It is there in all of our interactions. As Dave says- plan A is usually to repay violence with violence. To take what injury we feel, and look to make someone else pay- either as an individual, or as a group.
I have been thinking about this in relation to the place of my work. Those people who treat me badly- whose interactions are characterised by hard, angry and overly rigid attitudes. Or at least it seems that way to me and those with whom I confide.
And I find myself carrying this violence into my own responses- it shapes the way that I defend, then set up my own small plans of violent resistance.
Sometimes I manage to carry the beatitudes into these interactions- not just outwardly, but actually in the way I think and feel. But not often.
So that is my prayer. To be Christlike.
To measure victory not in terms of overcoming by violence- but in overcoming by something far deeper- called (for want of a better word) love.
God grant me the serenity to not want to change the people that I want to change…
I have just listened to this programme on D H Lawrence. Great fun- Mathew Paris and John Heggerty are always worth listening to.
I have always felt a slight kinship with Lawrence. He is english (rather than English) in the same way that I am- born a few miles from where I was born in Nottinghamshire, son of a miner and a mother with pretentions.
Only a slight kinship, because his star burned brighter from an early age. He was a creature of another age, whose restless energy took him round the world, but never quite to satisfaction.
Some of his poetry is sublime. Even if some of his writing, with it’s awkward sexual obsessions, is rather awful.
Here is one of his wonderful poems-
Shadows
And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.
And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.
And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:
and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches
of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me
then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man
I previously mentioned that Aoradh are in the process of using an e-mailed daily mediation as a means of sharing a deliberate spiritual practice. We have a rota to take a week at a time for a six week trial period.
If you would like to receive the e-mail, then let me know.
I took the first week, and it came to me again how much a reason to create can become in itself creative. And how it can become a source of blessing in the actual creating…
Here are the first three days- a meditation on Psalm 139-
1 You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.
Yet still I hide
Still I believe that my hard disc is encrypted and password protected
Even from your
Benign virus 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
The road is long
And this day is full of demands
Let me rest too
On your soft grass verge
4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.
So let my words be fat with grace
And my vowels be round with kindness
Let me make you smile
When I see you in others 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.
For I am frayed at the edges
Like an old coat
Shaped and scraped by warm work
And I would be conformed
Around you
7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
You are not alienated by my unbelief
Or driven away by my failure
You inhabit my hopes
And dance at the very centre of all that I dream of
Just received a proof of the sleeve of my new book of poetry, out on Proost soon.
I have felt strangely subdued about this project- possibly because it has been a long time in the making- the poems were written over a ten year period, and I have been trying to get the book into shape for most of this year.
But Jonny sent me Jon Birch’s proof- and it is lovely!
Audrey steered me towards Louis MacNeice, as I am always on the look out for great poetry.
MacNeice was born in Belfast, but spent much of his life working for the BBC in London. He was part of a group known as the ‘thirties poets’, including Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. They were united by their left-leanings.
He said this- which I very much agree with-
Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.
Here is one of his poems which I love, entitled ‘Prayer before birth’-
I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.
A man whose difficult childhood turned him into himself- into his own imagination. A difficult, mercurial man, born into extraordinary times. An intelligent man, with a precious gift.
A man who was to die three days after the D day landings, but whose poetry remains as a means of communicating the nature and horror of war.
Here is one of his poems, entitled ‘How to Kill’
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches
There was an interesting discussion on the radio a few days ago about war poetry, during which the question was asked again about why the voices of the Sasoon, Brooke and Owen are so powerful and evocative even so many years (and so many wars) later.
They capture for us the humanity and inhumanity of war in language so vivid and immediate that it resonates still.
But what of the war poets since? Can you name one? What poems told the story of the second world war, or the countless ones since? How many names can you bring to mind?
I read some poetry, but I can name none.
Perhaps this is because the voices of the world war poets bring something to us of a different time, when gentlemen went to war and discovered that there was nothing gentlemanly about industrial slaughter. A time when poetry was at the centre of literature and the arts, and when other forms of media were limited and closely managed.
Wars since then have increasingly been media events. Propaganda became as important as bullets, and image is all.
I wonder, in our mad information overloaded world, if the modern day equivalent of the poetry of Owen and Sasoon is the website Wikileaks.
But I am a poet (if that does not sound too pompous!)
So as we approach another remembrance day, here is a poem about war, and a poem hoping for peace-
A time for war
There is a time for all things under heaven
.
A time to dig trenches and put up barbed wire
Then run to our deaths into withering fire
A time for mass graves, for mums to wear black
Time to kill and to maim- a time to attack
.
A time to dehumanise, a time to breed hate
A time to decide the whole nations fate
A time when all truth is wrapped up in lies
For secret policemen and neighbourhood spies
.
A time to manipulate the news and the media
A time of unassailable powerful leaders
A time of expedient centralised power
Cometh the man in this our dark hour
.
A time for Guantanamo, a time for Auschwitz
A time of gas chambers and motherless kids
A time to throw rocks and let loose the rockets
A time for dead eyes fixed in dead sockets
.
A time for insurgents, a time to suppress
To disappear dissidents, and people oppress
Of brave freedom fighters and terrorist cells
A time for Robin Hoods and William Tells
.
In some foreign field or in our back yard
In red sucking mud or ground frozen hard
Lie the bones of our children who answered the call
Now glorious dead with their names on a wall
.
A time to break up and time to destroy
A time to make men of every small boy
Over by Christmas or just a bit more
Now is the time for us to make war
A time for peace
There is a time for all things under heaven.
.
There must come a time when canons will fall silent
And men start again to look beyond the battlements
Into the scarred and empty fields
Seeded still with land mines
.
There is a time to strike the white flags of surrender
And put away the banners of victory
A time when triumphalism
No longer seems to honour
The broken bodies
And the freshly dug graves
.
There must also come a time when displaced people
Dare to step beyond the bounds of the refugee camp
And walk the long road home
.
Surely too the day will come when guns will be melted into garden forks
And tanks will pull the plough
A time for doves instead of hawks
And lions to learn care for the cows
.
A time will come too when borders are open
And bitterness and hate are eroded by the resilience of a new generation
this fragile tent 