I Am The Light of the World

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.
I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,
It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.
I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ) Anglican poet, priest, theologian, and musician 

Scripture Reference: John 8:12

Images: Lux Nova (2011) by Bernd Nestler, German, window made of float glass, treated twice with ceramic enamels, platinum mirror surface, and gold dust, at St. Christoffel Cathedral, Roermond, the Netherlands.

Beatus vir qui non ablit

Come to the place where every breath is praise,

And God is breathing through each passing breeze.
Be planted by the waterside and raise

Your arms with Christ beneath these rooted trees,
Who lift their breathing leaves up to the skies.
Be rooted, too, as still and strong as these,

Open alike to sun and rain. Arise
From meditation by these waters. Bear
The fruit of that deep rootedness. Be wise

In the trees' long wisdom. Learn to share
The secret of their patience. Pass the day
In their green fastness and their quiet air.

Slowly discern a life, a truth, a way,
Where simple being flowers in delight.
Then let the chaff of life just blow away.

-- Malcolm Guite (1957- ), English priest, poet, musician, and academic, from David's Crown.
Inspired by Psalm 1.

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

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.

O Come O Wisdom

Today, December 17, we are seven days away from the Feast of Christmas. In the early Church, perhaps as early as the eighth century of the Common Era, it became a custom to sing a different antiphon on each of these seven days, using a term from Isaiah and other Hebrew scriptural texts which Christians believe describes a facet of Christ's identity. You might recognize these terms from the verses for "O Come O Come Emmanuel," which uses an O Antiphon in each verse.

The term for December 17 is "O Wisdom," described in Ecclesiasticus 24:1-9. The antiphon in English is this:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

What would it mean to think of Jesus as the Wisdom of God personified?

In his excellent book of collected poems for the Advent and Christmas seasons entitled Waiting on the Word, British priest and poet The Rev. Malcolm Guite wrote this sonnet in response to today’s antiphon:

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.


He then meditated upon this antiphon:

“In its first centuries the Church developed a custom of praying seven great prayers, calling afresh on Christ to come, addressing him by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!’ ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light!’ ‘O Emmanuel!’ These prayers were said ‘antiphonally’, as the name suggests, either side of the Magnificat at Vespers from 17 to 23 December (although in some places they begin a day earlier, on 16 December). Each antiphon begins with the invocation ‘O’ and then calls on Christ, although never by name.

The mysterious titles and emblems given him from the pages of the Old Testament touch on our deepest needs and intuitions; then each antiphon prays the great Advent verb, Veni, ‘Come!’

There is, I think, both wisdom and humility in this strange abstention from the name of Christ in a Christian prayer. Of course, these prayers were composed "A.D.," perhaps around the seventh century, but in another sense, Advent itself is always B.C.! The whole purpose of Advent is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ. In that place of darkness and waiting, we look for his coming and do not presume too much that we already know or have it. Whoever compiled these prayers was able, imaginatively, to write ‘B.C.’, perhaps saying to themselves: ‘If I hadn’t heard of Christ, and didn’t know the name of Jesus, I would still long for a saviour. I would still need someone to come. Who would I need? I would need a gift of Wisdom, I would need a Light, a King, a Root, a Key, a Flame.’ And poring over the pages of the Old Testament, they would find all these things promised in the coming of Christ. By calling on Christ using each of these seven several gifts and prophecies we learn afresh the meaning of a perhaps too familiar name."

As we prepare to enter Christmas week, may we ever invite Christ, the Wisdom of God, into our lives.

Dominus regnavit

With our own joy, we will take up the song
Of all creation: Jesus Christ is king!
The whole earth will be glad, for there has sprung,
A light for all the righteous who will bring
A final judgment to the earth, as bright
As lightening, and the round world will ring
With jubilation. For the mournful night
Of our long exile will be ended then
As darkness flees before his glorious light,
The bright ark of his covenant. And when
We see that holiness unveiled, the dark
Devices, all the substitutes, the vain
And empty images, the shoddy work
Of our own hands will fall to nothingness
For Christ himself will shine as the true ark.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and theologian, from his blog.

Scripture reference: Psalm 97

Epiphany on the Jordan

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;

The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Sprit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river
To die and rise and live and love forever.


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

Today is the anniversary of my baptism in 1965 at Southern Hills United Methodist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Station XIV: Jesus is laid in the tomb

Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), Anglican priest, songwriter, theologian, and musician, from his blog.

Image: "Jesus is laid in the tomb," Gwyneth Leech

Unless a grain of wheat

Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,
Then fall upon me with your freeing flail
To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear
As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall
May be more fruitful and my autumn still
A golden evening where your barns are full.

-- Malcolm Guite (1957- ) English priest, poet, singer-songwriter, musician and theologian

Lectionary link: John 12:20-33, 5th Sunday in Lent B

Cleansing the Temple

Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

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

Scripture Reference: John 2:13-22 (Third Sunday in Lent B)

Image: Peter Koenig, Jesus Cleansing the Temple

The Baptism of Jesus (First Sunday after Epiphany)

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Sprit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river
To die and rise and live and love forever.

