Easter is God lying on a park bench,
hungry, drunk, huddled against the cruel wind and the lashing rain.
Easter is a weeping, brick dust girl
watching as her family home is demolished in the West Bank
or a brave, silent protest
in the face of globalized thought control.
Easter is a church
that walks out one morning
from a stone and brick tomb
into the garden of the broken,
holds out the hand of God and says,
“Sister, brother, I see that you are hurting.
I have come to bring you
good news!”
Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Then Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me… When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11. 39-43)
THE REEDS and the grasses on marsh and hill, they are they who remember.
Stones will be rolled into sand, dragged to the sea. But the reeds dance and the grasses keep whispering, passing down, generation to generation, the stories, the names: Lazarus whom God will call out from his tomb, Mary rebellious child of the poor, Martha home-maker in the mud and the dust.
The reeds and the grasses, they’ve no desire to recall the rich or the powerful, who never took off their sandals to quench their feet in nature’s holy sustenance, or turned to her for refuge in the dark night of the soul, who have never joined her to sing in praise of the One who Is.
The rich and the powerful have left their own grand scars on the landscape, made of stone or iron and, latterly, of neon might. But the reeds and the grasses, they call out the names of martyrs and heroines of a wholly other kind. This is a kind who will give away their lives to receive Life. This is a kind who will die to the self, be cocooned and bound in the darkest tomb of self doubt, four days, four nights, or even for years and years.
They are not rock gods or celebrity gurus, they do not make a sound in the big-noise places. They are a simple kind, mortal, fallible, vulnerable and, most often, wounded. These are the ones remembered by the reeds and the grasses on marsh and hill. Theirs are the stories passed on by the flowers and the wind. They are the ones who hear from their cocoon in their tomb the voice of God calling their name, “Take away the stone, child. It’s time for you to come out into the Light.”
The reeds and the grasses on marsh and hill, they are they who remember the stories of the names of the names written on God’s Hand and in the Wind.
Mary picks up her fallen son in a scene from Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother’ (John 19.26,7)
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless… Neil Young
HOW MANY times has she been here in her heart?
How many times has she gone over in her mind the words of Simeon, the temple priest, spoken when Jesus was just forty days old: “And a sword will pierce through your soul also” (Lk 2:35)?
His Cross is her Cross, his broken body hers, his pain her pain.
How many times has she pleaded with him –
think about the danger, not to go to this year’s Passover in Jerusalem?
How many times has she pleaded with God to take away the cup? Let it pass from her son. The world is too broken. Even he can’t fix it.
Please God.
Let him go.
How many times has she bathed her child’s wounds, picked him up when he’s fallen, nursed him when he was ill, held him in her arms when he was hurting, kissed him as he was leaving?
And now, helpless, she must watch him as they beat him and nail him till he screams out, ‘Mama!’
And he falls,
crushed under the weight of that torture-to-death tree.
And she would give the world, give her life, to be able to just pick up her child once more, and wipe away the blood, and chase away the crowd, hold back his attackers, his executioners.
But all she can do is watch. She has no earthly power, let alone of the divine kind, to save.
And now. The voice.
From the Cross.
Speaking like a spear in her soul…
‘Woman, behold your son…’
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
And tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.
Helpless, helpless, helpless…
Change, she comes,
Weeping, tree green,
Sundanced, song-blanched,
Creeping gently in the wind,
Lake rippling grey.
Leaf shoot, life root,
Through the bark of winter,
She comes.
She walks in beauty,
Like a bulrush defiant Virgin
Mother-blessed
New Day
(Llangasty 25th March)
Yes we are but Jesus calls us to so much more. He calls us to freedom. To the freedom of faith, the freedom to love, the freedom of eternal life. This is what scares people about Jesus. He doesn’t accept pre-set limitations or excuses. He calls us out of our complacent, self-deprecating, self-righteous slumber. This is what scared the demons in the wild man’s soul and the people of Gerasene, in the story of ‘Legion’ (Mark 5). It scares so many people today. Jesus can, if he wants send our attitudes like a herd of pigs over the cliff. Whatcha gonna do then? Where’re ya gonna hide? Stripped! Jesus calls our souls to be free. But with freedom comes the responsibility of the free, to dare to choose a better way, dare to work at growing, dare to turn round and face Truth and not hide ourselves in lies. If we can blame our limitations, we don’t need to do anything, do we? “It’s not my fault. I just can’t. I was made this way.”
