It is a gorgeous day here today- light is falling like hand grenades.
I wrote this recently, and it seems appropriate to post it today;
Awake
.
Awake my soul-
Arise and let the light in.
The morning star is done by sun,
Today is split
wide open
.
Breathe it deep, this mountain air
Each breath intoxicating
Plant firm these feet, awide these eyes
For here my heart is
beating
.
Awake my soul
.
Awake
A friend of mine has a new book out!
Samir Dawlatly has written a lovely collection of reflections on the parables of Jesus- poetry and prose. You can get hold of the book, or download it from Proost, here. Highly recommended- simple, profound twists to allow us to look again at the words of Jesus from a different direction.
Here is a wee sample;
Blood in Water (Luke 13:20-21)
Love
Is like
A drop of blood
In a glass of water
Though there’s only
A tiny drop
Of blood
It completely changes
The appearance
Of the whole glass
Of water
During my recent silent retreat, I found myself writing some odd things.
I was thinking about the nature of the Communion/Eucharist/Mass. This was triggered in part by an encounter with the centrality of the Mass within the Catholic church. Rightly so of course- it is one of the few specific things that Jesus told us to do- when you meet, do this in rememberence of me.
For many of my brothers and sisters the Mass is a place of mystical exchange. It has power that must be mediated through the ministry of Priests- and the exclusion of those outside the boundaries of the church. Having said that, many Catholics bemoan some of the power stuff that has attached itself to the church, and there is a long tradition of openness, generosity that warms my heart.
However, at one of the celebrations of mass that I attended recently, a Priest said something like this- “Each time we take this bread and this wine, it is doing its work of salvation within us.” I found myself in a place of divergence.
And I started to think about that final meal in the upper room- Jesus looking around at his closest friends, holding them in his heart, longing for them to get it. Get that it does not get any better than this- friends who laugh and love and share life together. Friends who take the stuff of their humanity- their bodies, their life blood, and lay it out for one another. And how Jesus knew that he would soon be gone. That a place at the table would be empty. How his heart must have ached.
Then I started to think about all those people who do not get to share a table like this- ever. All those people who life has broken and split off to live a kind of discommunion. Unmass. Nocharist.
And I suddenly felt a grief that our communal remembering of who Jesus was could ever become exclusive.
And I wrote this;
Holy Communion
.
Make me a mass from the broken bread
Of the schizoid on ward C
And for wine there’s a pool of Rogers blood
After suicide number three
.
And mix me some bread from the words he said
To Carrie when she was nine
The secret stains that drip from her
Will do for communion wine
.
Tear me a piece of the angry bread
Of Leroy on ICU
It took three nurses to inject his wine
They’ll need more before he’s through
.
Bake me bread in the boozers head
His clothes they sure do stink
Instead of wine have the turpentine
That was all he could find to drink
.
These are the holy broken ones
Gone soon and not much missed
From the first and the last of the least of these
We make our Eucharist
Following on from my previous post, I have been thinking a lot about the grace of God recently. Hardly surprising, as I am frequently in need of huge doses of it, but also because I have been immersed in thoughts about our understandings of hell, redemption and atonement.
As part of this I re-read Brian McLaren’s book “The Last Word, and the Word After that” which adventures into this territory. I read the whole thing in one sleepless night, hungry as I was to try to come to some view of these things myself.
From this, I wrote this;
The last word
I was reading a story from the Gospel of Mark about
Jesus. It was one of the hard passages where he uses
words that bite – words that leave no space for
my failure.
Jesus told his disciples to stand up for him before men and
the angels will sing. However those who disown
him will be lost – sent out in
disgrace.
And then I remembered Peter.
Rock of the Church.
Three time sinner before the crow of the cock.
Then I remembered too the story of the Garden where
God tells Adam (and Eve) that if they eat the fruit of the tree they shall surely die.
Not in abstract; they had no concept of the legacy left by the origin of their sin.
Yet they do not die, and God
cares for them, clothes them, sends them out onto the human race
like an anxious parent.
There is God’s
last word –
and the
word
after
that
which is always
‘grace’.
(with apologies to Brian Mclaren for pinching his book title.)
The feathered Eucharist
Happy are these birds above who
never have to go to mass.
Happy fragile feathered things with
light not stained by glass.
Blessed are they beak and claw; their air
Is ever sacred.
Blessed be their treetop temple, each twig
a flying arch.
And sacred is each song that choirs
from sparrows or from larks.
Happy are these crows and cranes
Whose Eucharist is endless.
And may the vaulted holy sky
Be full of wings as birds fly by
On their way to ruffled worship.
(With thanks to Juan Raman Jimenez, ‘The Silversmith and I’.)
Towards the beginning of my retreat, I wrote this;
Lost sheep
Through trees wearing ice where leaves
once were, I follow the map that
someone kindly laid for me.
Over stile that skates my boots and
into fields wiped clean, skittered
only by claws of creatures who watch
me blunder by from cover.
A hedge a road a bog a bridge a pause to
mop and catch my breath, a buzzard low in
silhouette, too-early lamb almost indivisible from
mother, who all but knits for him a jumper.
I am no-where. At least not where I
ought to be. Not mappable. No surrender to
conspiracies of cartographers.
It came to me that only when we
lose a path can we discover our own.
But these too have all been walked before.
I am of for a few days then so the blog will be quiet for a week or so…
I leave you with this old poem from my book ‘Listing’. It seemed appropriate!
A time to be silent
There is a time for all things under heaven
A time for marram grass to move
In gentle air
And for the dying sun
To turn all green things gold
To alchemise the evening
Into a luminal place
On the twilit edge
Between here
And there
A time when the last call of the curlew
Will echo away over the dimming mountains
And the stillness is itself
Whispering
A time for this day
To silence
The soul
Fractals;
One often cited description that Mandelbrot published to describe geometric fractals is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”;[2] this is generally helpful but limited. Authorities disagree on the exact definition of fractal, but most usually elaborate on the basic ideas of self-similarity and an unusual relationship with the space a fractal is embedded in.[2][3][4] [6][29] One point agreed on is that fractal patterns are characterized by fractal dimensions, but whereas these numbers quantify complexity (i.e., changing detail with changing scale), they neither uniquely describe nor specify details of how to construct particular fractal patterns.
Memory
Leeched like lime from this soil
The grains of me are gone
Fractalled
And falling away
Numbers swirl and tumble
Names all interchange
Heads of friends are hooded
Keys each night re-cut
In 66 we went to Spain you told me
The year before Charlene was born
Our wedding day was cloudy
Some song suggested
You
Am I portable?
Is there a jar somewhere to catch what is left?
Or do these memories become minerals
Feeding some darker place?
Hold me softly my love
For I am leaving
Sometimes darkness lies with open arms
Casting no shadows;
No zones of jagged uncertainty
The folded black is bosom-soft
An iris around the eye
Could it be that dark is not opposed by light
But is the place where light is falling?
For the night is not defeated by starlight-
It is anointed.
At the edge of this suburban half light
Beyond the reach of neon
Darkness is waiting
Like pregnancy
For light to be born
May you be richly blessed this Christmas.
So I was watching one of those films. You know the
kind: cheaply made-for-TV at Christmas time. Full of cute kids whose
families are being squashed by the weight of some
manufactured crisis. Then despite my (long nurtured) defensive
cynical screen, I am punctured by goodness;
skewered by grace that grew where even the trees
are plastic. I can offer no excuses except to say that
like fake glitter on the surface of snow the hidden
heart of this angel-beast is shaped
towards love.
this fragile tent 