Living Wittily

Oppression, Occupation and The Prayer of the Butterfly

Decided earlier this week to quietly change the colour and format of my blog.

Chose a cool blue-green with minimal ornamentation.

Wasn't sure if I liked it.  Seemed too, well,... cool, in a cold kind of way.

Nobody else said anything - didn't notice? Didn't like it? Too polite to say?

I didn't like it much - so back to my Art Nouveau design with the red butterfly.

One of my favourite thin books (cost me £1.80 I see) is Prayers from the Ark, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold (translated by the novelist Rumer Godden). Mademoiselle de Gasztold started writing poetry during the German occupation of France. When confronting tyranny words matter - and in times of oppression poetry is the art of making words matter.

After the war she was helped to recover from serious illness in a Benedictine Abbey just outside Paris. This became her long term home as librarian and fitter of stained glass in the windows. Her poem prayers were first circulated privately then published in 1953 in French and in 1962 in English.

In this slim volume the prayers express the joyful response of each creature to God, the words capturing the unique character and beauty of the creature, expressing the mind of the Creator. One of them is the Prayer of the Butterfly. It reads well in English, but at times the subtleties of humour and allusion that convey precision of feeling and meaning are muted but not lost, in translation. A prayer expressing the fluttering delicacy of the fritillary captures exactly the restless inattentiveness of those of us who, seeing so many possibilities to experience, are frustrated by the finitude of time and the brevity of life. A kind of Ecclesiastes moment, this prayer.

The Prayer of the Butterfly

Lord!

Where was I?

Oh yes! This flower, this sun,

thank You! Your world is beautiful!

This scent of roses...

Where was I?

A drop of dew

rolls to sparkle in a lily's heart.

I have to go...

Where? I do not know!

The wind has painted fancies

on my wings.

Fancies...

Where was I?

Of yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you;

                                                                   Amen

Ornithology, poetry and around 70 shopping days to Christmas!!!

Feel the need of a poem. Too much theological prose dessicates the imagination, and makes the mental processes sluggish.

(Interesting how we learn words - 'dessicated' I learned as a wee boy who loved coconut and raided the packets bought for baking)

Just watched the robin clearing out the local sparrow scruff from the back garden. Reminds me of Fanthorpe's poem, "The Robin".

It's reference to Christmas is allowed in October - Dobbies have their Christmas cards out. So that's all right then.

The Robin

I am the proper

Bird for this season –

Not blessed St Turkey,

Born to be eaten.

                    

I’m the man’s inedible

Permanent bird.

I dine in his garden,

My spoon is his spade.

 

I’m the true token

Of Christ the Child–King:

I nest in man’s stable,

I eat at man’s table,

Through all the dark winters

I sing

Poetry and the way we see the world

The Blade of Grass

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good eneough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.

(Brian Patten (1946)

This anthology of poems is one of those gems bought in a charity shop several years ago. It introduced me to some poets I didn't know, including Brian Patten. There are times when he is so right you can't help the physical nod of your head in agreement, and wonder why you never thought it or understood it, or saw it that way before.

Virginia McKenna's comment on this poem has its own reflective wisdom:
"This poem brilliantly describes how complicated we all become, how convoluted our outlook on life. A frost-robed blade of grass must surely be one of the beauties of nature, but perhaps it takes an open and undemanding heart to recognise it."

R S THomas on "the contemporaneity of the Cross".

There were other churches from which the
populations had withdrawn, Celtic foundations
down lanes that one entered with a lifting of the
spirit, because there were no posts, no telegraph
wires. Is God worshipped only in cathedrals
where blood drips from regimental standards as
from the crucified body of love. Is there a need for
a revised liturgy for bathetic renderings of the
scriptures? The Cross always is avant-garde.

---<>---

The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow, and behind
that the shadows of the shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of those recessions
are brought up short by
the contemporaneity of the Cross.

(R.S. Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 82-3.

