady (piteous as thou art!)
Who is so calm and bright,
It shall be deep delight
To feel her presence there.
And thou, Soul, worship her
Still in her purity.


--Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300) Italian (Florentine) poet, friend and influence of Dante Alighieri, translated into English by Dante Gabriel Rosetti

The opening lines of this poem influenced T. S. Eliot in his poem, "Ash Wednesday."

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Ash Wednesday, Unshowered



My hair’s pulled back to disguise the grime,
though maybe it’s well that I’m unclean,
since from dust you came, to dust you will return,
the priest recites, smearing my forehead.
Once, twice, and I’m marked, a lintel in plague years.
I’m invited to kneel and read the fifty-first Psalm,
recalling how David watched Bathsheba bathe.
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Merciful one, save me from slight repentance.
I pierced the center of the white orchid, Lord,
and it was mud, blood’s cry, my body’s blighted tender.


-- Anya Krugovoy Silver (1968-2018, from Image Journal

Prayer at the Start of Lent



Creator, Sustainer and Savior,
You lead us through the late winter wilderness of Lent.
As we trudge through the stuff of our lives,
show us, guide us, and remind us of your presence.
Help us to see and praise you in, around and through our days.
Connect us to you in our experience as we walk toward the veiled cross.
Amen.


-- the Rev. Bill Petersen, from his Signs Along the Way blog

Litany for Lent



Because temptation is woven into the fabric of our lives,
and we know the weariness of forty days in the desert,
and the beckoning power of sweet fruit,
and the vain promises of the world,
we need you, God.
We need you, God.

Because we see the broken before the whole,
and the half empty cup, and the unfinished task,
and the thirst in freedom’s quest,
we need you, God.
We need you, God.

Because we trust in what we can see,
and we are blinded by our prejudices,
and we do not know what we do not know,
we need you, God.
We need you, God.

Because our need for correctness exceeds our need for truth,
and our excuses preempt the cry of the wounded,
and our celebration of blessing is mindless of those displaced,
we need you, God.
We need you, God.

Because you came among us,
and breathed into our sinewy souls,
and healed our pain and let us wound you,
and loved us to the end,
and triumphed over all our hatred,
we need you, God.
We need you, God.


--Katherine Hawker, from the re-worship blog.