Don’t argue for your limitations.
If you do, you can be sure, they’ll make themselves yours.
Dare to be free.
Look child. Gaze on the light. You are frightened now. He has just told you it can’t be the way you want, not how you think it is supposed to be. He has told you that he will be crucified. He even knows what you’re gonna do. Deny him. Run for your life. Leave him to the wolves and the jackals on the darkest night. Knowing he’s hanging there. Dying slowly. Screaming out the pain of all humanity, ‘Why! Oh my God, why have you forsaken me! Why have you left me here bleeding in the rain and the hailing wind?’
You’ve been with him some time now. But the more you get close to knowing him, the crazier he seems. The more dangerous it seems to get. Look child. Though you are scared and hope-dashed, dream- smashed into hiding inside your sleep,
Gaze into the light.
Look at him now. All of scripture surrounds him. The whole universe emanates from him. His face shines with the radiance of the Uncreated. He is Love. The Way of the Cross is Love amidst the fear,
No darkness can dis-appear it, no death can conquer it.
The Way of the Cross confronts all wrongdoing, all injustice, all terror. No evil can fester in its light.
Child you are afraid. You’ve guessed deep inside, though you deny it to your self-taught thought, that you will have to suffer too. But know this. In suffering there is beauty. Though you must struggle sometimes, maybe many times, until you too must taste death,
Through death you will explode in God-light, radiant and bright, bright white.
I am showing you all this now though you can’t understand yet. One day you will. When you have seen Resurrection, in him, in you, in all things, in all place, in all time…
…And you, ‘there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
Look child. Look at the light. She cannot die. Her resurrection is already won.
Gaze
into the light.
ancient yew tree, sacred to the Celts, like the one at Llanrhidian
‘In avenues of sleep inside the forest
there’s a silent smoke that creeps among the trees
A distant sound like countless fires fighting,
and the frightened giants wait to lose their leaves’
Gower singer songwriter, Paul Carman, is not impressed with the giant fir trees that edge the vicarage garden in Llanrhidian. They are not supposed to be here and they rip all the nutrients out of the soil so that other plants have nothing to feed on. Well that’s what I think he said.
Like his Celtic ancestors, nature is important to Paul, his life tuned to melodies of birds and poetic metre of wave and season. At least, it would be if he wasn’t a musician and so unable to be awake in daylight hours!
In his recent work, Paul has been exploring some of the more interesting aspects of cosmic and earthly experience. In the song, There (Wake Up Brasilia), the voice of the text comes from within the ‘soul’ of a tree in a devastated rainforest. It is the voice of nature responding to: how a human race, at suicidal pace, went wrong, so wrong, so long…
As the song comes to its resolution, the tree’s prayer for forgiveness of her human executioner, and appeal to humankind’s better self, are cut off: Too late, Brasilia – tear up the plan………… there, when I’m there………………
Burning, tortured sap finally explodes through the bark, apocalypse unavoidable:
YOUR DEVASTATED GARDEN,
YOUR DESECRATED WOMB,
SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
– YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MUST DO:
UNLEASH YOUR SACRED ANGER,
ALL RADIANT AND BLUE,
TO CAUTERISE THE CANCER;
THE CANCER KILLING YOU……
THESE FOOLS HAVE GOT NO FUTURE,
THE FINAL CHANCE THEY BLEW…
It is ego that causes the human race to be so wasteful, so unthinking, so devoid of empathy that he/she has so deeply damaged God’s Creation. The rainforests are indeed dying, climate is changing, floods and droughts are threatening increased destruction. Scientists are discovering more and more evidence that human habits are endangering human survival and the survival of pretty much everything else. Perhaps, as Paul’s tree tells us, it is already too late. Let us pray that it is not.
