Poem a day in Lent part 6 Tuesday 8th April to Thursday 17th (Maundy Thursday)
Tuesday 8th April
Yesterday we looked, with John Heath-Stubbs at how the whole of humanity is involved in
the Passion, understood as both death and renewal. Today’s poem, The Agoby by George
Herbert sees how the Passion of Christ, from his agony in the garden to the shedding of his
blood on the cross help us entirely to re configure and renew our understanding forst of Sin
and then of the Love that meets and redeems it:
The Agony
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states and kings;
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious thins,
The which to measure it doth more behove;
Yet few there are that sound them, - Sin and Love.
Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A Man so wrung with pains, that all His hair,
His skin, His garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice which, on the cross, a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like,
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.
Wednesday 9th April
Today’s poem, like the first verse of yesterday’s is set in Gethsemane. Rowan Williams may
well have had Herbert’s image of the ‘press and vice’ in his mind, certainly he is aware that
Gethsemane was an olive grove that contained an olive press, and that some of the ancient
olive trees in Gethsemane today may well have been witness to Christ’s agony.
Gethsemane
Who said that trees grow easily
compared with us? What if the bright
bare load that pushes down on them
insisted that they spread and bowed
and pleated back on themselves and cracked
and hunched? Light dropping like a palm
levelling the ground, backwards and forwards?
Across the valley are the other witnesses
of two millennia, the broad stones
packed by the hand of God, bristling
with little messages to fill the cracks.
As the light falls and flattens what grows
on these hills, the fault lines dart and spread,
there is room to say something, quick and tight.
Into the trees' clefts, then, do we push
our folded words, thick as thumbs?
somewhere inside the ancient bark, a voice
has been before us, pushed the densest word
of all, abba, and left it to be collected by
whoever happens to be passing, bent down
the same way by the hot unreadable palms.
Thursday 10th April
Both George Herbert and Rowan Williams inuit that in some way the Agony in Garden is the
focus for God’s participation in the whole human experience of doubt, difficvulty and
struggle, that he suffers and wrestles with what Keats called ‘the giant agony of the world’ in
order to be near us, to be with us and within us as we ourselves struggle in the dark. It is this
conviction that paradoxically God might be nearer to us when we doubt and struggle than
when we back in certainty that informs the extraordinary courage and honesty of Tennyson’s
great poem In Memoriam. The poem is a kind of spiritual journal taking the poet from the
first extremities of grief, through radical doubt that there is any goodness in the world and
finally towards a renewed and profound faith in the God who is Love. Our next two poems
are extracts from this extraordinary poem. Beginning with a passage which can only be called
a prayer in doubt:
….Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
Friday 11th of April
Towards the end of In Memoriam Tennyson addresses those who condemn doubters as weak
and supress or demonise their own doubts, and shows that a mature and balanced faith is not
one which has refused the agony and the wrestling but one that has been through them and
grown from them. Paradoxically this famous passage about ‘faith in honest doubt, is also a
place in which he makes one of his most explicit appeals to scripture, to the darkness and
cloud of Sinai, contrasted with the sparkling certainties of the Golden Calf
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Siniai's peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.
Saturday 12th April
Someone who knew both doubt and faith, and whose own journey through and from atheism
made him all the more an effective Christian Apologist was CS Lewis. Famous as a
theologian and a children’s writer, he is less well known as a poet, but has written some very
fine verse. This poem ‘Love’s as warm as tears’ seems to me to go to the heart of both our
human loving and the divine and costly love revealed to us on the cross. Lewis, a mediaeval
scholar, has also subtly woven the four elements, and perhaps more faintly the four seasons
into his four meditative verses on Love:
Love's as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green
Love's as fierce as fire, Love is fire: All sorts--Infernal heat Clinkered with greed and pride, Lyric desire, sharp-sweet, Laughing, even when denied, And that empyreal flame Whence all loves came. Love's as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering "Dare! Dare!"
To sap, to blood,
Telling "Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best."
Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
Palm Sunday and Holy Week.
Holy week is perhaps its own season, distinct from Lent, the holy time for which Lent is
preparing us, and towards which it is pointing. I include here a poem for each day between
now and Good Friday, drawn from my collection Sounding the Seasons. These poems will be
used in church in services on each day of Holy Week. On Good Friday itself we shall be
using my fourteen sonnets for the Stations of the Cross, copies of which will be available
from the back of the church and from the St. Eds Website.
Holy Week: 1 Palm Sunday
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The Saviour comes. But will I welcome him?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they'll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple. Jesus, come
Break my resistance and make me your home.
Holy Week: 2 Jesus weeps
Jesus comes near and he beholds the city
And looks on us with tears in his eyes,
And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity
Flow from the fountain whence all things arise.
He loved us into life and longs to gather
And meet with his beloved face to face.
How often has he called, a careful mother,
And wept for our refusals of his grace,
Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping,
Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way;
Fatigued compassion is already sleeping
Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day.
But we might waken yet, and face those fears,
If we could see ourselves through Jesus' tears.
Holy Week: 3 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.
Holy Week: 4 The Anointing at Bethany
Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus,
So close the candles flare 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 centre of all things,
Here at the meeting place of love and loss
We all foresee and see beyond the cross.
Holy Week: 5 Maundy Thursday
Here is the source of every sacrament,
The all-transforming presence of the Lord,
Replenishing our every element,
Remaking us in his creative Word.
For here the earth herself gives bread and wine,
The air delights to bear his Spirit's speech,
The fire dances where the candles shine,
The waters cleanse us with his gentle touch.
And here he shows the full extent of love
To us whose love is always incomplete,
In vain we search the heavens high above,
The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray him, though it is the night.
He meets us here and loves us into light.