The Airy Christ

After reading Dr Rieu’s translation of St Mark’s Gospel.

Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East?
This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking,
Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking.

But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown,
What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down,

Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands,
Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands.

As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily
Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly.

Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song,
Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong.

Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words,
And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd.

Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried
For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified.

For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything
Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.

--Stevie (nee Florence Margaret) Smith (1902-1971), Anglican British poet and novelist who called herself a "lapsed atheist"

A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

My heart within me like a stone 

Is numbed too much for hopes or fears; 

Look right, look left, I dwell alone; 

I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief 

No everlasting hills I see; 

My life is in the falling leaf: 

O Jesus, quicken me. 

 My life is like a faded leaf, 

My harvest dwindled to a husk: 

Truly my life is void and brief 

And tedious in the barren dusk; 

My life is like a frozen thing, 

No bud nor greenness can I see: 

Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; 

O Jesus, rise in me. 

 My life is like a broken bowl, 

 A broken bowl that cannot hold 

One drop of water for my soul 

Or cordial in the searching cold; 

Cast in the fire the perished thing; 

Melt and remould it, till it be 

A royal cup for Him, my King: 

O Jesus, drink of me.

-- Christina Rosetti (1830-1894), English poet, sister of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, devout Anglican and supporter of the Oxford movement, from her book The Goblin Market and Other Poems. She is in the calendar of saints of the Anglican Church, with a feast day of April 27.

Judas, Peter

because we are all
betrayers, taking
silver and eating
body and blood and asking
(guilty) is it I and hearing
him say yes
it would be simple for us all
to rush out
and hang ourselves

but if we find grace
to cry and wait
after the voice of morning
has crowed in our ears
clearly enough
to break out hearts
he will be there
to ask us each again
do you love me?


--Luci Shaw (1928- ), British born American poet, retreat leader, teacher, and Episcopalian

Still Falls the Rain

(The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potters’ Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain –
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side
He bears in his Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear, –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh ... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain –
Then – O I'll leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain –
“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”


~ Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) English poet


From my friend Caroline Carson, some explanation:

Sitwell compares the Nazi bombing of London to the Crucifixion. As befits the historical context, this is a bleak poem about the sinfulness of humanity. Each year since Christ’s birth become another nail that humanity has driven into his body on the cross (“nineteen hundred and forty nails”), and the poem alludes to famous betrayers, murderers, and sinners from the Bible and literature. But there is a turn in the final stanza, as Jesus continues to shed his blood willingly for sinful humanity. (Composer Benjamin Britten wrote a musical setting for this poem in 1955.)
~ Potter’s Field” – a burial ground for poor and unknown people. From Matthew, in which Judas’s thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus are used to buy a potter’s field for burying foreigners (Matthew 27:7-8).
--“Field of Blood” – the name given to the potter’s field in Matthew 27:7-8, because it is bought with Judas’s “blood money.”
--“Cain” – the Bible’s first murderer, who kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4).
--“Dives and Lazarus” – the rich man and the poor man in Jesus’s parable about judgment and the afterlife. Dives (Latin for “rich man”) ignores the suffering of Lazarus, a beggar at his gate; when both men die, Lazarus ascends to heaven while Dives is sent to hell (Luke 16:19-31). In the poem’s next line, “the sore” refers to Lazarus, who was afflicted with terrible sores while on earth, and “the gold” refers to Dives.

And in the next to last stanza there is a reference to Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe:
FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! – Who pulls me down? –
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! –
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Benjamin Britten's setting of the poem from 1955:

Prayer for Overcoming Indifference

For the sin of silence,

For the sin of indifference,
For the secret complicity of the neutral,
For the closing of borders,
For the washing of hands,
For the crime of indifference,
For the sin of silence,
For the closing of borders.
For all that was done,
For all that was not done,
Let there be no forgetfulness before the Throne of Glory;
Let there be remembrance within the human heart;
And let there at last be forgiveness
When your children, O God,
Are free and at peace.

--Chaim Stern, editor, Gates of Repentance (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1978).

Evening Prayer

I believe my sin
to be entirely common:
the request for help
Masking request for favor
and the plea for pity
thinly veiling complaint.

So little at peace in the spring evening,
I pray for strength, for direction,
but I also ask
to survive my illness
(the immediate one)—never mind
anything in the future.
I make this a special point,
this unconcern for the future,
also the courage I will have acquired by then
to meet my suffering alone
but with heightened fortitude.

Tonight, in my unhappiness,
I wonder what qualities this presumes
in the one who listens.
And as the breeze stirs
the leaves of the little birch tree,
I construct a presence
wholly skeptical and wholly tender,
thus incapable of surprise.

