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Blessed art thou,
O Christmas Christ,
that thy cradle was so low
that shepherds,
poorest and simplest of earthly folk,
could yet kneel beside it,
and look level-eyed into the face of God. (Anon)
From a story told by a colleague working with churches in Latin America. One farmer said: ‘A single star for the well born and wealthy wise men compared with a whole host of glorious singing angels on the hillside to warm and welcome the poor and scruffy shepherds. That’s how we know how much God loves the poor. He gives them his very best.’
Written on 24th December 1974 by Oscar Romero: ‘No-one can celebrate Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God with us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.’
Seen for the first time 24th December 1968 from Apollo 8 as the spacecraft looked for possible future landing sites, and giving us something to marvel at, and something to worry about. ‘The most important environmental picture ever taken.’
Now playing Barry Louis Polisar: All I Want
One for the postal strike today…
Karaoke words below.
Night Mail
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
—————-
Now playing: Bruce Springsteen – Waitin’ On A Sunny Day
via FoxyTunes
We’ve been traveling recently. I found this prayer/poem/blessing which sort of makes sense of why we wonder about wandering, and why we welcome home coming.
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingerprints be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
Walk mindfully, well loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home
Ursula K. Le Guin
—————-
Now playing: Carlos Gardel – Por Una Cabeza
via FoxyTunes
Our two churches welcomed a new rector last night.
Last year the following poem on being a priest was kindly passed on to me by the much missed Hopeful Amphibian who used to blog. I’d half remembered it, and something he posted brought it to mind. Although it’s dedicated to an ordained priest, it’s really about those they get to be a priest to.
Priestly Duties – written for E.D. – 23.5.96
What should a priest be?
All things to all -
male, female and genderless.
What should a priest be?
reverent and relaxed
vibrant in youth
assured through the middle years
divine sage when ageing
What should a priest be?
accessible and incorruptible
abstemious, yet full of celebration,
informed, but not threateningly so,
and far above
the passing soufflé of fashion
What should a priest be?
an authority on singleness
Solomon-like on the labyrinth
of human sexuality
excellent with young marrieds,
old marrieds, were marrieds, never
marrieds, shouldn’t have marrieds,
those who live together, those who live
apart, and those
who don’t live anywhere
respectfully mindful of senior
citizens and war veterans,
familiar with the ravages of arthritis
osteoporosis, post-natal depression,
anorexia, whooping-cough and nits.
What should a priest be?
all-round family person
counsellor, but not officially because
of the recent changes in legislation,
teacher, expositor, confessor,
entertainer, juggler,
good with children, and
possibly sea-lions,
empathetic towards pressure groups
What should a priest be?
on nodding terms with
Freud, Jung, St John of the Cross,
The Scott Report, The Rave Culture,
The Internet, the Lottery, BSE, and
Anthea Turner,
pre-modern, fairly modern,
post-modern, and, ideally,
secondary-modern -
if called to the inner city
What should a priest be?
charismatic, if needs must,
but quietly so,
evangelical, and thoroughly
meditative, mystical, but not
New Age.
Liberal, and so open to other voices,
traditionalist, reformer and
revolutionary
and hopefully, not on medication
unless for an old sporting injury.
Note to congregations:
If your priest actually fulfills all of the above, and then enters the pulpit one Sunday morning wearing nothing but a shower-cap, a fez, and declares: ‘I’m the King and Queen of Venus, and we shall now sing the next hymn in Latvian, take your partners, please’, -
Let it pass.
Like you and I,
they too sew the thin thread of humanity.
Remember Jesus in the Garden -
beside himself?
So what does a priest do?
mostly stays awake
at Deanery synods
tries not to annoy the Bishop
too much
visits hospices, administers comfort,
conducts weddings, christenings, -
not necessarily in that order,
takes funerals
consecrates the elderly to the grave
buries children, and babies,
feels completely helpless beside
the swaying family of a suicide.
What does a priest do?
tries to colour in God
uses words to explain miracles
which is like teaching
a millipede to sing, but
even more difficult.
