Messengers
It suddenly strikes me
with overwhelming force:
It was women
who were first to spread the message of
Easter -
the unheard of!
It was women
who rushed to the disciples
who, breathless and bewildered,
passed on the greatest message of all:
He is alive!
Think if women had kept silence
in the churches!
Marta Wilhelmsson
Gods Mercy
God's boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis n'ere
Known, or else seen to be the emptier:
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and filled full, than when full-filled before.
(Robert Herrick)
Many of the poets of the Seventeenth Century combined theological precision with psychological perception. The best of them weren't called Metaphysical Poets for nothing; and when they recounted the range of human experiences they called a spade a spade, a sin a sin, and looked their own unworthiness and deserved judgement head on. But they also revelled in images and words for the extravagant mystery of divine love, the inexhaustible fund of divine mercy, and the inexplicable generosity of a holy God for sinful humanity. The above is one of my favourites from Herrick - I don't know who reads him much today, and sure some of his verbal gymnastics look like showing off - but here's another one I like. Not because it is devotionally effective (whatever that might mean!), but because Herrick is enjoying the chance to dig the ribs of over metaphysical theologians:
God's Presence.
God's present ev'ry where; but most of all
Present by union hypostaticall;
God, He is there, where's nothing else, schools say,
And nothing else is there, where he's away.
Mind you - I wouldn't mind the odd few lines of metaphysical mind-stretching put up on the power-point as a counter-balance to the limitations of much of contemporary one dimensional praise.
The Resurrection
I was the one who waited in the garden
Doubting the morning and the early light.
I watched the mist lift off its own soft burden,
Permitting not believing my own sight.
.
If there were sudden noises I dismissed
Them as a trick of sound, a sleight of hand.
Not by a natural joy could I be blessed
Or trust a thing I could not understand.
.
Maybe I was a shadow thrown by some
Who, weeping , came to lift away the stone,
Or was I but the path on which the sun
Too heavy for itself, was loosed and thrown?
.
I heard the voices and the recognition
And love like kisses heard behind the walls.
Were they my tears which fell, a real contrition?
Or simply April with its waterfalls?
.
It was by negatives I learned my place.
The garden went on growing and I sensed
A sudden breeze that blew across my face.
Despair returned but now it danced, it danced.
(Elizabeth Jennings)
Whether intended to or not, Jennings' poem is an exposition of Luke's description of disciples who 'disbelieved for joy'. The triumph of the resurrection came later, on reflection. The more immediate responses were fear, bewilderment, disbelief, panic, the consequent confusion of thought and emotion when confronted with impossibility dawning into a clear perhaps. The mist lifts, and sight is permitted, but faith needs more than sight, and how do you 'trust a thing you do not understand?'
Today I will celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. And like those first witnesses, there will be the thrill of recognition, that 'sudden breeze' of new possibility, of fresh and refreshing movement, and that inner redeeming movement, as despair is reborn in hope, and sorrow is turned to dancing. There will also be, I trust, time for deeper reflection of how a resurrection faith can be practised and lived by the community of Christ who are witnesses to the Easter faith. And in our worship, the affirmation that life overcomes death, darkness gives way to light, and 'love, like kisses', is heard behind the walls', and then lived out in the streets.
A joyful and reflective Easter to all who now and again come by here.
Holy Saturday - the essential hiatus in the story of redemption, when the Son of God entered into the abyss, and when the death throes of death were entered into and endured; Holy Saturday, when the reality of the Son being made sin who knew no sin, fell with tragic force on the heart of God. Some of the most profound theology of the past few decades has tried to take seriously the suffering of the Son who died, and the suffering of the Father bereft of His only begotten Son, and that anguish communicated within the eternal communion of the Triune God through the Spirit.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale is a masterpiece of reflection on the theology of Easter, and the significance of Holy Saturday as the quiet, empty, menacing abyss where death, loss and defeat intimate the triumph of the tragic, the death of God, with a persuasive finality; Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God and his later reflections, explore with theological courage, perhaps even some theological recklessness the meaning of Christ's death for the inner life of the Triune communion of love that is God; Alan Lewis, whose Between the Cross and the Resurrection was written during the last months of his life when he was dying of cancer, and out of his suffering came a book of immense integrity, of movingly engaged theology, the theological and personal testimony of one who built his own hope on the mystery of life overcoming death, enduring light rescinding final darkness, redeeming love eclipsing the power of sin.
