Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

“More Beautiful than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord” by Mary Oliver

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1

In the household of God, I have stumbled in recitation,

and in my mind I have wandered.

I have interrupted worship with discussion.

Once I extinguished the Gospel candle after all the others.

But never held the cup to my mouth lagging in gratitude.

2.

The Lord forgives many things,

so I have heard..

3.

The deer came into the field.

I saw her peaceful face and heard the shuffle of her breath.

She was sweetened by merriment and not afraid,

but bold to say

whose field she was crossing: spoke the tap of her foot:

It is God’s and mine.”

But only that she was born into the poem that God made, and

called the world….

6.

It’s close to hopeless,

for what I want to say the red-bird

has said already, and better, in a thousand trees.

The white bear, lifting one enormous paw, has said it better.

You cannot cross one hummock or furrow but it is

His holy ground.

7.

I had such a longing for virtue, for company.

I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear.

I wanted to read and serve, to touch the altar linen.

 

Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree

turns its face away.

 

Instead I prayed, oh Lord, let me be something

useful and unpretentious.

Even the chimney swift sings.

Even the cobblestones have a task to do, and do it well.

 

Lord, let me be a flower, even a tare; or a sparrow.

Or the smallest bright stone in a ring worn by someone

brave and kind, whose name I will never know.

 

Lord, when I sleep I feel you near.

When I wake, and you are already wiping the stars away,

I rise quickly, hoping to be like your wild child

the rose, the honey-maker the honey-vine:

a bird shouting its joy as it floats

through the gift you have given us: another day.

 

 

 

 

Thanks by W.S. Merwin (A gorgeous poem for Thanksgiving)

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W S Merwin

W. S. Merwin ( credit )

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

The Poet, the Albatross and the Christian

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albatross wandering1

                                                                                                           The Albatross

Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak —
He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.

— George Dillon, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

 

We saw huge, white albatrosses glide on their giant wings in New Zealand in 2009. Aloft, in their native element, they are majestic, sublime.

Once captured, and mocked by sailors who force them to waddle on deck where their giant wings hamper their walk, as Baudelaire describes, they are piteous and comic. The gigantic wings which helped them soar are now comic impediments

* * *

 God designs an ideal medium, aerial, terrestrial, submarine, for each of us, and we are at home and happy when we are in it. God determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live (Acts 17:26). When we are in the right place, doing what we are meant to do, there is a sense of ease, a sense of soaring.

I have finally found this place. I am living in the town in which I have most longed to live, Oxford, with its heady combination of history, architecture, art, Christian and literary history, beauty, nature and stimulation.

I am beginning to get back into the work I most enjoy, creative prose, and am enjoying my blog. I am again enjoying reading. And I am enjoying the brainy, creative community in my church, St. Andrew’s, Oxford.

Of course, it took years for the pieces of the puzzle to fit together, and for me to discover work and a place which make me very happy.

Taking the time to discover the roles God has created us for, and the work which makes our souls sing—ah, these are worthwhile quests, for when we are doing the right work, and are in the right place and the right relationships, we can soar in the way we are designed to.

How about you? Have you discovered what you would like to make your life’s work? A church which permits your fullest flourishing? What are the dreams which God has placed in your heart, and are you able to work on them daily or weekly, at least a little?

What a string of personal questions! I’d love to hear your answers!

 

When Great Poets Encounter the Angel of Writing

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I love “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe. It has a mysterious perfection: the rhythm, the evocative words, the allusions, the beautiful language create a loveliness  greater than the sum of its parts.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

 

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.”

(Chorus)

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

 In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

On the night of November 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

                                                      * * * 

Wow! To whom are these mysterious gifts of creativity handed out?

Generally to those who have long trained themselves waiting for the angel. “If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your grim resolve to be always a beginner,” Rainer Maria Rilke muses. Rilke suffered for most of his life from torturing writers’ block. Beauty, images, art, ideas, poetry filled his mind; he was, however, unable to express them in poetry.

Rilke said that as he was walking, depressed, by the cliffs near Duino Castle, he heard a voice call out to him, “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” which became his famous Duino Elegy,

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?

And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

His writers’ block was broken, and The Duino Elegies flowed forth in a torrent.

* * *

Milton claimed that he was visited nightly by an angel or muse who dictated cantos of Paradise Lost to him. In the morning, his daughters found the blind poet, already up, neatly dressed, and waiting to be “milked” of his verses, which he dictated to them.