Contemplatives such as Richard Rohr and Thomas Merton have written about the false self and the true self. The false self is the ego-centric identity with which we tend to define ourselves. It is fed by success, sense of power and control, competition, public esteem, fame, renown etc. It is fixed on the future and driven by the past, and it will pursue its aims whatever the cost. The end justifies the means. Conversely, the true self is God-centric and ultimately free. The true self is peace, love, compassion, truth in essence. It is met and fed only in the present moment. To find it is to live. It is by stopping and noticing that we can become our true self.
Civil war is erupting in the Ukraine, there are murders and massacres between Moslems and Christians in Africa, and between Israelis and Palestinians, Syrians and Syrians, power struggles, floods and financial crises all over the world. Rainforests, tigers and whales are all but extinct. So much has at suicidal pace, (gone) wrong, so wrong, so long… Is it too late Brasilia?
Or dare we hope humanity may yet find her true self?
‘Look at the birds of the air…consider the lilies of the field’ while we still can. Peace.
(There © Paul Carman 2011)
The Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple
Why do I have to suffer? Why does life seem to be so unfair? Why do so many good people seem to die young? Why do I have to die and all the people I love too? Why am I here anyway? Why are there bad guys? Why do the bad guys seem to win so much in real life? They don’t in the movies. Why then? Why? How long Lord? How long till you come and put it right? When will the just be vindicated? When will your people be One?
These are the questions aren’t they? You can think of plenty more too. But they’re not new questions. People have struggled with them as long as people have walked the earth – the Romantics, the Platonists, Neo-Platonists, modernists, post-modernists, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, Celts and Saxons, writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, Buddhists and Hindus, Moslems and Agnostics, Atheists… No doubt Simeon had pondered these things all his life. But something inside him insisted that he would not die before he saw the Awaited One.
One day in the temple of his prayers, Simeon saw more than what his eyes (or the rational mind) could perceive. Physical sight could notice Jesus, a forty day old baby. But that’s not how Simeon describes, in the Nunc Dimittis of Luke’s Gospel, what he saw. He says, “My eyes have seen your salvation.” Which is it? Is it a baby or is it salvation? The answer can only be, “Yes.”
Simeon’s ‘yes’ is also “yes” for you and me. This is not simple history. The presentation of our Lord in the temple is happening all the time. The unseen is seen, the untouchable touched, the unspoken heard, the uneaten tasted, the odourless made fragrant.
There are moments in all our lives when we come to the temple and we catch a glimpse of what Simeon saw. Do you remember a time when you thought to yourself and maybe even shouted out loud, “I want this feeling to last forever”? What about a day when you were so taken up by something or someone that you lost all track of time? It seemed just like you were living outside time. Remember a day when you railed, “I can’t do this any more. It’s too much. I can’t go on,” but somehow you did go on, though you haven’t a clue how.
In such moments we experience a presence greater than the people or events that seem to be there. We hear more than the words spoken. We feel more than what we can touch with our hands. We perceive more than what is in front of us. We know somehow there is more going on than the events appearing to unfold as they do.
No matter how incredible or how difficult the circumstance, we somehow experience that all is well. Everything is in some strange way right, as it is supposed to be, complete. Nothing is lacking. Our life suddenly becomes more than we have ever previously known it to be. There seems to be more meaning, though we know we are still only catching a glimpse.These are moments of presentation. These are the moments when we see salvation and are set free to go in peace.
‘The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.’ CS Lewis
‘As God works out his salvation of sinners, he leads us along unexpected paths that result in unexpected and sometimes agonizing pain. When it does, we can remember Mary. The darkest moment of her life, the sword that stabbed deepest into her soul, was the moment that God used most to bring salvation and joy to the world — and to her!