Here is one paragraph from the end of Lewis's remarkably penetrating and contemplative understanding of the paschal mystery:
For surely it is only in the mode of prayer ---in meditation, reflection, and straining of the heart and ear for a word of God beyond human speechlessness, that one could finally do justice to a narrative like ours which at its centre-point has God buried in the grace on Easter Saturday. What is there left to do but pray, if the story of God's own death and burial be true? (p. 463)
What Lewis is suggesting is not prayer that is fuelled by certainty, but prayer that grows out of the bewilderment and speechlessness that must overcome mind and heart when the implications of Holy Saturday are thought and felt.
All of which reminded me of Denise Levertov's poem, 'Oblique Prayer', a poet's take on spiritual truth that is too profound for words, too elusive for certainties, and a poet's honesty about those experiences of God that speak more of absence than presence. The poem is set out in a way that allows the text to convey the fragmented, at times fearful, yet finally hopeful searching of those for whom Holy Saturday speaks of God's own dark night.
Oblique Prayer
Not the profound dark
night of the soul
.
and not the austere desert
to scorch the heart at noon,
grip the mind
in teeth of ice at evening
.
but gray,
a place
without clear outlines,
.
the air
heavy and thick
.
the soft ground clogging
my feet if I walk,
sucking them downwards
if I stand.
.
have you been there?
Is it
.
a part of human-ness
.
to enter
no man's land?
.
I can remember
(is it asking you
that
makes me remember?)
even here
.
the blessed light that caressed the world
before I stumbled into
this place of mere
not-darkness.
This Holy Saturday, I am glad to pay tribute to Alan Lewis, an alumnus of New College, Edinburgh, and one whose theology was lived and written in the presence of God. The book cover shows Alan's memorial window at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. I have bought his book three times - because I have twice given my own copy away as a gift - there aren't many book you buy three times.
Good Friday is a day of heaviness. The weight of a world's pain borne in the heart of God in Christ crucified, the very nature of crucifixion compelling the body to feel its own weight in proportion to the physical anguish of wounded limbs supporting a broken frame. It is inevitable that the passion of Christ should reverberate within the penitent devotion of hearts bewildered by the agony of love.
Saint Exupery writes that 'sorrows are the vibrations of the soul that remind us we are alive'. And early in devotional verse Jesus was called the Man of Sorrows, absorbing into the infinite spaciousness of divine love the malignant consequences of a world's sin; and in his case those sorrows were linked at one and the same time to his death, and the gift of life it released. Elizabeth Jennings' poem while acknowledging the anguish of Christ crucified, faces up to the reality of sin as more than radical evil; sin is also the accumulation of small acts of selfishness, cruelty, indifference, neglect; it is the diligently learned skill of witholding acts and words that bless and care for and heal those who are carrying the heavy end of the cross in their lives. The weight of sin is made up not only of those occasional vast blocks of granite, but also of mountains of sand, that inumerable and unimaginable number of microscopic rocks that defies our best calculus. A bag of sand is as heavy as a lump of granite - but easier accumulated, perhaps representing the sheer quantity of our lost opportunities to bear the weight of someone else's struggle - and when that happens, says Jennings, Jesus is crucified again.
The Eternal Cross
He'll blossom on the cross in three weeks now,
The saviour of the world will die again.
He is the flower upon a hurting bough,
The crown of thorns and nails will give him pain.
But the worst one is how
.
We go on daily wounding him and he,
Although he's out of time, still feels the great
Dark of betrayal. He's nailed on a tree
Each time we fail him. Suffering won't abate
Until the liberty
.
This God-Man gave us is used only for
Kindness and gentleness. Our world is full
Of dying Christs - the starved, the sick, the poor.
God sleeps in cardboard boxes, has no meal.
We are his torturer
.
Each time we fail in generosity,
Abuse a child or will not give our love.
Christ lets us use our fatal liberty
Against himself. But now and then one move
Of selfless love sets free
.
The whole of mankind whom he saw at play
And work as he lay dying, when his side
Was pierced. That spear was how we fail to say
We love someone, but each time tears are dried
It's Resurrection Day.
