Our hearing goes as years grow old and God
speaks to our hearts in bracing ways and still
God reaches out like fire to lightning rod
to defibrillate deaf hearts, re-set will.
The spoken Word is void and hearing’s sense
has lost its power to move and renovate.
In old age the calm centre flares intense
In inner fire comes Spirit advocate.
The Word has become a perilous false guide
in querulous senility sounds blurred,
trust God not the ear, and be satisfied
when experience matches the remembered Word!
Persist in the tension of paradox,
the Word can appraise the true orthodox.
– Ted Witham 2016
Campfire – courtesy Koora Retreat Centre, Western Australia
She went on the boat, the toddler Aliya,
an act of love and desperation,
beginning the middle passage of risk and fear,
from war-torn country to wealthy free nation.
They stand in a ring and pray,
the parents, the uncles, the old friends,
they squeeze tight to produce the way
for Aliya to fight through to good ends.
They thought it was better, this boat,
not crowded, not corrupted, not bad,
safely able to cross Europe’s wide moat,
Thus farewells were confident and sad.
Aliya was soon alone, pushed into the hold
of a forty-foot boat with ninety aboard,
the hull, the frame, the motor all old,
no food, no toilet, naught aboveboard.
All around the headache-making stench
of dieseline and human waste and sick,
men groan, women cry, Aliya can clench
her eyes against foul air so thick.
This the middle passage – you must know now
that migrants and crew have been jettisoned.
Peristaltic waves rock Aliya, bitter winds blow,
Motor falters, death has been commissioned.
Little Aliya is quiet. No food for three whole days,
She slips away, a pilgrim to paradise,
her middle passage a satanic maze
She comes to its end a tiny sacrifice.
It’s rough. There’s no one close to grieve.
She’s shrouded. Prayers are said. Blessing and peace
and the Prophet’s words give leave
to the little corpse as it slides beneath the seas.
While in Beirut or Bath they count their US dollars.
Two treks up the high mountainside for God:
First climb with light pack, heart open to awe
The great man of God ached, yearned and saw God,
And watched God’s finger carve on stone the Law.
But the people, Ah! his people, they turned to gold,
Loving it, their greedy false self they fed:
when their prophet returned, he saw they had sold
their souls, and gold had mutely turned to lead.
Moses broke the stones, climbed the breathy track,
This time took care with God the work to share:
In anger and in love he wrote the second plaque,
And held God’s heart in God’s shekinah glare.
One thing of Moses’ veil is worth to know:
Light that comes from inside has the brightest glow.
Bush church of my childhood: see server and priest
In tiny vestry; vestment-chest of oak,
White robes laid out immaculately creased,
Christ’s purity, and his mother’s, evoke.
The albs are bordered in fine crafted lace,
Stole and chasuble crisply ironed and laid,
Emptied of sound, in silence of place
The server hears as his precursors prayed.
Inside the small church a reed organ sounds,
On, into the sanctuary the server leads on,
He bashful bows deep then processes ‘round,
He offers water and wine: the Dreaming’s white swan.
My mother and grandma with pride are stilled;
They watch from the pews the now and the willed.
Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Luke 2:22-40
In Native American stories, Dragonfly persuades Swan to surrender to the power of the river so that she can, in a state of grace, be taken into the future. (http://www.swansongs.org/who-we-are/swan-mythology/)
—They’re dazzling Da-Esh with wonders and signs
Across widespread Islamist latitudes,
Where gospel is grounded in physical confines
And must be proved by miracles’ certitudes.
—We in Nazareth are more Word-based, of course,
Our gospel is rooted in reason’s deep grace,
In doctrine and Midrash is Jesus’ real source,
In text and good preaching we see Jesus’ face.
So Jesus can stand and read the whole scroll,
he can sit and discourse and be learned as well,
he can count off the ways he will save your soul –
but he cannot act. No! We’ll move to expel.
Your water to wine, your sadness to joy,
disrupting our world prepared to destroy.
Luke 4:21-30
Christ Preaching in the Synagogue at Nazareth. 14th c. fresco (detail).
Visoki Decani Monastery, Kosovo
Poem by Symeon the New Theologian(949-1022), Hymn 15 in his Hymns of Divine Love
We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
Then open your heart to him.
And let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved
In every last part of our body.
Quoted by Richard Rohr, pp. 219-20 in Things Hidden
Arise, ablaze because your light now beams,
Godly light, insight to eternal aims.
The darkness that would cover earth still dreams
Of battle victory in Satanic games.
The poverty of the poor brought to nought,
The dryness of the drought be drowned in rain,
The violence of the vicious be stopped short,
The upright once disgraced honoured again.
So yes: God’s mystery wise has been revealed,
the Gospel locked in sepulchre set free,
and Jesus master of this battle-field
is fruiting flower of frankincense tree.
For darkness has no means of quenching light:
Wise men blaze in the beacon of Twelfth Night.
Isaiah 60:1-6, Psalm 72:1-7,10-14, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12
Readings for Christmas 2: John 1:1-18, Jeremiah 31:7-14, Sirach 24:1-12
The Word became our flesh and dwelt with us,
so the cosmos was by God itself restored,
the past is healed, the future bright for us,
Jesus’ poor birth revealed, humanity awed.
With pleas for mercy I will lead them back,
says our Lord, I will make them walk by streams,
I’ll keep my people on the straightest track,
the blind, the lame, I will fill full their dreams.
Wisdom for my homing, mercy’s teacher,
comb through heaven’s reaches and the depths’ abyss,
destination of God’s every creature –
Heart of the Universe accomplish this:
Last grain, and God’s letter spaced to kern,
Made from star-dust, to stars we will return.
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Mind Journeys 