At the risk of seeming indulgent, I want to share a poem with you: one I wrote a few weeks ago.
I share it not because I want you to like it (though I do!), but because I think the way it emerged has something to say to us, especially in light of this morning’s reading from John’s gospel.
Gale
I’d share that moment with you if I could;
the morning sun straining through scudding cloud,
swathing the wind-scoured fields in shifting light.
And yet for all her wintery glory bright
The trees and scrawny bushes bowed
Not to her, but to another.
A gale swept in, swept clean across the coast.
And from my armchair, safe, I sensed its power
in throaty gusts that made the rafters groan
and toppled heavy plant pots – left them prone
and helpless, ‘mid spilt earth and flower.
Their squat stability undone.
The skeletons of climbing frame and swing
keened, as raw elemental air raced through;
shuddering with the strain of staying still.
The lengthening grass preferred to bend, its will
less hardened; rippling like the blue
green sea that swells beyond the dunes.
Strangely moved, I sat transfixed and silent,
breathing shallow lest the spell be broken.
Embraced in peace, when outside all was rage
I lost myself in wonder for an age,
knowing truth was being spoken
in words no ear could understand,
but heart could fathom. The unrepentant
wind was chiding; calling all who live too tame
to wildness. Not to shush the soul’s long sighs
to sleep, but send them skirling through the skies,
airborne, breath-born. Given a name.
Lifted, like a child’s giddy kite.
I’d share that moment with you, but it’s gone.
Swept off on that same breeze to who knows where.
Yet traces linger; a yearning for more
of all that we call life. I slid the door
and stepped into the swirling air
where dry leaves danced in ecstasy.
So how did that poem emerge?
Well, in our house Monday to Wednesday are the quiet days. It’s usually on those mornings that I get a little bit of peace and quiet to read and pray if circumstances allow.
And I remember the morning in question very well – I’d sat down to pray but kept getting distracted by this howling gale. But after a while I began to feel that that God was saying to me – ‘Just sit and listen. There’s something in this for you’. So that’s what I did. I just sat and listened for a while and paid attention to what was going on around me.
I started to feel the pressures of all the things that needed done weighing down on me, but I stayed with the experience and in time the thoughts and feelings I had resolved themselves into the right words, with verse 5 being especially important to me.
The Spirit was saying: “Where do you live too tame? What sighs are you shushing to sleep? What kites do you need to set flying?” And I’m still trying to work through the answers to those questions.
So how did that poem come about? I felt a prompting which I could easily have ignored, but I gave it my attention and out of that reflection something true was born. Something that’s changed and continuing to change me.
What I’ve just described is really the kind of territory that real poets work away in. They have this practiced ability to see the profound in the ordinary. And it’s a gift, but they have to work at it too, like any skill.
They start with Grecian urn, a field of daffodils, a battlefield, or a road through the forest which happens to split in two, but they name them and describe them in a way that brings out their eternal truths and makes a deep connection with the reader or the hearer.
So what’s all that got to do with us? This is church, not poetry class!
Well here’s the crux of it. I’ve come to recognise that poetry and lived faith both rely on one central discipline. The discipline of awareness.
It’s that awareness, that disposition that makes you look beneath the surface to find the truth of things, that really matters.
The Jesuit Priest Anthony De Mello writes
“Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up”.
He’s describing the person who goes through life unaware - seeing nothing except what’s immediately in front of them, and missing everything else– God included.
They might live what the world calls successful lives. But they’ll be two dimensional lives. There’s no depth to them.
John’s words to us this morning are a warning not to fall into that trap, and a promise of what can happen if we avoid it.
“The Word was in the world” John tells us at verse 10. And we’ve heard that kind of thing so often over the Christmas period.
Getting this message across was so important to him.
If the historians are right, John would have been in his late 80’s or even early 90’s when his gospel was written. He was one of the last people living to have seen Jesus and spent time with him. And he wanted to leave us in no doubt about what had happened in the Christ event.
This was the Word – the Life – coming to be with us. Focused into one particular human being called Jesus. Living among us, as one of us. Above all – that’s what John wanted us to understand. It really happened. We’ve seen him, we’ve touched him, we’ve spoken with him. It really happened.
So the word was in our world, but the world did not recognise him.