(Elizabeth Jennings, from An Easter Sequence)
Now those of you who know my theological preferences are well aware of my enthusiasm for P T Forsyth. No mean theologian, a precursor of Barth some fellow enthusiasts claim, and certainly someone whose theological legacy perdures like a rich quarry of high quality Aberdeen granite that carries long term promise of productivity. So it's a comment on the theological perception and intellectual sure-footedness of Dora Greenwell that she and Forsyth collaborated on a book on prayer entitled, The Power of Prayer. Now don't let the Victorian portrait fool you - you might think she'd look out of her depth at a quite good house group - but she'd wipe the floor with the lot of us if it came to serious theological engagement with the meaning of the Cross, the relations of human and divine suffering, and the mystery and reality of the provident purposes of God. In that short essay on 'prayer as will', she probes deeply into the truth of God's will as it encounters human volition, and recognises that finally faith has to rest not in answers and certainty, but in a knowing trust in God revealed on the cross. One of her poems, for a long time a favourite in hymn-books, is an uncomplicated meditation on the trust-worthiness of God in Christ, no matter what.
I am not skilled to understand
I am not skilled to understand
What God hath willed, what God hath planned;
I only know at His right hand
Is One Who is my Saviour!I take Him at His word indeed;
“Christ died for sinners”—this I read;
For in my heart I find a need
Of Him to be my Saviour!That He should leave His place on high
And come for sinful man to die,
You count it strange? So once did I,
Before I knew my Saviour!And oh, that He fulfilled may see
The travail of His soul in me,
And with His work contented be,
As I with my dear Saviour!Yea, living, dying, let me bring
My strength, my solace from this Spring;
That He Who lives to be my King
Once died to be my Saviour!
Dorothy Sayers wrote some of the most accomplished detective stories in the genre. She wasn't so much a crime-writer who could write well, she was an exceptionaly fine writer who wrote crime stories, plays for radio, and a translation of Dante still popular enough to remain in print half a century later. She was also a fine theologian whose slim essay on the vocational value of work, and whose The Mind of the Maker, and Creed or Chaos? are as lucid examples of accessible, thoughtful theology as you're likely to pick up. I wish she'd written more theology - but some of her theological fingerprints are all over her poetry.
The following poem shows her characteristic sharpness of mind just held in check by an acknowledged deference before mystery - that word 'perhaps' at the end of the last line but three, is an unmistakeable giveaway. I confess I love and trust the God revealed in Christ crucified as the One who refuses by lightning to smite the world perfect.
The Choice of the Cross
Hard it is, very hard,
To travel up the slow and stony road
To Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better
To make but one resplendent miracle,
Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power
And with a sudden lightning smite the world perfect.
Yet this was not God's way, Who had the power,
But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn,
The sorowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps,
That power destroys in passing, something supreme,
To whose great value in the eyes of God
That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.
Dorothy L Sayers, From 'The Devil to Pay'.
Emily Dickinson was an enigmatic genius. Her poetry presents condensed thought, ideas triggered by allusive but precisely chosen and positioned words, often indicating the direction rather than the content of thought.
"Her poetry is 'romantic', that is derived from observations and meditations on phenomena of 'nature', but it is also metaphysical, making use of unusual and extended metaphors."
Quite - but such comments hide as much as they say. Reading Dickinson's poems can be like encountering the astringent wisdom of the Desert Fathers, or the contemplative challenge of Zen teaching, but in the diamond-cut terminology of a 19th Century New England woman, who knew a bit about desert, solitude and the essential if elusive wisdom that resides in words and silence, when each is rightly used.
Metres of shelf space and gigabytes of word documents are devoted to secondary studies of commentary, criticism, context and much else about Dickinson. More important is the work of reading her - and allowing her poetry to do its own work. That work is best described by the word 'deep', used in a currently fashionable sense of "deep listening", "deep feeling", "deep understanding".
That I Did Always Love (No. 549)
That I did always love
I bring thee Proof
That till I loved
I never lived---Enough---
.
That I shall love alway---
I argue thee
That love is life---
And life hath Immortality---
.
This---dost thou doubt---Sweet---
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary---
Holy Week is a good time to honour martyrs, those who bear witness to their faith by sacrificial living or by surendering life itself. Elisabeth Alden Scott Stam was raised by missionary parents in China in the early 20th Century. After missionary training at Moddy Bible Institute she married and returned to China. They had a daughter in 1934 and six months later, during the Chinese Civil war, she and her husband were executed by Chinese Communist soldiers. In the looted wreckage of their home, written on scraps of paper used to wrap around chinaware, a number of her poems were later found. They had been preserved by their faithful cook, disguised as mere wrappings.