Milton however, at the age of 14, had decided to become one of the great poets in English. His goal: “To write something which the world would not willingly let die.” He spent his youth in arduous preparation, so much so that by the time he began writing Paradise Lost at the age of 50, he was blind (the result of the years from his early teens spent reading late into the night by candlelight); had an brain incomparably stocked with poetry and learning, but had written nothing substantial.

But the angel came, and he did indeed write something that the world would not willingly let die.

My father had memorized the opening of Paradise Lost, and I remember the opening sentence with a thrill of pleasure. It’s so beautiful, so majestic, that reading it now, after some years, I almost cry with pleasure,

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

    Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

    Brought death into the world and all our woe,

    With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

    Restore us and regain the blissful seat,

    Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

    Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

    That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed

    In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth

    Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill

   Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d

   Fast by the oracle of God, I thence

   Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,

   That with no middle flight intends to soar

   Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues

   Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

   And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

    Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,

  Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first

  Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,

   Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss

   And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark

   Illumine, what is low raise and support,

    That to the highth of this great argument

   I may assert Eternal Providence

    And justify the ways of God to men.

Wow! What a long amazing sentence!

Paradise Lost comes, it comes as if dictated by an angel, but it comes to the blind poet who had spent his life preparing to write it. The Duino  Elegies were “overheard” by the poet who also spent a life of sacrifice in preparation.

Poetic inspiration comes suddenly, as if the unconsciously suddenly ripens, to those who had laboured long  and hard, for much of their lives to receive it.

* * *

In contrast is William Blake, an untaught visionary poet who was more in touch with Heaven than with our world.  At the age of four, the young artist “saw God” when God “put his head to the window.”

At the age of eight or ten in Peckham, Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

Do I believe him?  Actually, yes!

“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I

lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate,” Blake wrote.

Blake continues, “Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it

is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides

her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours;

voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, &  their forms more distinctly seen.”

It was while he lived in Felpham, Sussex, that Blake wrote
the perfect Jerusalem.

 

With the night falling we are saying thank you by W.S. Merwin

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My daughter, Irene, as a four year old, thanking God for the Rhine Falls in Switzerland!

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin 

Listen 
with the night falling we are saying thank you 
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings 
we are running out of the glass rooms 
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky 
and say thank you 
we are standing by the water thanking it 
smiling by the windows looking out 
in our directions 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging 
after funerals we are saying thank you 
after the news of the dead 
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you 
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators 
remembering wars and the police at the door 
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you 
in the banks we are saying thank you 
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us 
our lost feelings we are saying thank you 
with the forests falling faster than the minutes 
of our lives we are saying thank you 
with the words going out like cells of a brain 
with the cities growing over us 
we are saying thank you faster and faster 
with nobody listening we are saying thank you 
we are saying thank you and waving 
dark though it is.

“Advent Calendar” by Rowan Williams

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photo

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.
He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.
He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.
He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

 

Christ Walking on the Waters, not of Gennesaret but Thames

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 Billy Bragg sings Jerusalem at Greenbelt 2011

 And did those feet in ancient time.

Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land .

                                                                           William Blake

Blake refers to the pleasing apocryphal tradition that the young Christ visited Glastonbury with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea.

It is thrilling: the notion that those feet, in ancient time, walked upon England’s mountains green, that the Holy Lamb of God was upon England’s pleasant pastures seen, and the Countenance Divine shone forth among our clouded hills.

What is no less thrilling but actually true is those feet still walk upon England’s mountains green, that the Holy Lamb of God can still be among England’s pleasant pastures seen, and that the Countenance Divine still shines forth among our clouded hills.

We just do not slow down enough to see or recognize him walking beside us.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

 

Visionaries and prophets can always see the one walking beside. Always another walking beside us. Can see the hills around us ringed with angels in chariots and fire. Can see Jacob’s ladder between heaven and Charing Cross, as Francis Thompson saw it, or between Heaven and Oxford. Can see Christ walking on the water, not of Genesareth but the Thames.

 

Here’s one of my favourite poems by a Christian mystic, Francis Thompson.

The Kingdom of God

1

“IN NO STRANGE LAND”

O world invisible, we view thee,

O world intangible, we touch thee,

O world unknowable, we know thee,

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

5 Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

The eagle plunge to find the air—

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

10 And our benumbed conceiving soars!—

The drift of pinions, would we hearken,

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places—

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

15 ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangéd faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

20 Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

2

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry—clinging Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Genesareth,

3

but Thames!

 

May we always see Him walking beside us.

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot. “There is not enough silence.”

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restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem


And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee?
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks.

Listen to T.S. Eliot read, or rather chant, his whole poem here

Read the whole poem here 

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