What does a priest do?
answers the ‘phone
when sometimes they’d rather not
occasionally errs and strays
into tabloid titillation
prays for Her Majesty’s Government
What does a priest do?
tends the flock through time,
oil and incense,
would secretly like each PCC
to commence
with a mud-pie making contest
sometimes falls asleep when praying
yearns, like us, for
heart-rushing deliverance
What does a priest do?
has rows with their family
wants to inhale Heaven
stares at bluebells
attempts to convey the mad love of God
would like to ice-skate with crocodiles
and hear the roses when they pray
How should a priest live?
How should we live?
As priests,
transformed by The Priest
that death prised open
so that he could be our priest
martyred, diaphanous and
matchless priest.
What should a priest be?
What should a priest do?
How should a priest live?
Stewart Henderson
—————-
Now playing: Dixie Chicks – Landslide
via FoxyTunes
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to love everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then,
someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
live your way into the answers.
From ‘Letter Four‘ of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.
from R S Thomas’ poem The Answer
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
Saint John’s Bible on tour in America
Epitaph on my own Friend
An honest man here lies at rest,
As e’er God with his image blest;
The friend of man, the friend of truth,
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d;
If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
Robert Burns
A friend and colleague, Luke FitzHerbert, died three weeks ago and his wife, Kay, sustained serious injuries. A tragedy. Those who knew him were genuinely rocked by the news. The Robert Burns piece was included in one of the tributes paid to him and it made sense to post it tonight.
Luke was a one-off. He made a room better for being in it. He was charming, generous and challenging when you needed to be pushed a bit. We wrote books with him, trained with him and agitated with him in many conference centres, town halls and seminar rooms throughout the country and beyond, especially London, Liverpool and Hungary. He was good enough to believe in us when we started out and encouraged us to make things happen.
He believed in the power of individuals to change the world for the better. And that made all the difference.
Kay wrote after the accident: As Luke would want I am being as positive as I can and concentrating, not on my loss, but on my rare good fortune in sharing 43 exciting years with such a dazzling man.
Because He is risen: a poem for Easter
-
Because he is risen
Spring is possible
In all the cold hard places
Gripped by winter
And freedom jumps the queue
To take fear’s place
as our focus
Because he is risen
-
Because he is risen
My future is an epic novel
Where once it was a mere short story
My contract on life is renewed
in perpetuity
My options are open‐ended
My travel plans are cosmic
Because he is risen
-
Because he is risen
Healing is on order and assured
And every disability will bow
Before the endless dance of his ability
And my grave too will open
When my life is restored
For this frail and fragile body
Will not be the final word
on my condition
Because he is risen
-
Because he is risen
Hunger will go begging in the streets
For want of a home
And selfishness will have a shortened shelf‐life
And we will throng to the funeral of famine
And dance on the callous grave of war
And poverty will be history
In our history
Because he is risen
-
And because he is risen
A fire burns in my bones
And my eyes see possibilities
And my heart hears hope
Like a whisper on the wind
And the song that rises in me
Will not be silenced
As life disrupts
This shadowed place of death
Like a butterfly under the skin
And death itself
Runs terrified to hide
Because he is risen
Prayer
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
Carol Ann Duffy
(From Mean Time)
This is both prayerful and liturgical. It’s hanging on to something familiar and snatching the wisp of blessing as it passes – a prayer that utters itself. The roll of the Shipping Forecast sounds prayerful – and like the best liturgy summons those things we need to keep remembering. It honours ‘Those that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters’ (Psalm 107).
Like liturgy it works best when heard and spoken (on Radio 4 at 12.01, 17.54 and at 00.48 or 5.36). The late night and early morning readings are the kinds of times you’re awake too long worrying or awake too early fretting. The kinds of times when it might feel like the ends of the earth.
And oddly enough, Duffy’s last word of prayer, Finisterre – finis terrae -literally the end of the earth – is where we end up in prayer. At the end of our known world.
The full liturgy of the daily Shipping Forecast is at the Met Office. The map doesn’t show Finisterre, which was once between Biscay and Sole. It was replaced in 2002 by Fitzroy.
The Christmas Life
Wendy Cope
“If you don’t have a real tree you don’t bring the Christmas life into the house” Josephine Mackinnon, aged 8
Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold -
Bring the Christmas life into this house.
Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.
Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in the birth, of hope and love light
Bring the Christmas life into this house.