I believe my sin is common, therefore
intended; I can feel
the leaves stir, sometimes
with words, sometimes without,
as though the highest form of pity
could be irony.

Bedtime, they whisper.
Time to begin lying.


--Louise Gluck (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020

The Sifting of Peter

“Behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.”—LUKE xxii. 31.

IN Saint Luke’s Gospel we are told
How Peter in the days of old
          Was sifted;
And now, though ages intervene,
Sin is the same, while time and scene 
          Are shifted.

Satan desires us, great and small,
As wheat, to sift us, and we all
          Are tempted;
Not one, however rich or great, 
Is by his station or estate
          Exempted.

No house so safely guarded is
But he, by some device of his,
          Can enter; 
No heart hath armor so complete
But he can pierce with arrows fleet
          Its centre.

For all at last the cock will crow
Who hear the warning voice, but go 
          Unheeding,
Till thrice and more they have denied
The Man of Sorrows, crucified
          And bleeding.

One look of that pale suffering face 
Will make us feel the deep disgrace
          Of weakness;
We shall be sifted till the strength
Of self-conceit be changed at length
          To meekness. 

Wounds of the soul, though healed, will ache;
The reddening scars remain, and make
          Confession;
Lost innocence returns no more;
We are not what we were before 
          Transgression.

But noble souls, through dust and heat,
Rise from disaster and defeat
          The stronger,
And conscious still of the divine 
Within them, lie on earth supine
          No longer.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882

Scriptural reference: Luke 22:31-34

Chorus VIII from The Rock

VIII 

O Father we welcome your words,
And we will take heart for the future,
Remembering the past.

The heathen are come into thine inheritance,
And thy temple have they defiled.

Who is this that cometh from Edom?

He has trodden the wine-press alone.

There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem
And the holy places defiled;
Peter the Hermit, scourging with words.
And among his hearers were a few good men,
Many who were evil,
And most who were neither.
Like all men in all places,

Some went from love of glory,
Some went who were restless and curious,
Some were rapacious and lustful.
Many left their bodies to the kites of Syria
Or sea-strewn along the routes;
Many left their souls in Syria,
Living on, sunken in moral corruption;
Many came back well broken,
Diseased and beggared, finding
A stranger at the door in possession:
Came home cracked by the sun of the East
And the seven deadly sins in Syria.
But our King did well at Acre.
And in spite of all the dishonour,
The broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.
Only the faith could have done what was good of it;
Whole faith of a few,
Part faith of many.
Not avarice, lechery, treachery,
Envy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride:
It was not these that made the Crusades,
But these that unmade them.

Remember the faith that took men from home
At the call of a wandering preacher.
Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And of moderate vice
When men will not lay down the Cross
Because they will never assume it.
Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
To men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD , help us.

-- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American Modernist poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature, from his play The Rock.


Image: Workers at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 2015

Earth

What made us think
It was yours? Because it was signed
with your blood, O God of battles?
It is such a small thing.
Easily overlooked in the multitude
Of the worlds. We are misled
By perspective : the microscope
Is our sin, we tower enormous
Above it the stronger it
Grows. Where have your incarnations
Gone to ? The flesh is too heavy
To wear you, God of light
And fire. The machine replaces
The hand that fastened you
To the cross, but cannot absolve us.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest,  from H'm, 1972

Lord's Prayer Cycle Prayer 4: Forgive Us Our Sins

Our Father in heaven,
loving Parent and Creator,
tender Mother, 
we thank You for your forgiveness 
of our manifold sins. 

Again and again You call to us 
when we have wandered from your ways, 
and stubbornly separate ourselves from your Love. 
We repent of the evil we have done, 
the evil that is done on our behalf, 
and the very real hurt we have caused.

Forgive us when we place our selves 
as an idol in the sanctuary of our hearts, 
which should be dedicated to worship of You alone, 
O Redeemer.

Help us to acknowledge the sins done 
because we do not try to prevent them, 
and arouse in us the will to take action.

Teach us that the root of righteousness and salvation 
is found in fully opening our hearts 
to each other and to You.

Help us clothe ourselves 
and our motives 
in charity and obedience, O Christ. 
Help us direct our wills 
to the establishment of justice and peace.

Come into our hearts, O Spirit, 
and guide us in matters great and small, 
for your Love heals all our woundedness.

O Loving One, hear our prayers 
and grant your benediction and grace 
to those whose needs we now raise before You.

Amen.