In this slim volume Thomas juxtaposes prose and verse, and both must be read as twin perspectives, perhaps as two light-casting candles. In the prose poem, my copy has no question mark after "crucified body of love". Was that Thomas's intent or a miss-print? Is the absence of the question mark a hint that such a rhetorical question is no question, but a statement from one who had thought long on the human capacity to shed blood and think it justified in heaven, and had shaken his head in defiant negation? The cross is not the validation of war but its nemesis. And for Thomas, God is known not in the theology of glory but in the theologia crucis. So that the crucified God, symboled in shadow-casting light and crucified love, remains the most powerful critique of a theology of glory dressed up in religion too closely aligned with the centres of secular power.

Jurgen Moltmann - A Prayer to the Triune God

God, creator of heaven and earth

it is time for you to come,

for our time is running out

and our world is passing away.

You gave us life in peace, one with another,

and we have ruined it in mutual conflict.

You made your creation in harmony and equilibrium.

We want progress, and are destroying ourselves.

Come Creator of all things,

renew the face of the earth.

Come, Lord Jesus,

and brother on our way.

You came to seek

that which was lost.

You have come to us and found us.

Take us with you on your way.

We hope for your kingdom

as we hope for peace.

Come Lord Jesus, come soon.

Come Spirit of life,

flood us with your light,

interpenetrate us with your love.

Awaken our powers through your energies

and in your presence let us be wholly there.

Come Holy Spirit.

God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Triune God,

unite with yourself your torn and divided world,

and let us all be one in you,

one with your whole creation,

which praises and glorifies you

and in you is happy.

Amen.

The end prayer from Moltmann's smaller book on pneumatology, The Source of Life. The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (London: SCM, 1997), 160. This wee book isn't a mere distillation of The Spirit of Life. It has several quite substantial new pieces of lectures and reflections following the publication of the larger volume. I think the last line of this prayer is theologically naive in the best sense of both words - a happy creation. I wish...and so I pray. 

............................................................................................

OK. I enjoyed the Buechner week - and thanks for the comments on my bit of playful prayer-making with Moltmann's titles on Sunday's post. So how about you blog readers who left comments, or others who have favourite passages in Moltmann, providing some food for thought over the next week or so?

Here's the suggestion:

1. Choose a passage from any of Moltmann's 8 books in his Contributions Series - well, preferably from these 8 titles. (Titles are on Sunday's Post). Type it out and email it to me. I'll then format it and post it with your name and the reference for the extract.

2. Don't make the quotation too long - say 200 words at the outside.

3. Feel free to add a brief comment on why it is important to you.

4. I've already got several passages in reserve but much more fun and likely to be more interesting if others contribute as well. Use the email available on the blogsite.

C S Lewis, "No dreamer, but thy dream."

Prayer

Master, they say that when I seem
    To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it's all a dream
    --One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they
    Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say
    And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
    The Listener's role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
    The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply
    Nor can;thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
    No dreamer, but thy dream

C.S.Lewis, quoted in James H Trott, A Sacrifice of Praise, (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999), page 735.

One line (not online) Prayers II

Hope Rosemary and Stuart don't mind if I pick up their comments and respond in a full post.

Rosemary isn't too impressed with John Wesley's prayer, "Lord let me not live to be useless." But in Wesley's defence Rosemary - he was the catalyst for a movement that has activism as one of its defining characteristics. And though some might argue that his evangelistic and organisational activism was driven by a clamouring ego, there is also a weight of evidence of something in John Wesley that is much more spiritually substantial. One of the key texts of Scripture on which Wesley's theology of Christian perfection drew deeply, was 2 Peter 1.4 which speaks of believers as participants in the divine nature. And the chain of consequences ends in verse 8 of that chapter with the desire to be kept 'from being ineffective and unproductive in [our] knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

Assuming Rosemary, you are referring to Milton's moving poem about his blindness, then yes,  the observation he makes to God "They also serve who only stand and wait", has equal claim to being a one line prayer that has its moments of exact appropriateness in all our lives. Though Milton himself was no passive quietist - his writing, social engagement and energetic pursuit of religious liberty, political activism and public service enabled him to live a life as full as that of any Wesley, his personality just as complex, his popularity just as mixed.

