On Drawing Poetry

 

The Lent Project is more reflection than penance, but continually faces me with my limitations. My messy desk. Blots on paper. The wrong brushes. Measurements, and how not to take them. Mixing styles: a bad idea. Finding out this is a bad idea. Not waiting for the paint to dry: so impatient. Ink and watercolours in a book so any mistakes stay around to be regretted. Just gotta live with it.  A lot like life.

Do I have the time to do this today? Where can I make the time? Am I pushing time? Should I have done this yesterday? Sure. What thing has to go elsewhere, even out, so I can find the time? Is time not it, but he, as the Mad Hatter proposes? Where is he? Hiding? Asleep? In another reality? Is Time but a feckless child?

The moment you engage with poetry you are faced with its intellectual quality. Poetry is one language, drawing another. Words and images have to speak to one another. Some lines, even the most descriptive, are abstract. Faced with the abstraction of all words. What’s beneath, behind, within words? Searching the words of poets to find the image beyond all words.

On Chorus Call

 

Fake facts are not new. The Greek tragedies hinge on them. The gods are by no means predisposed to overlook them. Confronted by catastrophe, Chorus knows that every one shall be afflicted by the resulting fall.

Who believed history tucked safely into the past? Catastrophe overturns the existing order; fatal reversal. Chorus hears it in the death of Agamemnon: “Anyone can see it, by these first steps they have taken, they purpose to be tyrants here upon our city.”[i]  Chorus foresees, inquires, fears, recounts, witnesses, prophecies. “Where shall I turn the brain’s activity in speed when the house is falling?”

Jesus, also, faces his followers as prophet. In Wycliff’s translation: “Moreover when ye se the abominable desolacion, whereof is spoken by Daniel the prophet, stond where it ought nott, let hym that readeth it, understonde it.” (Mark 13:14) What is standing in the wrong place now?  Your role is Chorus: stay awake.  Meanwhile the disciples are absorbed by the problem of who is worthy.

You still have a spiritual life. What is the state of your soul? The great and troubling mysteries of Lent and Holy Week are before us. (Let whoever reads understand).

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[i]Aeschylus, Agamemnon, tr. Richard Lattimore.

On Many Calls

 

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” Although few are chosen, does this mean many are called? Many who were called did not turn up. The great audition lacked some otherwise ambitious performers. (That’s how you don’t get the job). When the choice is down, the call goes to whom you did not expect. All the usual suspects found somewhere else to be on the day when the Holy Spirit stood beside Paul and made the right call. For a while.

            You can choose or be chosen. Which is more worrying? Think of the last kid chosen for the sports team. (Suffer the little children). Is one choice better than the other? Many vocations, many locutions. Who has the choice to choose? Then who is called, and who’s called out?

            Out of court, out of time, out of options. Some shall be out, some shall be in. (In favour, in prison; in trouble, in luck.) Where Martha has many calls on her attention, Mary has one only. That’s just a fact: if Martha didn’t answer, dinner wouldn’t make it to the table. The dinner, the table, the bread, the wine. The gift. The last shall be first; the first last.

On Quarter Time

 

Ocean currents flow both on the surface and below. Wind currents sweep above lands and waters, from sky to low. Everything is in flow, through time. All that you loved is in flow; what you did and said, loved and held, flowing back and forth, around and over and under and through.

Is the cosmos full of fire, and the earth of water? Is time regular, or full of floods and pools? Is God both mathematician and musician? Evidently. Common time in music is quarter time; four fours, a quarter note one four. The seasons divide into quarters. So a quarter of a century is a big chunk of time; it’s a real bite. From 2000 to 2025 looks like a quarter from here. Now someone will tell me my maths is most suspect, but history is cyclical, of this I’m sure. The forces of purity and fear retreat, and then return, when you don’t expect them, when your attention is directed elsewhere. From Christ’s time to our time, we entered the third millennium: it’s called the Common Era, but I prefer the old term Anno Domini. You can’t hope to see it all, but you can hope to see.

 

On Love and Charity

 Love one another. Is this enough? Love your enemies, too. The theological virtue of Love is a path, loving others through love of God as the strength of love for God makes all loves possible. Then again, your enemies are trying to destroy you. What would happen if enemies love each other? Peace on earth? Embrace an enemy today?

Be good to them that despise you: to say you’ll pray just makes them angry. Love is an action. Preach the liberation of the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. Free the oppressed.

Love saves. Mainly it saves you. The desperate love of parent for child; the passionate love of the Song of Songs: love is hardly love without emotion. Charity, however, may seem unloving love, cold as charity a proverb. Who is my neighbour? Share dignity with charity: receive the same.  Let charity be shown to you. God knows the need.

Love saved the weeping woman at Christ’s feet. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much.” Or with Tyndall: “To whom lesse is forgiven, the same doeth lesse love.” Who is my family? More love, more family. You are one of all of Us.

On Faith

 

In my understanding, a mystery is something that changes a person in relation to the Divine. The mystery of Christian faith is conveyed through Baptism and is lived through every day. Faith in its ordinary meaning encompasses loyalty and trust, so you may have faith in a football team that lets you down, but remain loyal. Trust is what you have. Loyalty is what you do.

Faith is the theological virtue that enables us to believe in God and believe in Truth as revealed in Jesus’ words and Word. That’s what makes Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” so interesting. Is Pilate a Nazi Gauleiter jesting with his Jewish victim? Is this a Stoic rhetorical question from his schooldays? Pilate is a man of action. He orders crucifixions, many. He lacks faith, but finds no harm in Jesus. Why?

Faith isn’t intellectual assent to a set of propositions. Nor is it blind, or unthinking. Faith is a Trinity surrounding you with love and support. Believing is related to loving: you may love what you trust, and trust what you love, and see miracles. In the words of Tyndall’s 1526 translation of Luke, “Thy fayth hath made the safe.” Go in peace.

On Envy

Envy consumes the eye. It is tainted sight. Invidia means looking closely, too closely at the advantages of others. Wealth, beauty, achievements, relationships, opportunities. It gives birth to resentment, hostility, and hatred. While jealousy defends one’s own possessions, envy desires another’s. It dwells in a limited world; it feels there is never enough; a world of reaching for prizes, seeking for names. Aquinas calls envy “sorrow for another’s good.”

 Envy distorts judgement. Where justice returns to everything that which belongs to it, envy seeks to take it away; envy will suffer loss, so others may lose. The evil eye is envy personified, withering crops, sickening children, fuelled by a sense of grievance and inferiority. Envy is the seat of many crimes, from theft to murder. 

Integrity is seamless. Wholeness protects. “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” That eye is the road to the heart: kindly, beneficent, generous, benevolent, loving. Light enables us to see reality as it is; darkness obscures. “If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.” We know so little about others, even judging God: “Are you envious because I am generous?” God’s eye is true.