And isn’t that an interesting choice of word on John’s part. It’s not ‘didn’t see him’ or ‘didn’t understand him’ or, ‘didn’t obey him’. It's didn’t recognise him.
You only recognise someone if you have some kind of idea what they look like.
If I sent you off to the airport to pick up my dad, you wouldn’t have a clue who to look out for. But if I showed you some pictures and told you to look out for a guy with a dodgy leg who looks like Clark Gable, you’d probably find him!
The fact that John uses that word recognise tells us that something within us is able to recognise the presence of God. The Psalmist puts it this way: “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls.” The depths in us reaching out for the depths in God, and vice-versa.
The writer of Ecclesiastes says the same kind of thing when he writes that that God has placed eternity in peoples’ hearts.
And most of us know that in our own experience. We know what it feels like to sense the voice of conscience within ourselves; or to feel a strong, unaccountable tug on heart strings because of something we’ve seen or heard; or that quickening of spirit we sense when something strikes us as true, and true particularly for us.
I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury being interviewed on the radio over Christmas and someone phoned into ask what God’s voice sounds like, and he answered in those very same terms.
And the way to sense that voice is to allow ourselves to be still for a moment and give God our attention.
I’d guess that’s why – when the word was in the world – the world didn’t recognise him. Most of the folk around him weren’t awake and weren’t aware.
I don’t know about you, but I’m convicted by that. I’m pretty sure I sleepwalk through most of my days. Reasonably effectively, I hope, but sleepwalking all the same.
I coast along on the tramlines that are set out for me by routine and responsibility, and it’s only with a great effort of the will that I lift my eyes from those tramlines and try to discern where God is in the middle of it all.
And yet, when I do, it’s those moments or hours that make all the difference. They're the times when I feel I’m really living. It’s a bit like slipping on your 3D glasses when you go to the movies these days, Things suddenly takes on new depth.
You know, I don’t want to live a life in two dimensions. I don’t want to sleepwalk through my three score years and ten. I want to know God. I want us to know God as a church community. Not as past history, but as real presence.
How do we get there?
By staying awake – by cultivating awareness in the midst of all the ordinary things we need to do every single day of life.
If poetry is discerning the profound in the ordinary and everyday, maybe lived faith is discerning the divine in the ordinary and everyday.
The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson tells a story about this.
Peterson was at a stage in his ministry when he was getting frazzled, and he and his wife decided to try and get away camping for a few days to help him clear his head.
But even with that plan in place, there were still lots of last minute things to do – phonecalls he had to make, letters to write and post, marked exam papers to get back to the faculty and lastly a hospital visit with parishioner who was having an operation later that day.
The man concerned was a bit of a grouch and Peterson knew it wouldn’t be a good visit. All he’d hear was a bunch of moans, and sure enough that’s exactly how it turned out.
Tired and angry, but having done his duty, he walked out of the hospital, scrunched up his list and threw it with some venom into the bin.
That night, under the stars in his tent, he had a dream. The kind of vivid dream through which God speaks sometimes.
In his dream, Peterson was walking past a bookstore when he saw a new bestseller in the window called Lists – and it was written by a childhood friend of his called Geri Ellingson. He was thrilled because he hadn’t even known that Geri was a writer.
He bought a copy straightaway and took it home to read. But much to his surprise it was just a set of lists! Shopping list, Christmas Card list, DIY jobs – nothing but lists!
He writes: “When I woke, I knew immediately the meaning of my dream: lists are best-seller material. In my hurry to recover the essentials of spirituality in my life – a sense of the presence of God, a spacious leisure for savouring grace – I had thrown out the raw material for it – my list. The items that I thought were interfering with the holiness of my vocation were the very materials of its holiness.”
Do you see what he’s saying? It’s not really about becoming a chin scratching poet or a reclusive mystic. That’s my bent – it’s probably not yours.
It’s about doing what you do every day in life – whether that’s teach kids, make dinner, drill oil, push paper or tend fields and animals. But doing it with awareness. Awareness that the God of the universe goes with you and ahead of you into all that the day holds. Recognising that the word who WAS in the world IS in the world. In YOUR world. Waiting to be discovered there in ways you might never have expected and might well miss if you aren’t paying attention.
So the next time you get that inkling that God’s speaking to you, however it comes, stay with it. Stay with it until the truth it holds for you becomes clear. It might just change your life.
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