--The Rev. Malcolm Guite (1954- ), Anglican priest, poet, musician, and theologian, from his blog.

XL Expectans Expectavi

The stone itself will soon be rolled away,

I wait in patience, all expectantly,

Firm on this rock above the miry clay



Where he has set me in his loving mercy.

I sing my psalm in Christ who sings in me,

A new song made in his Love’s mystery:



‘Your wondrous works all rise like wings in me

And lift my heart to praise. I hear your call,

The simple call of Love: Oh come to me,



Bring me no gifts, for I have made them all,

Just bring yourself, and open up your heart.

And so I come to you and bring you all,



All that I am and have been; joy and hurt,

Glory and shame, I bring you everything,

That you might make me whole in every part.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English poet, priest, musician, theologian, and songwriter, from his Psalm series

Scripture Reference: Psalm 40

Transfiguration

For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’,

On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English poet, priest, musician, and theologian, from Sounding the Seasons

Good Ground

I love your simple story of the sower,

With all its close attention to the soil,

Its movement from the knowledge to the knower,

Its take on the tenacity of toil.


I feel the fall of seed a sower scatters,

So equally available to all,

Your story takes me straight to all that matters,

Yet understands the reasons why I fall.


Oh deepen me where I am thin and shallow,

Uproot in me the thistle and the thorn,

Keep far from me that swiftly snatching shadow,

That seizes on your seed to mock and scorn.


O break me open, Jesus, set me free,

Then find and keep your own good ground in me.

-- Malcom Guite (1954-), English priest, poet, musician, and theologian

Add caption

Sonnet: Emmaus 1

And do you ask what I am speaking of
Although you know the whole tale of my heart; 
Its longing and its loss, its hopeless love?
You walk beside me now and take my part
As though a stranger, one who doesn’t know
The pit of disappointment, the despair
The jolts and shudders of my letting go,
My aching for the one who isn’t there.

And yet you know my darkness from within,
My cry of dereliction is your own,
You bore the isolation of my sin
Alone, that I need never be alone.
Now you reveal the meaning of my story
That I, who burn with shame, might blaze with glory.

-- --Malcolm Guite, (1957- ) Anglican priest, poet, singer-songwriter, and philosopher, from Parable and Paradox.


Scripture reference: Luke 24:17 ‘He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?” They stood still, their faces downcast’.  Easter 3A

Sonnet: Emmaus 2

We thought that everything was lost and gone,
Disaster on disaster overtook us
The night we left our Jesus all alone
And we were scattered, and our faith forsook us.
But oh that foul Friday proved far worse,
For we had hoped that he had been the one,
Till crucifixion proved he was a curse,
And on the cross our hopes were all undone.

Oh foolish foolish heart why do you grieve?
Here is good news and comfort to your soul:
Open your mind to scripture and believe
He bore the curse for you to make you whole 
 The living God was numbered with the dead
That He might bring you Life in broken bread.

-- --Malcolm Guite, (1957- ) Anglican priest, poet, singer-songwriter, and philosopher, from Parable and Paradox.

Scripture reference: Luke 24:25-26, Easter 3A

Easter 2020

And where is Jesus, this strange Easter day? 
Not lost in our locked churches, anymore 
Than he was sealed in that dark sepulchre. 
The locks are loosed; the stone is rolled away, 
And he is up and risen, long before, 
Alive, at large, and making his strong way 
Into the world he gave his life to save, 
No need to seek him in his empty grave. 

He might have been a wafer in the hands 
Of priests this day, or music from the lips 
Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips 
Away from church, shakes off our linen bands 
To don his apron with a nurse: he grips 
And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands 
The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, 
Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

On Thursday we applauded, for he came 
And served us in a thousand names and faces 
Mopping our sickroom floors and catching traces 
Of that virus which was death to him: 
Good Friday happened in a thousand places 
Where Jesus held the helpless, died with them 
That they might share his Easter in their need, 
Now they are risen with him, risen indeed.

--Malcolm Guite (1957- ), Anglican priest, poet, and musician, from his blog.

Station XIII: Jesus's body is taken down from the cross

His spirit and his life he breathes in all 
Now on this cross his body breathes no more 
Here at the centre everything is still 
Spent, and emptied, opened to the core. 
A quiet taking down, a prising loose 
A cross-beam lowered like a weighing scale 
Unmaking of each thing that had its use 
A long withdrawing of each bloodied nail, 
This is ground zero, emptiness and space 
With nothing left to say or think or do 
But look unflinching on the sacred face 
That cannot move or change or look at you. 
Yet in that prising loose and letting be 
He has unfastened you and set you free.

-- Malcolm Guite, (1957- ) (1957- ), English priest, theologian, musician, and poet, from Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, 2012, also published on his blog.