Innocence

But that which most I wonder at, which most 
I did esteem my bliss, which most I boast, 
And ever shall enjoy, is that within 
I felt no stain, nor spot of sin. 

 No darkness then did overshade, 
But all within was pure and bright, 
No guilt did crush, nor fear invade 
But all my soul was full of light. 

A joyful sense and purity 
Is all I can remember; 
The very night to me was bright, 
'Twas summer in December. 

A serious meditation did employ 
My soul within, which taken up with joy 
Did seem no outward thing to note, but fly 
All objects that do feed the eye. 

While it those very objects did 
Admire, and prize, and praise, and love, 
Which in their glory most are hid, 
Which presence only doth remove. 

Their constant daily presence I 
Rejoicing at, did see; 
And that which takes them from the eye 
Of others, offer'd them to me. 

No inward inclination did I feel 
To avarice or pride: my soul did kneel 
In admiration all the day. No lust, nor strife, 
Polluted then my infant life. 

No fraud nor anger in me mov'd, 
No malice, jealousy, or spite; 
All that I saw I truly lov'd. 
Contentment only and delight 

Were in my soul. O Heav'n! what bliss 
Did I enjoy and feel! 
What powerful delight did this 
Inspire! for this I daily kneel. 

Whether it be that nature is so pure, 
And custom only vicious; or that sure 
God did by miracle the guilt remove, 
And make my soul to feel his love 

So early: or that 'twas one day, 
Wherein this happiness I found; 
Whose strength and brightness so do ray, 
That still it seems me to surround; 

What ere it is, it is a light 
So endless unto me 
That I a world of true delight 
Did then and to this day do see. 

That prospect was the gate of Heav'n, that day 
The ancient light of Eden did convey 
Into my soul: I was an Adam there 
A little Adam in a sphere 

Of joys! O there my ravish'd sense 
Was entertain'd in Paradise, 
And had a sight of innocence
Which was beyond all bound and price. 

An antepast of Heaven sure! 
I on the earth did reign; 
Within, without me, all was pure; 
I must become a child again.

--Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), English priest and poet, whose feast day is today.

Present

At light speed, God speed,
time collapses into now, so that
we may see Christ's wounds as
still bleeding, his torso,
that ready sponge, still
absorbing our vice, our toxic shame.

He is still being pierced
by every hateful nail
we hammer home. In this
Golgotha moment his body--
chalice for the dark weeping
of the whole world-- brims,

spilling over as his lifeblood
drains. His dying into earth
begins the great reversal--
as blood from a vein leaps
into the needle, so with his rising,
we surge into light.

-- Luci Shaw (1928- ), American poet, from What the Light Was Like, 2006

Self- Acquaintance

Dear Lord! accept a sinful heart,
Which of itself complains,
And mourns, with much and frequent smart,
The evil it contains.

There fiery seeds of anger lurk,
Which often hurt my frame;
And wait but for the tempter's work,
To fan them to a flame.

Legality holds out a bribe
To purchase life from Thee;
And Discontent would fain prescribe
How Thou shalt deal with me.

While Unbelief withstands Thy grace,
And puts the mercy by,
Presumption, with a brow of brass,
Says, "Give me, or I die!"

How eager are my thoughts to roam,
In quest of what they love!
But ah! when duty calls them home,
How heavily they move!

Oh, cleanse me in a Saviour's blood,
Transform me by Thy power,
And make me Thy beloved abode,
And let me roam no more.

-- William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet

Photo: Figure on the Passion side facade of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.

Little Gidding: II (on the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar)

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: "What! are you here?"
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other--
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember."
And he: "I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) from Four Quartets, 1943

Photo of London during the Blitz, which influenced Eliot during the writing of the Quartets, from wikipedia

Little Gidding: III (on the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar)

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives - unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, 
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed 
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.












--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) from Four Quartets, 1943

Photos: Detail of statue of Dame Julian on the facade of Norwich Cathedral; icon of Dame Julian by Brother Robert Lenz

A Prayer

Grant I thee pray such heat into mine heart,
That to this love of thine may be equal;
 God grant me from Sathanas service to astart,
With whom me rueth so long to have be thrall;
Grant me good Lord and creator of all,
The flame to quench of all sinful desire,
And in thy love set all mine heart afire.

That when the journey of this deadly life
My silly ghost hath finished, and thence
Departed must without his fleshly wife;
Alone into his lord’s high presence,
He may thee find: O well of indulgence,
In thy lordship not as a lord: but rather
As a very tender, loving father.

--Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), from "A Prayer of Picus Mirandula Unto God," 1510

Icon of St. Thomas More by Theophilia Darn