But a comparison of prayers, their suitability or otherwise, invites some further reflection - on whether, or in what way someone, whether Wesley, Milton, Julian of Norwich or whoever can be "wrong" in content, intention or articulation of their prayer. Our personal circumstances, unique identity, our place in our family, neighbourhood or culture, the emotional and spiritual state we are in, our personal history - and much else, creates the person we are and out of whom come our prayers - praiseworthy and blameworthy, full formed and half formed, articulate and inarticulate, theologically correct and theologically dodgy, emotionally all over the place or emotionally integrated.

So we pray. We pray out of who we are. And we trust God who knows the heart, to see our intent. I think it's one of the mercies of God that love covers a multitude of sins, that God knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and that in prevenient grace God is there before we ever open our mouths, and long afterwards.

That said, some prayers are wrong. But what kind would they be?

.............................

Stuart asks in his comment about my own favourite one line prayer. I don't have one. There are a number I've used many times in those moments when they fit circumstance precisely, answer inner mood exactly, or say the truth as fully as I can bear it. Here's three of them:

For all that is past, thanks - for all that is to come YES

                                                                            (Dag Hammarskjold)

Thine eternity dost ever besiege us

                                                                               (Helen Waddell)

My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee!

                                                                                (Charles Wesley)

One line (not online) prayers

Lord, let me not live to be useless.

                                                         (John Wesley)

Grant me to recognise in other people, Lord God, the radiance of your own face.

                                                         (Teilhard de Chardin)

Lord give me work till my life shall end, and life till my work is done.

                                                         (Based on Epitaph of writer, Winifred Holtby)

Kierkegaard on thought turning toward God

Father in heaven!
Our thought is turned toward Thee; again it seeks Thee at this hour, not with the unsteady step of a lost traveller but with the sure flight of a bird homeward bound.

Grant then that our confidence in Thee be not a fugitive thought, a momentary leap, a mistaken appeasement of the heart and flesh.

Grant that our aspirations toward Thy Kingdom, our hopes for Thy glory, be not unproductive birth pangs or waterless clouds, but that from the fulness of our heart they will rise toward Thee, and that being heard they will quench our thirst like the refreshing dew and satisfy us forever like Thy heavenly manna.

P. D. LeFevre,(Ed.), Prayers of Kierkegaard, page 55

Being "properly present" to others - with or without a mobile!

Rosemary asks a very good question in her comment. I wanted to think a bit more about it. Yes, I agree, Rosemary. I'm equally unsure we can ever be fully or properly present to another person. Or at least, if we are to be, it requires of us levels of attentiveness, inner hospitality and outward welcome that we seldom achieve. But then again, hopsitality, attentiveness, 'the unselfing of the self' that is agape love, and perhaps the sheer celebration of the presence of an other - these seem to me to be moves towards that fuller awareness that in your own good phrase, would mean 'properly present'.

Not much of the above is even possible with a mobile phone clamouring successfully for our attention. As you say, such respectful attentiveness to the presence of the other, by seeking to be fully present ourselves, is really hard.

In the end I suppose our own presence to others, and theirs to us, requires that mysterious connection of purpose, attention and human recognition that we call relationship. Since reading it years ago, I've found J V Taylor's description of the Holy Spirit as the "Go-Between God" a helpful image of the God who enables, supports, enriches such intentional responses between us and others. Prayer too, then becomes an opening up of ourselves to the God whose presence is the promised and already given gift. Something here reminds me too of what Martin Buber taught us about I-Thou as the essential disposition of one human being in relation to another.

One of the 'problems' of prayer, dealt with in countless traditional prayer manuals goes under the heading "Distractions". The reason it was thought to be a problem was precisely because a distraction moves our attention, focus, concentration, away from the presence of God - at that moment something or someone else becomes more important. The gift of the self to the other is withdrawn. We are no longer paying attention, and that seems to me to be a diminishing of the value of the Other.

There's more to all this, and I think I'd like to come back to it when I have thunk about it more. Also interested in what other readers of this blog think about how we can be 'properly present' to others. It seems an important question with significant pastoral implications.