That’s how he works with us too. When the sword pierces, all it feels like is terrible pain. But later we discover that our deepest wounding often becomes the channel through which the most profound grace flows.’ Jon Bloom
san vincente by fra’ bartolomeo
“Preach, O messenger of the Word, not to make a name for
yourself, but to glorify the Name of Jesus and to make
known the treasures of His Heart.” ― ‘On Holy Preaching’ by Silverstream Priory, Ireland.
THERE are many wonderful and very famous paintings and statues in Florence. San Marco Monastery, north of the river, is particularly blessed with
more than its fair share of them. But the painting that really got me, when I visited there some summers past, was this one. It’s not very famous at all and it was hard to find a reproduction to show it to you. But I found it eventually.
While I was training for the priesthood, I was sent, with Emilia and our then very young children, to Italy for two months so that we could experience the church in another culture. During any kind of training, it is usual I suppose to focus to greater or lesser extent on yourself. It is necessary to work on skills and increase
knowledge and expertise. As I walked through the streets of Florence on my way from St Mark’s Anglican Church, some street-dust miles south of San Marco, I was glad of the shade against the hot midday sun, cast by the tall, ancient Florentine architecture. Part of my mind was working, no doubt, on the sermon I would be giving the next day. It was to be my first in the city and my mentor had challenged me not to write down a single word. He had told me this would be liberating but, ever since he had said that, I’d been feeling anything but liberated!
Anyway, my mentor had also told me, when I met him for the first time, that my mission in Florence and the wider parish of Tuscany was to ‘soak this place up’! So this day I was looking forward to spending time with Fra Angelico’s Annunciation and many of the works of Renaissance art that I’d grown up with in books and on the walls of my parents’ house.
Though San Marco is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been to and is literally dripping with the finest art, I kept having to return to the pointing monk.
From a massive oil canvass, the burning eyes of a seven hundred year old man of God seemed to sear into my brain, as he pointed to heaven:
“Are you lookin’ at me? Don’t look at me!
It’s not about me.
It’s not about you,
or your training, or your priesthood,
or your liberated sermons.
IT IS
ALWAYS
ABOUT HIM!”
What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Corinthians 1.12-13)
Personality cult – bane of prophets, spiritual leaders, apostles, even Jesus himself.
Paul, with typical Pauline rhetoric, mocks and scolds the Corinthians. No sooner have they received the Message than they are attaching themselves to the messenger. Paul is exasperated with the quarrels surrounding the personalities of the evangelists. What would he say about the fact there are 40,000 + denominations today?! Anyway, Paul points the way in no uncertain terms back to Christ.
But even Christ does not really point to himself; rather to the relationship he has with the Father and to the Holy Spirit. This is why he came! To reveal this Holy relationship. But he didn’t stop and say, ‘Hey look at me, aren’t I great?’. He came to give us the Gospel truth. And here’s the greatest thing of all. We can have this relationship too. That’s what we are here for. This relationship is the kingdom of God.
Jesus invites us, ‘Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the signs which I am doing’ (Jn 14). John the evangelist calls the supernatural actions of Jesus, not ‘miracles’ but signs. These actions are not displays of divine power in order to point anyone to the greatness of the Son of God but to the Divine relationship between Christ and the Creator God, whom he calls Abba – Daddy. Later he says, ‘On that day you will realize that I am in Abba, and you are in me, and I am in you.’ By his coming among us…being us, taking our sins and breaking their imprisoning power over us on the Cross, and defeating death itself, Jesus Christ declared what is in God’s heart, the yearning of Love Divine, to be in relationship with each individual person.
Another messenger, Fr Henri Neuwen, writes, ‘For you and I to engage this primal encounter is for us to return home’. This is the right direction of the roads we travel. This is the meaning of life. We come from God and we return, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, through the twists and turns of life, and by the Grace of God, home.
This is the message. It is a message God gives each one of us. He calls each one of us now to receive it and to pass it on. We are God’s messenger now. But remember. It is never about the messenger. It is always about the message. God be with you.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 