The story of the deaths of John and Betty Stam is almost forgotten. The book The Triumph of John and Betty Stam written by Mrs Howard Taylor is now available here and there on Amazon, but like many classics of Christian faithful Christrian witness is now an almost forgotten genre. Some forms of post-modern and post-colonial theology have taught us to recognise the failings and consequences of the role of Christian missionary activity in Western imperial politics. Fair enough, and there is plenty to require a long repentance
But when all due consideration is given to this, it doesn't in my view eclipse the significance of faithful Christian witness, the combination of compassion and courage shown by countless followers of Jesus who discovered in their own experience the cost of sacrifice in their own personal passion story. So I honour this woman and her husband, who the morning she and her husband were beheaded, managed to hide her baby Helen in a rug, later smuggled to her grandparents; this woman who whatever the murky implications of national politics simply wanted to share her faith by the practice of kindness; this woman whose passion for God led to the personal passion of martyrdom. Accounts of their death seem embarrassed by terminology - 'put to death', 'murdered', 'executed' - each with its own connotations of the motives of those who killed them. More important was the motive that took them there in the first place - passion for God, the call to bear witness to the love of God in Jesus, a love for a people amongst whom they chose to live.
Here is one of the poems, used to wrap china - I note the irony of the image - china wrapped in the poetry of Christian devotion, China wrapped in the witness of devoted Christian living.
"Stand Still and See"
Exodus 14.13.
"I'm standing Lord.
There is a mist that blinds my sight.
Steep jagged rocks, front, left, and right.
Lower, dim, gigantic, in the night.
Where is the way?
.
"I'm standing, Lord.
The black rock hems me in behind.
Above my head a moaning wind
Chills and oppresses heart and mind.
I am afraid!
.
"I'm standing, Lord.
The rock is hard beneath my feet.
I nearly slipped, Lord, on the sleet.
So weary, Lord, and where a seat?
Still must I stand?
.
He answered me, and on his face
A look inefffable of grace,
Of perfect understanding love,
Which all my murmuring did remove.
.
"I'm standing, Lord.
Since Thou hast spoken, Lord, I see
Thou hast beset; these rocks are Thee;
And since thy love encloses me,
I stand and sing!"
The epitaph on her gravestone reads, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain". When we've learned what we must learn from the mistakes and wrongs of history, It's no part of post-colonial hermeneutics to minimise the sacrifice and integrity of such remarkable witnesses, who in following after Jesus, entered their own Passion story.
During Holy Week I'll post a poem and some brief thoughts and reflections. Doing this gives focus to my own devotional response to this Holy Season, and I hope offers food for thought and thought for prayer, to those who visit here.
One of the underrated figures in Evangelical spirituality is Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. Long before Mother Teresa, Amy Carmichael was developing fellowships and communities of compassion for the disinherited, the vulnerable, and especially the children of South India. Her poetry is unabashedly devotional, but it is devotion unspoilt by superficial emotionalism, or cheaply purchased sentiment. Carmichael's spirituality drew on powerful undercurrents of Keswick holiness teaching, channelled through a determined and passionate personality, worked out in the pragmatic hard-headed labour of making homes for the homeless and feeding the hungry; all this then expressed in some of the most effective poetry in the last hundred years of Evangelical writing.
Her vision penetrated to those inner recesses of theological reflection where the eternal and mysterious purposes of God, though still unexplained, are yet contemplated and if not understood, then at least appropriated as foundational trust. "Yet Listen Now", is one of those poems that makes Easter more than a focal liturgical annual event, but a way of looking at the world day after day. Olive trees (favourite subject of Van Gogh), are called as witnesses of the redemption and healing of that human brokenness and fractured creation which is experienced in the reality and mystery of suffering.
Yet Listen Now
Yet listen now,
Oh, listen with the wondering olive trees,
And the white moon that looked between the leaves,
And gentle earth that shuddered as she felt
Great drops of blood. All torturing questions find
Answer beneath those old grey olive trees.
There, only there, we can take heart to hope
For all lost lambs - Aye, even for ravening wolves.
Oh, there are things done in the world today
Would root up faith, but for Gethsemane,
For Calvary interprets human life;
No path of pain but there we meet our Lord;
And all the strain, the terror and the strife
Die down like waves before his peaceful word,
And nowhere but beside the awful Cross,
And where the olives grow along the hill,
Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,
The crushing agony - and hold us still.
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